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Ethel Waters
Ethel Waters (October 31, 1896 – September 1, 1977) was an American singer and actress. Waters frequently performed jazz, swing, and pop music on the Broadway stage and in concerts. She began her career in the 1920s singing blues. Her notable recordings include "Dinah", " Stormy Weather", " Taking a Chance on Love", "Heat Wave", " Supper Time", " Am I Blue?", " Cabin in the Sky", " I'm Coming Virginia", and her version of " His Eye Is on the Sparrow". Waters was the second African American to be nominated for an Academy Award, the first African American to star on her own television show, and the first African-American woman to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award. Early life Ethel Waters was born in Chester, Pennsylvania, on October 31, 1896 (some sources incorrectly state her birth year as 1900) to African-American mother Louise Anderson (1881–1962). Her birth was the result of the rape of teenaged Louise Anderson by 17-year-old John Wesley (a.k.a. Wesley John) Wat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its roots are in blues, ragtime, European harmony, African rhythmic rituals, spirituals, hymns, marches, vaudeville song, and dance music. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major form of musical expression in traditional and popular music. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, complex chords, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. As jazz spread around the world, it drew on national, regional, and local musical cultures, which gave rise to different styles. New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. However, jazz did not begin as a single musical tradition in New Orleans or elsewhere. In the 1930s, arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Supper Time
"Supper Time" is a popular song written by Irving Berlin for the 1933 musical '' As Thousands Cheer'', where it was introduced by Ethel Waters. The song is about racial violence inspired by a newspaper headline about a lynching. History Berlin wrote the musical '' As Thousands Cheer'' with the librettist Moss Hart in Bermuda. Berlin's biographer, Laurence Bergreen, described it as "the best work he had ever done for the stage" and consisting of "nothing but hits". The score included the songs " Easter Parade", " Harlem on My Mind", "Heat Wave" and " How's Chances?" in addition to "Supper Time". The musical was a satirical revue of recent events that had made news headlines with parodies of President Herbert Hoover, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Barbara Hutton, Noël Coward, Edward, Prince of Wales, and Joan Crawford and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Context and composition Berlin first met Waters in the spring of 1933 during her headlining appearances at the Cotton Club in Harlem. Berli ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cabin In The Sky (film)
''Cabin in the Sky'' is a 1943 American musical film based on the 1940 Broadway musical of the same name. The first feature film directed by Vincente Minnelli, ''Cabin in the Sky'' features an all-black cast and stars Ethel Waters, Eddie "Rochester" Anderson and Lena Horne. Waters and Rex Ingram reprise their roles from the Broadway production as Petunia and Lucifer Junior, respectively. The film was Horne's first and only leading role in an MGM musical. Louis Armstrong is also featured in the film as one of Lucifer Junior's minions, and Duke Ellington and his Orchestra have a showcase musical number in the film. In 2020, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." Plot Little Joe is a well-meaning yet weak man, whose attempts at redemption are cut short when he is killed over gambling debts by big-shot Domino Johnson. On his deathbed, Little J ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Broadway Theatre
Broadway theatre,Although ''theater'' is generally the spelling for this common noun in the United States (see American and British English spelling differences#-re, -er, American and British English spelling differences), many of the List of Broadway theaters, extant or closed Broadway venues use or used the spelling ''Theatre'' as the proper noun in their names. Many performers and trade groups for live dramatic presentations also use the spelling ''theatre''. or Broadway, is a theatre genre that consists of the theatrical performances presented in 41 professional Theater (structure), theaters, each with 500 or more seats, in the Theater District, Manhattan, Theater District and Lincoln Center along Broadway (Manhattan), Broadway, in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Broadway and London's West End theatre, West End together represent the highest commercial level of live theater in the English-speaking world. While the Broadway (Manhattan), Broadway thoroughfare is eponymous ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vaudeville
Vaudeville (; ) is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment which began in France in the middle of the 19th century. A ''vaudeville'' was originally a comedy without psychological or moral intentions, based on a comical situation: a dramatic composition or light poetry, interspersed with songs and dances. Vaudeville became popular in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s, while changing over time. In some ways analogous to music hall from Victorian Britain, a typical North American vaudeville performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill. Types of acts have included popular and classical musicians, singers, dancers, comedians, trained animals, magicians, ventriloquists, strongmen, female and male impersonators, acrobats, clowns, illustrated songs, jugglers, one-act plays or scenes from plays, athletes, lecturing celebrities, minstrels, and films. A vaudeville performer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rosetta Reitz
