To Me It's Wonderfu

Ethel Waters was one of the most influential popular singers of her time and a pioneer among black female artists. Her early career found her working in vaudeville and was more widely based and popularly angled than many of her contemporaries. She was the first singer to perform W. C. Handy's "St. Louis Blues" in public, and she later popularized blues and jazz-influenced songs such as "Stormy Weather" On her early recording sessions from1921, she was accompanied by artists such as Fletcher Henderson, Coleman Hawkins, James P. Johnson, and Duke Ellington. She also recorded with Jack Teagarden, Benny Goodman, and Tommy Dorsey and gained acceptance among both black&white artists&audiences.From the late '20s, Waters appeared in several Broadway musicals, including "Africana," "Rhapsody in Black," "At Home Abroad," and "Cabin in the Sky," In the '30s she stopped the show regularly at the Cotton Club in Harlem with "Stormy Weather," and appeared at Carnegie Hall in 1938. In the '50s she appeared in the U.S. television series BEULAH for a while, and had her own Broadway show, "An Evening with Ethel Waters" (1957).Throughout the '60s and on into the mid-'70s she sang as a member of the organization that accompanied evangelist Billy Graham. A buoyant, high-spirited singer with a light, engaging voice that frequently sounded "whiter" than most of her contemporaries, Waters' career was an object lesson in determinationand inner drive. Her appalling childhood problems and troubled early life, recounted in the first part of her autobiography, HIS EYE IS ON THE SPARROW, were overcome through grit and the application of her great talent. The second part of her autobiography, TO ME IT'S WONDERFUL, continued her fascinating and inspirational story toward the sunset of her long and illustrious life.