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His Eye is on the Sparrow
"Here is a remarkable chronicle of the life and career of an extraordinary woman who had a major impact on American entertainment. With astonishing candor, Ethel Waters tells her dramatic and dazzling from a childhood of abject poverty, to her early success in Black vaudeville, to her rise into the top ranks of stardom with her memorable performances in Cabin in the Sky, Pinky, and The Member of the Wedding. Hers is both an engrossing record of a topsy-turvy career and, just as importantly, an invaluable social document that traces the changing landscape for African American entertainers in the first half of the twentieth century. One of our very best show-business memoirs, brimming with insights, humor, and an unbreakable spirit, His Eye Is on the Sparrow was a significant groundbreaker when first published in 1951--and remains an authentic American classic today." --Donald Bogle
Ethel Waters's His Eye Is on the Sparrow stands as perhaps the greatest autobiography of a black female performer, capturing both the horror and the joy of the African American woman's experience through the often bitter yet always forgiving voice of an indomitable spirit. This edition is supplemented with a new historical preface and over a dozen photographs.
Ethel Waters's His Eye Is on the Sparrow stands as perhaps the greatest autobiography of a black female performer, capturing both the horror and the joy of the African American woman's experience through the often bitter yet always forgiving voice of an indomitable spirit. This edition is supplemented with a new historical preface and over a dozen photographs.
304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1951
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February 6, 2017
An autobiography of Ethel Waters, His Eye Is On The Sparrow was published in 1951 when Waters was staring in Member of the Wedding. The book was a best seller.
I found a ragged and yellowed 1951 copy of the book on a free shelf at a library used book sale several years ago. I did not really know anything about Ethel Waters. Photographs from her stage plays inside the cover showed scenes from Mamba's Daughters, Pinky, The Member of the Wedding, and As Thousands Cheer. I brought the book home with me, willing to learn more about this African American entertainer.
What I discovered was a heart-wrenching, raw story that one wishes was pure fiction. Ethel's voice is strong in some places, while at times Samuels' voice puts her emotions into beautiful, if unauthentic, words. As an 'ofay' reading the book I felt my otherness. Ethel's black pride was fierce. It took many years before she would trust the white theater and movie establishment. She disdained whites as boring and ingenuine. Yet she also spoke to our common humanity.
"I never was a child. I was never coddled, or liked, or understood by my family. I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider...Nobody brought me up."
Ethel thought her 'mixed blood' may have explained her 'badness' as a child. Her great-grandfather Albert Harris was from India; he bought the freedom of her 'fair' great-grandmother. Albert had to protect his children during the Fugitive Slave Law years when Southerners kidnapped free African American children to be sold into slave states.
Their daughter Sarah Harris, Ethel's grandmother, went into service with a Pennsylvania family. First they educated her so she could pass the law stating that 'persons of Negro blood' could not be taken from Maryland unless 'competent and intelligent'. At age 13 she married Louis Anderson, who had been a child drum major in the Civil War and came from a Germantown, PA family. He became an alcoholic, and Sally left him taking their children Viola, Charlie, and Louise. A proud woman, Sally was a hard worker whose jobs working live-in for white families left the children alone.
Louise wanted to be an evangelist while her siblings Vi and Charles were wild. When John Waters asked Vi if Louise was 'broke in yet' Vi told him when to come to the house. At age twelve, Louise was raped. John's mother, who passed as white and was well off, denied her son would do such a thing. Waters was a pianist who died a few years later.
Ethel was born in 1900 in Chester, PA. Her mother was a thirteen-year-old child with an unwanted baby who looked like the man who raped her. Her church cast her out. She left the baby in her mother's care and went to work.
Ethel called her grandmother Sally 'Mom' and her mother Louise 'Momweeze.' Ethel's grandmother Mom had to leave her in the care of her aunts and uncle while she worked, but they were busy themselves, working days and partying at night. Ethel was shuffled about 'like a series of one-night stands' from Camden, NJ to Philadelphia to Chester. Ethel tells about battles with bedbugs and rats, being given whiskey to put her to sleep before her aunts went out at night, sleeping on the street, living in Philadelphia's red-light district and running errands for 'the whores', playing with the children of thieves and pimps, surrounded by junkies. She became 'the best child thief' in the Bloody Eighth Ward.
"My vile tongue was my shield, my toughness, my armor."
Watching her aunts drunkenness and watching the death of a teenage relative from syphilis were object lessons to Ethel. She avoided drink, smoking, and prostitution but was a hardened, street-wise survivor.
Ethel was big for her age, tall and thin, passing for being older. She began singing and 'shimming' on Negro vaudeville stages in Philly. At age seventeen, billed as Sweet Mama Stringbean, she appeared in Baltimore. She had a 'sweet, bell-like voice' and had 'developed into a really agile shimmy shaker' who 'knew how to roll and quiver, and my hips would become whirling dervishes.' She teamed with the Hill Sisters and was the first woman to perform the St. Louis Blues. They went on a cross-country tour, joining a carnival when stranded.
