There is a great supply of amateur undertakers in show business.
From Ethel Waters
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.
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.
Somehow, the things my mother wanted to do, the release in evangelism she sought with such frenzy, were transferred to me.
No one in the world can beat Ella Fitzgerald as a riff singer.
New York is only 97 miles from Philadelphia but was the Big Time as no other American city has ever been.
Negroes are human beings with exactly the same faults and virtues as members of the other races.
My whole family could sing. My family harmonized without any instruments to accompany them.
Mom was the greatest influence of my childhood. She wanted to save me from the vice, lust, and drinking that was all about me.
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.
2 perspectives
1 perspectives