Rosetta Reitz (September 28, 1924 – November 1, 2008) was an American feminist and jazz historian who searched for and established a record label producing 18 albums of the music of the early women of jazz and the blues. Life and career Reitz was born in Utica, New York on September 28, 1924. She attended the University of Buffalo for one year and the University of Wisconsin–Madison for two years. After leaving college, she moved to Manhattan and worked at the Gotham Book Mart, later opening the Four Seasons, a bookstore in Greenwich Village she operated from 1947-1956. Throughout her varied career she worked as a stockbroker, owner of a greeting card business, a college professor and a food columnist for ''The Village Voice'' and authored a book about mushrooms titled ''Mushroom Cookery''. Reitz was one of second-wave feminism's earliest theory writers as author of the 1971 ''The Village Voice'' article "The Liberation of the Yiddishe Mama" and was a member of New York Radi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Primetime Emmy Award
The Primetime Emmy Awards, or Primetime Emmys, are part of the extensive range of Emmy Awards for artistic and technical merit for the American television industry. Owned and operated by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (ATAS), the Primetime Emmys are presented in recognition of excellence in American prime time, primetime Television in the United States, television programming. The award categories are divided into three classes: the regular Primetime Emmy Awards, the Creative Arts Emmy Awards, Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards to honor technical and other similar behind-the-scenes achievements, and the Primetime Engineering Emmy Awards for recognizing significant contributions to the engineering and technological aspects of television. First presented in 1st Primetime Emmy Awards, 1949, the award was originally referred to as simply the "Emmy Award" until the International Emmy Award and the Daytime Emmy Award were created in the early 1970s to expand the Emmy to o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Academy Awards
The Academy Awards, commonly known as the Oscars, are awards for artistic and technical merit in film. They are presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) in the United States in recognition of excellence in cinematic achievements as assessed by the Academy's voting membership. The Oscars are widely considered to be the most prestigious awards in the film industry. The major award categories, known as the Academy Awards of Merit, are presented during a live-televised Hollywood, Los Angeles, Hollywood ceremony in February or March. It is the oldest worldwide entertainment awards ceremony. The 1st Academy Awards were held in 1929. The 2nd Academy Awards, second ceremony, in 1930, was the first one broadcast by radio. The 25th Academy Awards, 1953 ceremony was the first one televised. It is the oldest of the EGOT, four major annual American entertainment awards. Its counterparts—the Emmy Awards for television, the Tony Awards for theater, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
African American
African Americans, also known as Black Americans and formerly also called Afro-Americans, are an Race and ethnicity in the United States, American racial and ethnic group that consists of Americans who have total or partial ancestry from any of the Black people, Black racial groups of Africa. African Americans constitute the second largest ethno-racial group in the U.S. after White Americans. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of Slavery in the United States, Africans enslaved in the United States. In 2023, an estimated 48.3 million people self-identified as Black, making up 14.4% of the country’s population. This marks a 33% increase since 2000, when there were 36.2 million Black people living in the U.S. African-American history began in the 16th century, with Africans being sold to Atlantic slave trade, European slave traders and Middle Passage, transported across the Atlantic to Slavery in the colonial history of the United States, the Western He ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
I'm Coming Virginia
''"I'm Coming Virginia"'' is a song composed in 1926 by Donald Heywood with lyrics by Will Marion Cook. It is often wrongly attributed to vocalist Ethel Waters, who first recorded it on September 18, 1926, with Will Marion Cook's Singing Orchestra. Waters is credited with popularizing it. Cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, pianist Fats Waller (with Fletcher Henderson) and the Paul Whiteman Orchestra featuring Bing Crosby all recorded it in 1927. The song has become a jazz standard performed by Dixieland musicians. History Ethel Waters first recorded it for Columbia Records on September 18, 1926 and she identified Heywood and Cook as the authors in her autobiography. The following year, Waters first sang it during her Broadway premiere in a production of ''Africana'' at Daly's Sixty-third Street Theatre. After the Waters release, the tune was adopted by numerous Dixieland groups, who increased the tempo. Cornetist Bix Beiderbecke recorded the song in 1927 with Frankie Trumbauer, and it w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Am I Blue?
"Am I Blue?" is a 1929 song composed by Harry Akst (music) and Grant Clarke (lyrics), and published by M. Witmark & Sons. It was featured in four films that year, most notably with Ethel Waters in the movie '' On with the Show''. It has appeared in 42 movies, most recently ''Funny Lady'', '' The Cotton Club'' and '' Downton Abbey: A New Era'', and has become a standard covered by numerous artists. As a work from 1929 with its copyright renewed it has entered the public domain as of January 1, 2025. Eddie Cochran version Eddie Cochran, an early performer of rock and roll music, also recorded his version of "Am I Blue" sometime between May and August 1957. It was released on the B-side of Liberty Records single 55087. The A-side was " Drive In Show" which rose to number 82 on the Billboard charts. Personnel used in the recording session: * Eddie Cochran – guitars, ukulele, vocals * Perry Botkin – rhythm guitar * Connie "Guybo" Smith – double bass * The Johnny Mann Chor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