She was shocked by the Jim Crow South.
"I have the soundest of reasons for being proud of my people. We Negroes have always had such a tough time that our very survival in this white world with the dice always loaded against us is the greatest possible testimonial to our strength, our courage, and our immunity to adversity."
"I am not bitter and angry at white people. I say in all sincerity that I am sorry for them. What could be more pitiful than to live in such nightmarish terror of another race that you have to punch them, push them off sidewalks, and never be able to relax your venomous hatred for one moment? As I see it, it is these people, the Ku-Kluxers, the White Supremacists, and the other fire-spitting neurotics who are in the deep trouble."
One of the pivotal moment in Ethel's experiences in the South was befriending the family of a boy who was lynched for talking back to a white man. She later took that grief and turned it into art when singing Super Time in As Thousands Cheer on Broadway.
a young Ethel Waters
Ethel became a musical star in Harlem, in revues, on stage, in night clubs, and the movies. She explains that her art was drawn from her life experiences. Her hit song Stormy Weather offered her emotional release.
"When I got out there in the middle of the Cotton Club floor I was telling the things I couldn't frame in words. I was singing the story of my misery and confusion, of the misunderstandings in my life I couldn't straighten out, the story of the wrongs and outrages done to my by people I had loved and trusted. Your imagination can carry you just so far. Only those who have been hurt deeply can understand what pain is, or humiliation."
"I sang Stormy Weather from the depths of a private hell in which I was being crushed and suffocated."
In Mamba's Daughters Ethel was able to play her mother's story through the character Hagar. She felt it was the pinnacle of her career, for she was not 'acting' but sharing her feeling about "what it is to be a colored woman, dumb, ignorant, all boxed up and feeling everything with such intenseness that she is half crazy." She believed she was expressing the things her mother had felt, and wanted, and sought.
The book traces her career and her salary, her men and friends, her maternal love that took in children, and her deep faith and charitable gifts. She had her ups and her downs, years when she seemed forgotten to be followed by greater success. She achieved many 'firsts' including developing 'scat' before it was 'scat.'
The book ends in 1950 but Ethel lived another 27 years. She was on a television series, Beulah, and appeared as a guest singer on other shows. In 1959 her religious faith found focus and she toured with the Billy Graham Crusade for fifteen years.
The book has been criticized for it's faults, such as the insistence on including her salary for every job. And yet those 'boring' monetary figures would have been of great importance to a self-made woman. It is only from the position of privilege that we can dismiss this aspect of her life as superfluous.
I am glad I picked up this homeless book. I found myself gong online to learn about the Black Bottom, the shimmy, the songs (like Shake That Thing) that made Ethel famous. I learned much.
His Eye is on the Sparrow an Autobiography by Ethel Waters and Charles Samuels
Doubleday & Company, Inc
1951
I found a ragged and yellowed 1951 copy of the book on a free shelf at a library used book sale several years ago. I did not really know anything about Ethel Waters. Photographs from her stage plays inside the cover showed scenes from Mamba's Daughters, Pinky, The Member of the Wedding, and As Thousands Cheer. I brought the book home with me, willing to learn more about this African American entertainer.
What I discovered was a heart-wrenching, raw story that one wishes was pure fiction. Ethel's voice is strong in some places, while at times Samuels' voice puts her emotions into beautiful, if unauthentic, words. As an 'ofay' reading the book I felt my otherness. Ethel's black pride was fierce. It took many years before she would trust the white theater and movie establishment. She disdained whites as boring and ingenuine. Yet she also spoke to our common humanity.
"I never was a child. I was never coddled, or liked, or understood by my family. I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider...Nobody brought me up."
Ethel thought her 'mixed blood' may have explained her 'badness' as a child. Her great-grandfather Albert Harris was from India; he bought the freedom of her 'fair' great-grandmother. Albert had to protect his children during the Fugitive Slave Law years when Southerners kidnapped free African American children to be sold into slave states.
Their daughter Sarah Harris, Ethel's grandmother, went into service with a Pennsylvania family. First they educated her so she could pass the law stating that 'persons of Negro blood' could not be taken from Maryland unless 'competent and intelligent'. At age 13 she married Louis Anderson, who had been a child drum major in the Civil War and came from a Germantown, PA family. He became an alcoholic, and Sally left him taking their children Viola, Charlie, and Louise. A proud woman, Sally was a hard worker whose jobs working live-in for white families left the children alone.
Louise wanted to be an evangelist while her siblings Vi and Charles were wild. When John Waters asked Vi if Louise was 'broke in yet' Vi told him when to come to the house. At age twelve, Louise was raped. John's mother, who passed as white and was well off, denied her son would do such a thing. Waters was a pianist who died a few years later.
Ethel was born in 1900 in Chester, PA. Her mother was a thirteen-year-old child with an unwanted baby who looked like the man who raped her. Her church cast her out. She left the baby in her mother's care and went to work.
