walking upstream…
Ethel Waters
sourcesNPR — Ella Fitzgerald, Ethel Waters And The Colors Of Sound (backs the Bessie Smith/Ma Rainey vocal contrast, quoting Waters's autobiography) · The Diane Rehm Show — interview with biographer Donald Bogle on Heat Wave (backs the "idols"/"champ" framing of Smith and Rainey) · Discography of American Historical Recordings — Charles Anderson (confirms his 1928 "St. Louis Blues" recording) · Discography of American Historical Recordings — Ethel Waters (confirms her 1932 "St. Louis Blues" recording with the Cecil Mack Choir)
In 1917, seventeen-year-old Ethel Waters stood in front of a Baltimore vaudeville crowd and sang "St. Louis Blues" very softly, deliberately, against the going style. "For years, they had been used to Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey," she wrote in her autobiography His Eye Is on the Sparrow. "They loved them and all the other shouters. I could always riff and jam and growl, but I never had that loud approach." She called Smith "the champ" and, according to biographer Donald Bogle, genuinely "looked up to" both women as idols — she simply refused to sound like either of them. Born in Chester, Pennsylvania, to a thirteen-year-old rape survivor and raised by her grandmother, Waters carried that soft, clearly enunciated delivery from Harlem's Edmond's Cellar to Broadway and later into a groundbreaking career as a Black dramatic actress. Her voice got heard by refusing to shout over anyone.
the sound in question
1933
Stormy WeatherEthel Waters
walk the tributaries ↓
In 1917, seventeen-year-old Waters landed a two-week Baltimore engagement and needed a number. She chose "St. Louis Blues" — and by her account, she'd learned it from Charles Anderson, a vaudeville singer who performed in "mammy" costume as a female impersonator and had been singing the song onstage since 1914, years before Handy's tune found its own hit recording. Blues historians Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff back her claim, crediting Anderson as the song's first professional performer. Waters wrote to Handy's publishing company for permission to sing it, got it, and carried the number to Harlem's Lincoln Theater in 1919 — the start of her signature repertoire.
listen: upstream & heresource: American Songwriter — Behind the Song ↗
1928
St. Louis BluesCharles Anderson
1932
St. Louis BluesEthel Waters
listen forAnderson's 1928 OKeh side of "St. Louis Blues" has no surviving stream to press play on, but the historians who catalogued it praised his "folk-operatic tenor voice" — prized for a clarity that "conflicted with modern tastes," per Abbott and Seroff, exactly the trait critics kept singling out in Waters. Cue up her 1932 "St. Louis Blues," recorded with the Cecil Mack Choir: listen for how she rides the song's tango-inflected bridge without ever raising her voice to compete with the singers behind her — clear diction over volume, the same "high, clear" delivery Anderson was known for on the same song, over a decade earlier.
Waters was touchy about who got credit for making her. "[Edmond's] piano player, Lou Henley, was the first one to get me to sing different types of songs," she wrote in His Eye Is on the Sparrow, naming the house pianist at the Harlem club where she landed her first steady New York booking around 1919. No song he pushed her toward is named, and no recording of his playing survives — house pianists at Black-owned clubs rarely made it onto record in this era — but it is Henley, not the club owner or her later manager, whom Waters's own account credits with widening her repertoire past blues.
listen: upstream & heresource: Encyclopedia.com — Ethel Waters (backs the Lou Henley influence, quoting her autobiography His Eye Is on the Sparrow) ↗
1919
No known recording — Edmond's Cellar house pianistLou Henley
1925
DinahEthel Waters
listen forThere is nothing of Henley's own playing to hear — Edmond's Cellar's piano book went undocumented. What is audible instead is the range Waters credited him with opening up. Her 1925 "Dinah" is a brisk, unmistakably pop number, worlds from "St. Louis Blues" in mood and material, yet sung with the same unhurried, plainly enunciated clarity she brought to blues. That range across a night's set, blues one number, sprightly pop hit the next, both delivered in the same legible voice, is the versatility Waters traced straight back to Edmond's Cellar and its pianist.