Quotes
 Mom never quit on me. My only regret is that she didn`t live long enough to share some of the money and comforts my work in show business has brought me. The first time I sang after my throat operation was one of the tensest times of my life. But my voice proved to have a clearer tone than ever before.
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We never had a bathtub. Mom would bathe me in the wooden or tin washtub in the kitchen, or in a big lard can.
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All my life I`ve been prejudiced against wealthy people.
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I want affection and tenderness desperately, but there`s something in me that prevents me from handing it out.
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There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.
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After years in white theaters I dreaded working in colored houses. The noise, the stomping, whistling, and cheering that hadn`t annoyed me when I was young was now something I dreaded.
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There`s no hypocrisy in Hell`s Kitchen.
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Negroes are human beings with exactly the same faults and virtues as members of the other races.
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My whole family could sing. My family harmonized without any instruments to accompany them.
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We show girls were forced to live in whorehouses in each town, no other accommodations being available.
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I have no acting technique I act instinctively. That`s why I can`t play any role that isn`t based on something in my life.
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I wanted to be with the kind of people I`d grown up with, but you can`t go back to them and be one of them again, no matter how hard you try.
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All the men in my life have been two things: an epic and an epidemic.
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I cannot help feeling I would have been happier with a husband and chidren of my own.
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The big compliment came from the beer drinkers who didn`t know me. They wouldn`t drink or move when I sang. If they had their glasses in mid-air, the glasses wouldn`t come down.
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Mom was the greatest influence of my childhood. She wanted to save me from the vice, lust, and drinking that was all about me.
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New York is only 97 miles from Philadelphia but was the Big Time as no other American city has ever been.
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You are a person of the greatest importance when you are a mother of a family. Just do your job right and your kids will love you.
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It has been an ache and a joy both to look over this big shoulder of mine at all my yesterdays.
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In her whole life Mom never earned more than five or six dollars a week. Being without a husband, it was hard for her to find any place at all for us to live.
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I never accepted the idea that I was all through. I guess no person who has once been a star can do that, ever.
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We are all gifted. That is our inheritance.
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No one in the world can beat Ella Fitzgerald as a riff singer.
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I never was coddled, or liked, or understood by my family.
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Today or any day that phone may ring and bring good news.
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I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider.
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Somehow, the things my mother wanted to do, the release in evangelism she sought with such frenzy, were transferred to me.
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I had always loved John Ford`s pictures. And I came to love him, too, but I was frightened to death working for him. He used the shock treatment while directing me.
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Nothing can beat the smell of dew and flowers and the odor that comes out of the earth when the sun goes down.
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I`ve never been able to feel that there is anything undignified about making your living by the sweat of your brow.
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I have reason to be shy. I`ve been hurt plenty.
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I never was a child.
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Whenever I played Columbus, Ohio, I dropped in to see my close friend, a medium who had mysterious powers. Her Indian guide was Mohawk.
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When you dominate other people`s emotions, the time has to come when you will have to pay, and heavily, for that privilege.
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The white audiences thought I was white, my features being what they are, and at every performance I`d have to take off my gloves to prove I was a spade.
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Asking what I considered an impossible salary when I didn`t want to work for someone has boosted my pay again and again.
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I am an isolationist.
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Basically there is no difference between whites and blacks, browns and yellows. I decided to think no more of people as Northerners and Southerners.
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Elia Kazan understood my problems. He was able to bring out the very best in me. He gave me credit for my intelligence.
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There is a great supply of amateur undertakers in show business.
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Though I was excited about the Sojourner Truth play, it was not reassuring to think that my entire future might depend on the success of that one show.
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I guess singing is the traditional outlet for the colored people. The very thing that is paramount in my mind I can find expression for in just humming a song. But, of course, there is solid prayer for other things in my mind. Oh, I can get angry and curse a little (of course, the Lord look the other way). I don`t take the Lord`s name in vain, don`t get that idea. But I have a vocabulary without the Lord`s name that could raise the roof. You understand what I`m saying, sugar?