Ethel called her grandmother Sally 'Mom' and her mother Louise 'Momweeze.' Ethel's grandmother Mom had to leave her in the care of her aunts and uncle while she worked, but they were busy themselves, working days and partying at night. Ethel was shuffled about 'like a series of one-night stands' from Camden, NJ to Philadelphia to Chester. Ethel tells about battles with bedbugs and rats, being given whiskey to put her to sleep before her aunts went out at night, sleeping on the street, living in Philadelphia's red-light district and running errands for 'the whores', playing with the children of thieves and pimps, surrounded by junkies. She became 'the best child thief' in the Bloody Eighth Ward.
"My vile tongue was my shield, my toughness, my armor."
Watching her aunts drunkenness and watching the death of a teenage relative from syphilis were object lessons to Ethel. She avoided drink, smoking, and prostitution but was a hardened, street-wise survivor.
Ethel was big for her age, tall and thin, passing for being older. She began singing and 'shimming' on Negro vaudeville stages in Philly. At age seventeen, billed as Sweet Mama Stringbean, she appeared in Baltimore. She had a 'sweet, bell-like voice' and had 'developed into a really agile shimmy shaker' who 'knew how to roll and quiver, and my hips would become whirling dervishes.' She teamed with the Hill Sisters and was the first woman to perform the St. Louis Blues. They went on a cross-country tour, joining a carnival when stranded.
She was shocked by the Jim Crow South.
"I have the soundest of reasons for being proud of my people. We Negroes have always had such a tough time that our very survival in this white world with the dice always loaded against us is the greatest possible testimonial to our strength, our courage, and our immunity to adversity."
"I am not bitter and angry at white people. I say in all sincerity that I am sorry for them. What could be more pitiful than to live in such nightmarish terror of another race that you have to punch them, push them off sidewalks, and never be able to relax your venomous hatred for one moment? As I see it, it is these people, the Ku-Kluxers, the White Supremacists, and the other fire-spitting neurotics who are in the deep trouble."
One of the pivotal moment in Ethel's experiences in the South was befriending the family of a boy who was lynched for talking back to a white man. She later took that grief and turned it into art when singing Super Time in As Thousands Cheer on Broadway.
a young Ethel Waters
Ethel became a musical star in Harlem, in revues, on stage, in night clubs, and the movies. She explains that her art was drawn from her life experiences. Her hit song Stormy Weather offered her emotional release.
"When I got out there in the middle of the Cotton Club floor I was telling the things I couldn't frame in words. I was singing the story of my misery and confusion, of the misunderstandings in my life I couldn't straighten out, the story of the wrongs and outrages done to my by people I had loved and trusted. Your imagination can carry you just so far. Only those who have been hurt deeply can understand what pain is, or humiliation."
"I sang Stormy Weather from the depths of a private hell in which I was being crushed and suffocated."
In Mamba's Daughters Ethel was able to play her mother's story through the character Hagar. She felt it was the pinnacle of her career, for she was not 'acting' but sharing her feeling about "what it is to be a colored woman, dumb, ignorant, all boxed up and feeling everything with such intenseness that she is half crazy." She believed she was expressing the things her mother had felt, and wanted, and sought.
The book traces her career and her salary, her men and friends, her maternal love that took in children, and her deep faith and charitable gifts. She had her ups and her downs, years when she seemed forgotten to be followed by greater success. She achieved many 'firsts' including developing 'scat' before it was 'scat.'
The book ends in 1950 but Ethel lived another 27 years. She was on a television series, Beulah, and appeared as a guest singer on other shows. In 1959 her religious faith found focus and she toured with the Billy Graham Crusade for fifteen years.
The book has been criticized for it's faults, such as the insistence on including her salary for every job. And yet those 'boring' monetary figures would have been of great importance to a self-made woman. It is only from the position of privilege that we can dismiss this aspect of her life as superfluous.
I am glad I picked up this homeless book. I found myself gong online to learn about the Black Bottom, the shimmy, the songs (like Shake That Thing) that made Ethel famous. I learned much.
His Eye is on the Sparrow an Autobiography by Ethel Waters and Charles Samuels
Doubleday & Company, Inc
1951
April 11, 2014
absolutely fabulous book detailing the life of a young African American woman born and raised in poverty who makes her way to the big time using her beautiful voice! The name-dropping can be quite laborious at times but I believe Ethel included this so as to extend recognition to her fellow Black performers of the time. Overall it is a fascinating life story of an immensely strong and passionate woman!
November 5, 2016
Miss. Waters grew up in the Jim Crow south among whores, pimps, thieves, alcoholics, drug addicts, gangsters and a world of much violence. Yet she survived to write her story about her love of God and how she overcame many an obstacle in the entertainment business and in life.
