Ethel Waters

From Harlem Renaissance

Ethel's rough start

Ethel Waters is a singer and an actor during the harlem renaissance . Her mother was a rape victim at the age of twelve. Ethel Waters was raised in Chester, Pennsylvania. She grew up as a lonely child and her childhood was very short. Ethel was also a rape victim so she quit school at the age of thirteen to work for her child.She started to work at a hotel in Philadelphia and was paid only about five dallars a month. Her grandmother took care of Ethel's child while she worked at the hotel.

Career

Ethel Waters was the first African American dancer and singer in America. One Halloween night on Waters seventeenth birthday she atended to sing two songs and impressed the audience and was promoted for a professional job at the Lincoln theater in Baltimore, Maryland and was paid a rish sum of ten dallars a week and was tipped well from her boss. Ethel loved traveling in fright trains to Chicago and back "I used to work at nine until unconscious" said Ethel Waters. But later on she moved and south to Atlanta, Georgia and worked at a club with Bessie Smith. Smith could not sing with Waters because Waters sang different songs that Smith never new. Ethel sang songs of ballad and danced. Waters was going to be a star in musicals and on TV and return to the blues. During this time around nineteen ninteen Waters fell in love with a drug addict but there relationship ended with world war one. Ethel moved to Harlem and became part of the renaissance. Ethel went to the Edmond cellar and became an actress at the black comedy club. During this time, Waters was first paid 4.50 then 10 now she is being paid 15 dollars. After that Waters worked with Duke Ellington By 1925 Ethel Waters was the first African American women to make an album called "Dinah". Ethel later retired between 1950 - 1955 she was robed all of her jewelry was gone and her so she could no longer countinue her career.

References

www.redhotjazz.com/waters.html

www.jazzateria.com/roots/ewaters.html

www.wntb.com/blackachievers/ethlwaters/

www.glbtq.com/arts/waters_e.html