OTHER
I just let singing out the way it comes to me. Once the orchestra gets used to letting themselves go, everything works out fine. The song is really the main thing, the song and the way you sing it.
OTHER
Trivia
Universal Pictures announced in November 1968 that they would be making a movie version of Waters autobiography "His Eye Is On the Sparrow" from a screenplay by Peter S. Feibleman, with Julian Blaustein producing. It was planned to use an unknown to play Waters but the film was never made.
There is a park named in her honor in her hometown of Chester, Pennsylvania. Ethel Waters Park is located at Third & Dock Streets and a plaque reading "dedicated to the city of Chester for the enjoyment of its people" was placed there May 1, 1972 following "Ethel Waters Week," which ran from April 24th to April 30, 1972. April 30, 1972 was proclaimed "Ethel Waters Day" in Pennsylvania by then governor Milton Shapp. Waters was on hand for the ceremonies.
October 15, 1953 was designated "Ethel Waters Day" in New York City by Mayor Vincent R. Impellitteri. Waters was honored in a City Hall ceremony by the Mayor and the Negro Actors Guild for her "limitless and tireless efforts" in advancing the country`s democratic ideals at home and abroad. Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, founders of the Guild, were on hand for the occasion.
Often appeared on the various radio & TV shows of New York City media couple "Tex & Jinx" (John Reagan `Tex` McCrary & Eugenia `Jinx` Lincoln Falkenberg). Waters appeared as a regular on the Tex & Jinx TV Show over WNBT in NYC starting January 29, 1954.
Won a Joseph Jefferson Award as Best Guest Artist in a Locally Produced Play in 1970 for her performance in "The Member of the Wedding" at the Ivanhoe Theatre in Chicago. The award was presented to her by Cyd Charisse.
Waters has had three of her recordings inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame: "Dinah" (Columbia Records, 1925) in 1998; "Stormy Weather" (Brunswick Records, 1933) in 2003; and "Am I Blue?" (Columbia Records, 1929) in 2007. Her "Stormy Weather" recording was also inducted into the Library of Congress National Recording Registry in 2004.
Waters was honored on a U.S. Postal Service stamp issued September 1, 1994 as part of the Legends of American Music series. Her stamp was issued at a ceremony at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City, along with stamps honoring Nat `King` Cole, Bing Crosby, Al Jolson and Ethel Merman. A west coast ceremony was held by the U.S. Postal Service at Compton Community College in Compton, CA the next day. The city of Compton declared September 2, 1994 `Nat King Cole/Ethel Waters Day` for the occasion.
Husband Edward Mallory was an orchestra leader whom Ethel performed with.
Never learned how to read music.
She got religion in the late 1950s and performed and toured with evangelist Billy Graham until her death in 1977.
She recorded her first two songs, "The New York Glide" and "At the New Jump Steady Ball," in 1921 on the Cardinal Record label. That same year, she was the first artist to record for Black Swan, W.C. Handy`s record label. By the early 1930s, she had introduced fifty song hits.
Performed for the first time at the age of five in a children`s church program; given the first chance to sing on an amateur night at a Philadelphia club on her 15th birthday and was hired on the spot and billed as "Sweet Mama Stringbean"; and made her vaudeville debut in 1917 at the Lincoln Theater in Baltimore, Maryland.
Ethel was born to a 12-year-old mother, Louise Anderson, who had been raped at knife point by a man named John Waters. Although she was raised by her maternal grandmother, Sally Anderson, she took her father`s surname.
Her favorite hymn was "His Eye Is on the Sparrow." She used it for the title of her autobiography.
Married three times; had no children.
Was the second African-American actress to be nominated for an Academy Award. The first was Hattie McDaniel, who won for her performance in Gone with the Wind (1939).
Sang with the Billy Graham Crusade in her later years, always to a warm reception, and recorded several albums of sacred music for Word Records. Became a born-again Christian at one of Graham`s crusades in the late 1950s.
Singer Crystal Waters is her great-niece.
The child of a teenage rape victim
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