Now, sixty-one years after writing the book - I have questions. First, the voice of Miss Waters and her ghost writer are very distinct. Sometimes the writing is very raw, clearly Miss Waters' perspective, and sometimes the writing flows with fancy syllabic words and phrases, clearly not Miss Waters' voice. I'm sure that there was a battle between the two and the ghost writer just gave in rather than fight her on every little point. I wish she had been assigned a better writer who could have translated her stories, feelings and emotions more eloquently rather than providing a mere grocery list of name and locations.
Now, sixty-one years after writing the book - I have questions. First, the voice of Miss Waters and her ghost writer are very distinct. Sometimes the writing is very raw, clearly Miss Waters' perspective, and sometimes the writing flows with fancy syllabic words and phrases, clearly not Miss Waters' voice. I'm sure that there was a battle between the two and the ghost writer just gave in rather than fight her on every little point. I wish she had been assigned a better writer who could have translated her stories, feelings and emotions more eloquently rather than providing a mere grocery list of name and locations.
May 27, 2023
This autobiography of Ethel Waters, the famous singer, Broadway star, and movie actress, was recommended to me by a friend.
At first I thought I had never hear of Ethel Waters, but I soon realized she sang many wonderful songs, including one of my mom's favorite songs, "Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe." I found my mom's college yearbook when I was in high school, and her yearbook quote was "Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe," which was my dad's name. I made fun of her for being so corny, but she told me that it was the name of a very popular song. A few years ago I ordered sheet music of that song and also of a song called "Patricia," my mom's name, by Perez Prado. I framed and hung the sheet music up on the wall above my father's piano, which my siblings and I inherited when he died. While reading this autobiography, I learned that Ethel Waters appeared in the musical and sang that song. The sheet music reads, "As sung by Ethel Waters"!
Waters shares the true story of her childhood, a very rough and humbling experience. She was raised primarily by her grandmother, and Ethel lived in a series of ramshackle apartments and homes surrounded by her wild aunts and occasionally her uncle, with her grandmother coming home only once a week since she was required to live in the homes of the white people for whom she worked.
Ethel's mother was attacked and raped at age 12 and gave birth to Ethel at age 13. She was so horrified by the experience that she had difficulty accepting Ethel as her own and showing her the love and care that she did for her second daughter, Genevieve, who was born within the bonds of matrimony.
Ethel was left unsupervised, wandering the streets of Chester, Camden, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, making friends with and helping out the prostitutes, bartenders, and criminals who made up her neighbors and friends. Ethel learned a lot from them, including that they could be very caring and generous people, full of love themselves, love that she often did not receive at home.
Because of all of the horrific things the Ethel saw from a very young age, she stayed away from alcohol and the wild party scene. Even when she was on the road unsupervised as a young woman, she frequently refused the advances of men and never drank alcohol, often ordering a glass of milk at the bar!
This autobiography was gripping, telling of a life that we don't usually hear about in the early 1900s in the United States. We learn not only about children in that era growing up in extreme poverty, but also the very beginning of what we call popular music today.
Ethel was the very first African American woman to be on the radio. She was also one of the first African American to have top billing with the white cast of a Broadway show. She broke many barriers, and throughout her career, even when she was financially struggling, she always gave to those in most need, whether it be her family and friends or religious organizations, such as St. Theresa's Monastery in Allenstown, Pennsylvania.
I have two favorite quotes:
"My biggest surprise of all has been the reaction of white people who wear their tolerance like a plume when I tell them I've never minded even slightly being a Negro.
"They are stunned. It's difficult to convince them that I mean that and am not just keeping a stiff upper lip and being brave and gallant. Keeping a stiff upper lip, hell!
"I have the soundest of reasons for being proud of my people. We Negroes have always had such a tough time that our very survival in this white world with the dice always loaded against us is the greatest possible testimonial to our strength, our courage, and our immunity to adversity.
"We are close to this earth and to God. Shut up in ghettos, sneered at, beaten, enslaved, we always have answered our oppressors with brave singing, dancing, and laughing. Our greatest eloquence, the pith of the joy and sorrow in our unbreakable hearts, comes when we lift up our faces and talk to God, person to person. Ours is the truest dignity of man, the dignity of the undefeated."
My second favorite quote occurs when Ethel visits Lexington, Mississippi to perform for a community of sharecroppers and their children, who had never before seen a professional show like hers.
"The night we gave our show the tears came to my eyes as I watched ragged and hard-working colored farm women humbly handing in to the school the cakes and other stuff they'd cooked. As they watched our show those people just sat there, awed and thunderstruck by everything: our clothes, the music, the dances. We might have been people from another world, with no blood or color or language in common with them.
"But it was our turn to be awed afterward, when the girls of the school came on and sang. We were professionals and we had done our best, but those little girl singers put us in the twilight by the sea at high tide. The professional never lived who could compete with them.
"It is hard for me to describe the emotion roused in my breast as I listened. For this was pure. Those little girls sang and praised their God, and it must have been how women first sang before they were teachers to coach youngsters how to imitate others.
"When the girls sang there was nothing between them and their God. Nothing to stop their voices, rich and full of heart, from reaching Him. These were voices untampered with, and they were raised in song not too impress people or to earn money. They were singing to express something they felt and that they never could say in words if they went to all the Vassars and Howard Universities on earth.
"It was the soul of the Negro that I heard that night, all his religion and simple faith, and that singing carried all the Negro's hope for happiness and a better deal in the next world. And I cried and I was proud again of my people and I loved them."
At first I thought I had never hear of Ethel Waters, but I soon realized she sang many wonderful songs, including one of my mom's favorite songs, "Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe." I found my mom's college yearbook when I was in high school, and her yearbook quote was "Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe," which was my dad's name. I made fun of her for being so corny, but she told me that it was the name of a very popular song. A few years ago I ordered sheet music of that song and also of a song called "Patricia," my mom's name, by Perez Prado. I framed and hung the sheet music up on the wall above my father's piano, which my siblings and I inherited when he died. While reading this autobiography, I learned that Ethel Waters appeared in the musical and sang that song. The sheet music reads, "As sung by Ethel Waters"!
Waters shares the true story of her childhood, a very rough and humbling experience. She was raised primarily by her grandmother, and Ethel lived in a series of ramshackle apartments and homes surrounded by her wild aunts and occasionally her uncle, with her grandmother coming home only once a week since she was required to live in the homes of the white people for whom she worked.
Ethel's mother was attacked and raped at age 12 and gave birth to Ethel at age 13. She was so horrified by the experience that she had difficulty accepting Ethel as her own and showing her the love and care that she did for her second daughter, Genevieve, who was born within the bonds of matrimony.
Ethel was left unsupervised, wandering the streets of Chester, Camden, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, making friends with and helping out the prostitutes, bartenders, and criminals who made up her neighbors and friends. Ethel learned a lot from them, including that they could be very caring and generous people, full of love themselves, love that she often did not receive at home.
Because of all of the horrific things the Ethel saw from a very young age, she stayed away from alcohol and the wild party scene. Even when she was on the road unsupervised as a young woman, she frequently refused the advances of men and never drank alcohol, often ordering a glass of milk at the bar!
This autobiography was gripping, telling of a life that we don't usually hear about in the early 1900s in the United States. We learn not only about children in that era growing up in extreme poverty, but also the very beginning of what we call popular music today.
Ethel was the very first African American woman to be on the radio. She was also one of the first African American to have top billing with the white cast of a Broadway show. She broke many barriers, and throughout her career, even when she was financially struggling, she always gave to those in most need, whether it be her family and friends or religious organizations, such as St. Theresa's Monastery in Allenstown, Pennsylvania.
I have two favorite quotes:
"My biggest surprise of all has been the reaction of white people who wear their tolerance like a plume when I tell them I've never minded even slightly being a Negro.
"They are stunned. It's difficult to convince them that I mean that and am not just keeping a stiff upper lip and being brave and gallant. Keeping a stiff upper lip, hell!
"I have the soundest of reasons for being proud of my people. We Negroes have always had such a tough time that our very survival in this white world with the dice always loaded against us is the greatest possible testimonial to our strength, our courage, and our immunity to adversity.
"We are close to this earth and to God. Shut up in ghettos, sneered at, beaten, enslaved, we always have answered our oppressors with brave singing, dancing, and laughing. Our greatest eloquence, the pith of the joy and sorrow in our unbreakable hearts, comes when we lift up our faces and talk to God, person to person. Ours is the truest dignity of man, the dignity of the undefeated."
My second favorite quote occurs when Ethel visits Lexington, Mississippi to perform for a community of sharecroppers and their children, who had never before seen a professional show like hers.
"The night we gave our show the tears came to my eyes as I watched ragged and hard-working colored farm women humbly handing in to the school the cakes and other stuff they'd cooked. As they watched our show those people just sat there, awed and thunderstruck by everything: our clothes, the music, the dances. We might have been people from another world, with no blood or color or language in common with them.
"But it was our turn to be awed afterward, when the girls of the school came on and sang. We were professionals and we had done our best, but those little girl singers put us in the twilight by the sea at high tide. The professional never lived who could compete with them.
"It is hard for me to describe the emotion roused in my breast as I listened. For this was pure. Those little girls sang and praised their God, and it must have been how women first sang before they were teachers to coach youngsters how to imitate others.
"When the girls sang there was nothing between them and their God. Nothing to stop their voices, rich and full of heart, from reaching Him. These were voices untampered with, and they were raised in song not too impress people or to earn money. They were singing to express something they felt and that they never could say in words if they went to all the Vassars and Howard Universities on earth.
"It was the soul of the Negro that I heard that night, all his religion and simple faith, and that singing carried all the Negro's hope for happiness and a better deal in the next world. And I cried and I was proud again of my people and I loved them."
June 18, 2015
Ethel Waters had a life that is almost too unbelievable to be real. Reading her autobiography now, over 60 years after it was published, one wonders how much of it is really true. I don't doubt her harrowing experiences on stage in Jim Crow America in the 1920s and '30s, but, if Waters was writing today, would she have portrayed herself as such a perfect role model? Despite the fact that she grew up among whores, thieves, alcoholics, and addicts, she drank only milk in speakeasies and she held strictly to her religious beliefs? It seems unrealistic. Still, I'm glad we have this book so many years later for a glimpse into the life of a blues and Broadway legend, just as those art forms were taking hold.
January 22, 2009
Now, here was a woman! What a voice, even in writing. This is a powerhouse of a memoir about what drives art. As vaudeville tell-all and window into early 20th century black music it is fascinating. The story of her life is pure blues. Waters' incisive social commentary and deep compassion are what really grabbed me and put this book right in the same league as Bound for Glory.
May 18, 2011
This was such an impressionable book. It gave an inside look into the real hardship of life for a black woman growing up in the slums in the early 1900's. Her faith in God and unwillingness to be ashamed was inspirational. I am thankful for Ms. Waters taking the time to write her life story. I cannot recommend this book enough.
December 24, 2016
This book belonged to my grandmother and sat her shelf for many years. It is a treasure waiting for the right time to be read. The writing is honest and without reservation of telling it how it really was for an up and coming black singer during a time of persecution and inequality. Fantastically done and is a treasure that will kept in the family for generations to come.
March 4, 2019
Typically I don't care for biographies or autobiographies but this was something else. Great insight into life as a vaudeville star and how the circuit worked for black performers. Seeing how entertainment changed during the 20s and 30s from her perspective may be of particular interest to readers who like to read about that era, but I think most anyone can find something to like about this autobiography.
September 19, 2019
1951
see also Ed Murrow's 1954 televised interview with Ethel Waters on YouTube, which briefly mentions this book.
I could hardly put this book down! What a young life full of adventures and all kinds of bizarre events. Waters grew up on the street, as she describes. What she didn't get was three meals a day and regular love and attention.
Her descriptions of how she got work performing, singing, dancing, touring with various kinds of companies [broadly 'vaudeville'], and the people she met, those who helped her and those who were antagonistic. A great big bully in Atlanta [owner of big entertainment venue] who intimidated everyone; she stood up to him, then escaped from town before he could have her beaten up.
I think her time pretty much overlaps with Count Basie's time, and his experiences touring that I read about and also found fascinating. How things were in the South at that time. And how things were in the North, and the range of attitudes. Waters started performing maybe 1915 and up through the 1930s, some after that too, when she did films.
Waters says she stayed far away from white people early in life, and it was some years after she started performing before she was willing to perform for white people.
She missed the noisy sounds of appreciation of a black audience during performance. But after some years of the quiet of most white audiences, she was jarred by the noise when again performing for blacks!
A strong strong woman, and she had to be that strong to survive childhood, and later to survive in her career.
As with Count Basie, I was astounded at the good memory they seemed to have, all the detail about people and happenings 30 years earlier.
=========================
NYR 29 Sept 2011
reviewed by Robert Gottlieb
Written late in her career in 1951 "first popular entertainer to have produced a serious autobiography that was not only authentic but a best seller"
Note in this review mentions Donald Bogle's thorough recent bio of Waters, "Heat Wave". Bogle is the acknowledge leading expert on black American theater and film. Bogle is also the author of the convincing if somewhat hyperbolic "Dorothy Dandridge".
see also Ed Murrow's 1954 televised interview with Ethel Waters on YouTube, which briefly mentions this book.
I could hardly put this book down! What a young life full of adventures and all kinds of bizarre events. Waters grew up on the street, as she describes. What she didn't get was three meals a day and regular love and attention.
Her descriptions of how she got work performing, singing, dancing, touring with various kinds of companies [broadly 'vaudeville'], and the people she met, those who helped her and those who were antagonistic. A great big bully in Atlanta [owner of big entertainment venue] who intimidated everyone; she stood up to him, then escaped from town before he could have her beaten up.
I think her time pretty much overlaps with Count Basie's time, and his experiences touring that I read about and also found fascinating. How things were in the South at that time. And how things were in the North, and the range of attitudes. Waters started performing maybe 1915 and up through the 1930s, some after that too, when she did films.
Waters says she stayed far away from white people early in life, and it was some years after she started performing before she was willing to perform for white people.
She missed the noisy sounds of appreciation of a black audience during performance. But after some years of the quiet of most white audiences, she was jarred by the noise when again performing for blacks!
A strong strong woman, and she had to be that strong to survive childhood, and later to survive in her career.
As with Count Basie, I was astounded at the good memory they seemed to have, all the detail about people and happenings 30 years earlier.
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NYR 29 Sept 2011
reviewed by Robert Gottlieb
Written late in her career in 1951 "first popular entertainer to have produced a serious autobiography that was not only authentic but a best seller"
Note in this review mentions Donald Bogle's thorough recent bio of Waters, "Heat Wave". Bogle is the acknowledge leading expert on black American theater and film. Bogle is also the author of the convincing if somewhat hyperbolic "Dorothy Dandridge".
February 14, 2011
I enjoyed this book....it's an autobiography about Ethel Waters. She was an African American performer, who was born at the turn of the 20th century and lived / became famous in spite of poverty, a rough / unpredictable upbringing, and all of the set-backs of racial tension / civil rights. She was raised in the roughest of circumstances and was a tough lady- both in action and attitude. She had natural talent and slowly worked her way up through the ranks to become a famous blues singer, Broadway theater performer, and star in major motion pictures (in a time when this was highly unusual for a black female performer- a first really). This book is about her journey.....brought about by luck, perseverance, and raw talent. She found religion in the face of adversity and found belonging in the most unlikely venues. Ethel Waters had a long career and she died in the 1970s. Her story is candidly honest and in my opinion- inspirational. Of course, this is a topic I am very interested in- but I think most readers would find her story well-written and thought-provoking. A quote I liked:
"When I 1st crashed into the big eaner bracket I was amazed to see that money is only important when you haven't got it. Once in the chips, you can only give those dollars importance by what you do with them." Ethel Waters was also a caretaker and philanthropist.
"When I 1st crashed into the big eaner bracket I was amazed to see that money is only important when you haven't got it. Once in the chips, you can only give those dollars importance by what you do with them." Ethel Waters was also a caretaker and philanthropist.
August 23, 2011
I am not a non-fiction reader, I do read some but rarely. And when I do read one I'm a tough customer. But I really enjoyed this. Took me awhile to read it but that was just because I've been doing less reading what with summer and all.
Anyway, four star (heh, probably would of been five if I dug non-fiction) rating. I had only ever known of Water's by watching the movie adaptation of Carson McCullers's "The Member of the Wedding"... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Memb.... Those that know me here know what that book is to me. I happened to be key wording YouTube and came up with the scene where her and her two charges sing "His Eye is on the Sparrow".
Heh, I am babbling. Four stars. I recommend it.
Anyway, four star (heh, probably would of been five if I dug non-fiction) rating. I had only ever known of Water's by watching the movie adaptation of Carson McCullers's "The Member of the Wedding"... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Memb.... Those that know me here know what that book is to me. I happened to be key wording YouTube and came up with the scene where her and her two charges sing "His Eye is on the Sparrow".
Heh, I am babbling. Four stars. I recommend it.
September 1, 2008
Honest and full of grace, His Eye is on the Sparrow offers insight into a time and place almost 100 years old, Black vaudeville, overt racism, and musical styles that have since come out of fashion. But from the poverty she describes that defined her childhood, to the emotion that she applied to her music, to the struggle she continued to face even after she made it big, there is a timeless quality to this book. Because of her writing as well as her singing voice, she will be remembered, perhaps longer than the many women she paved the road for.
August 3, 2011
I have been a fan of Ethel Waters' since I saw her in the movies Pinky , and A Member of The Wedding (one of my all-time fave movies also with Julie Harris and Brandon DeWilde).
I didn't care for the writing style of this book, it seemed like she was mostly listing dates, names, and places of people she performed with.
The parts I did like were, when she talked more intimately about herself, her family and her religion
I didn't care for the writing style of this book, it seemed like she was mostly listing dates, names, and places of people she performed with.
The parts I did like were, when she talked more intimately about herself, her family and her religion
May 16, 2014
Intense, raw, beautiful, hopeful, unforgettable.
"Your imagination can carry you just so far. Only those who have been hurt deeply can understand what pain is, or humiliation. Only those who are being burned know what fire is like. I sang 'Stormy Weather' from the depths of the private hell in which I was being crushed and suffocated." - page 220
"Your imagination can carry you just so far. Only those who have been hurt deeply can understand what pain is, or humiliation. Only those who are being burned know what fire is like. I sang 'Stormy Weather' from the depths of the private hell in which I was being crushed and suffocated." - page 220
February 2, 2010
This autobiography is devastating. Ethel Waters tells the story of her childhood in the slums with the bluntly objective eye of a James Ellroy. "At thirteen I was married, and at fourteen I was separated and on my own." Jesus.
September 11, 2011
It gave a lot of info about music, black performers and musicians in the early part of the century, most of the names weren't familiar to me, and at times it was hard to relate. But it was well-written, and since I do remember Ethel Waters, I'm glad I read it.
September 3, 2008
This is a wonderful book! Ethel Waters shares her life. She was a woman who rose above her circumstances in life. Her story is inspirational and encouraging.
April 4, 2012
It was interesting, but I wasn't familiar with a lot of the people and events in the book.
September 14, 2013
Boring. I can't finish it.
January 26, 2015
One of the first "grown up" books that I read when I was a child. Loved it then and nothing has changed.
August 27, 2016
WOW I could not put this book down, great lady and a great story. I would give it more than 5 stars.
Want to read
December 16, 2016* Understanding Oppression: African American Rights (Then and Now)
* Autobiography
* Autobiography
April 21, 2024
What a personality! Now I’m going to head to Spotify and discover the music of Ethel Waters.
“We are close to this earth and to God. Shut up in ghettos, sneered at, beaten, enslaved, we always have answered our oppressors with brave singing, dancing, and laughing.our greatest eloquence, the pith of the joy and sorrow in our unbreakable hearts comes when we lift up our faces and talk to God, person to person. Ours is the truest dignity of man, the dignity of the undefeated.”
“My ambition was to bring Algretta up so everyone would love her as I’d never been loved as a little girl. For once, I wanted to do the little things that every other woman does each day of her life. I thought that being a wife and mother would convince me I belonged to the human race.
Being a mother is what makes a real life for a woman, not applause, your picture in the paper, the roses and the telegrams you get on opening night. A great many people who think themselves as poor have that richness in their lives.
You are a person of greatest importance when you are a mother of a family. Just do your job right and your kids will love you. And for that love of theirs there is no satisfying substitute.”
“We are close to this earth and to God. Shut up in ghettos, sneered at, beaten, enslaved, we always have answered our oppressors with brave singing, dancing, and laughing.our greatest eloquence, the pith of the joy and sorrow in our unbreakable hearts comes when we lift up our faces and talk to God, person to person. Ours is the truest dignity of man, the dignity of the undefeated.”
“My ambition was to bring Algretta up so everyone would love her as I’d never been loved as a little girl. For once, I wanted to do the little things that every other woman does each day of her life. I thought that being a wife and mother would convince me I belonged to the human race.
Being a mother is what makes a real life for a woman, not applause, your picture in the paper, the roses and the telegrams you get on opening night. A great many people who think themselves as poor have that richness in their lives.
You are a person of greatest importance when you are a mother of a family. Just do your job right and your kids will love you. And for that love of theirs there is no satisfying substitute.”
September 11, 2019
Ethel Waters words are stark and poignant from the opening sentence, "I was never a child." She is able to review every part of her life objectively piercing to the heart of the matter.
Certainly, her beginning, born to a mother of 13 who was alone with no doctor or midwife, living in a red-light district, stalked and mistreated by many could easily have been an horrific story, but she moves through it simply. Rather than swim in the sorrow of it, she is grateful she escaped and had much good in her life. Maybe it was also her belief that there was a greater purpose at hand, but she doesn't proselytize.
She is sassy and brassy and takes nothing from nobody even early on. She fights for artistic freedom and has a true artistic approach to music and acting.
It was a thoroughly fascinating read.
Certainly, her beginning, born to a mother of 13 who was alone with no doctor or midwife, living in a red-light district, stalked and mistreated by many could easily have been an horrific story, but she moves through it simply. Rather than swim in the sorrow of it, she is grateful she escaped and had much good in her life. Maybe it was also her belief that there was a greater purpose at hand, but she doesn't proselytize.
She is sassy and brassy and takes nothing from nobody even early on. She fights for artistic freedom and has a true artistic approach to music and acting.
It was a thoroughly fascinating read.
March 28, 2020
This is the story of the life of Ethel Waters. She grew up during the days of Jim Crow in the South. To say that she had a hard life is an understatement. The book details her rise from poverty to the entertainment world. I was amazed at the story. I read this book years ago, but I think I learned more reading the book this time. I don't have my rose colored glasses on anymore. I read this book before going to sleep, so it took me longer to red than it should have.
January 17, 2023
I think Ethel Waters' story, her life experience, was just breathtaking. What a tale to behold, a story of a life filled with hardship and a life well lived. I learned through this book the queerness of Waters that isn't largely publicized and also recognized the variance in her background, where she came from and where she went. It was just an adventure, so well written, and the audiobook was narrated flawlessly. 5 stars
August 24, 2023
The story of Ethel Water's life was never without drama, most caused by others, but plenty caused by herself. It's an interesting peek into a world that is, in so many ways, a world unlike my own, I think. But the humanness, the fears and hopes, the joys and crushings, the feelings and strengths and weaknesses--those are common to people everywhere, and the reader can't help but sympathize or cheer. It's insightful. And it's definitely worth reading.
February 1, 2021
Beautiful account and testimony of a strong, gifted black woman. She recounts her battles, struggles, victories in life all the time carried through her love of God. Ethel Waters is a remarkable woman speaking to her experiences in a world that is hard and prejudiced. Yet, God’s love and power carry her through all.
May 18, 2021
Great story. Fun to hear early 20th c vernacular. Waters perspective on race is enlightening. She resists performing for white audiences for years and writes cogently about white fear and sadness versus Negro (sic) joy and openness. Her journey from a child of the streets to international stardom is breathtaking. Her final reconciliation with Momweeze is compelling.
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