Ethel Waters

CTL-E-6181 · Person · musician · 1896–1977

VERIFIED evidence grade — build store (JSON graph)

Combined Graph record U-07380 · provenance: build store (JSON graph), record CTL-E-6181.

Ethel Waters (1896-1977) was an American blues singer and actress. After singing in a local nightclub, she joined the Braxton and Nugent vaudeville troupe performing regionally around Baltimore and became an overnight sensation singing 'St. Louis Blues,' the only woman to have done so at that time, before establishing herself as a recording artist and touring nationally. In 1933 she accepted an offer to perform at New York's Cotton Club, where she introduced 'Stormy Weather' in the Cotton Club Parade, singing it with Duke Ellington and his orchestra; the performance was a turning point that led Irving Berlin to offer her a role in his Broadway revue As Thousands Cheer. She became the first African American woman to integrate Broadway and soon one of the highest paid actresses on Broadway regardless of race. Her Broadway acclaim led to film, including Cabin in the Sky (1943), and to television. She was the second African American to be nominated for an Academy Award — for Pinky (1949) — the first African American to star in her own television show, and the first African American woman to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award. She died on September 1, 1977.

Notes

Staged 2026-10-16 under CTL-GOV-006 (Scan Tail Wave 5 — 747 Program, Wave 12; fifth Scan Tail packet at the founder's 40-record size). Gate A (2026-10-16): Gate A CLEAR: hand-checked entities.json (3,843 entities) 2026-10-16 — no Ethel Waters entity by name or alias. Endpoint confirmed live: Cotton Club CTL-E-0953, Venue/club. Work endpoints for Pinky and Cabin in the Sky do not exist in the graph (hand-check: NONE) — see blocked list. Supply: Supply: 747 Supply Ledger, Tier 4 — corpus scan tail tranche, ranked clean survivor #2164. The scan supplied the NAME STRING ONLY; no fact in this record is sourced to it (CTL-GOV-004). SCOPE GATE: 747 Supply Ledger Tier 4 scan-tail reserve (Scan Tail Wave 4 banked), corpus-gap-candidates ranked #2164; Black music and screen history, Cotton Club / Harlem performance circuit. Vital status: DECEASED — verified: died September 1, 1977 (Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, accessed 2026-10-16). Tribute language appears only in curators_judgment, marked DRAFT. STATISTICS — Life dates: 1896-1977, died September 1, 1977 (Smithsonian NMAAHC, accessed 2026-10-16). Recording honors, counted and dated (Library of Congress essay, accessed 2026-10-16): 'Stormy Weather' recorded May 3, 1933, for Columbia; inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2003; added to the National Recording Registry in 2004. Oscar placement: second African American to be nominated for an Academy Award, after Hattie McDaniel, for Pinky (1949) (NMAAHC, accessed 2026-10-16) — stated as second Black woman nominee in the task brief; the Smithsonian's broader wording, second African American, is the form carried here. MEDIA: photo HELD (HELD — candidate: the Carl Van Vechten portraits of Waters held in the Smithsonian NMAAHC collection (noted on the museum's Waters page); no license claimed, PHOTO-001 file-level verification deferred. — named candidate only; file-level rights verification per CTL-PHOTO-001 still required; no license claimed); chart FILLED (charts/chart-ctl-e-6181-ethel-waters.svg); video HELD (no matching-entity CTL Short or verified-rights archival video staged); audio HELD (no rights-cleared matching-entity audio staged); map N/A (person record). MEDIA LAYER (staged 2026-10-16; full per-asset PHOTO-001 records + embed specs in the packet's staged JSON, Drive packet folder): map = N/A (Person record; no map attaches at the entity layer.) | visual_assets = HELD: | chart = FILLED (CTL-created chart (black / deep red / gold) built only from this record's sourced statistics and timeline fact) | video = HELD (No matching-entity CTL Short in the Shorts Link Map (checked by name and variants against shorts-link-map-2026) | audio = HELD (HELD — no rights-cleared matching-entity audio staged in this pass; her recordings are third-party administere)

Relationships

• Black Swan Records — recorded for
  Ethel Waters (CTL-E-6181) recorded 'Down Home Blues' for Black Swan Records, released in May 1921 as the label's first hit; both opened label sources (BlackPast.org and EBSCO Research Starters) state it. recorded_for runs Person→Institution per the schema matrix.
• Cotton Club — performed at
  The Library of Congress National Recording Registry essay documents that in 1933 Waters performed at the Cotton Club in New York, introducing 'Stormy Weather' in the Cotton Club Parade with Duke Ellington and his orchestra.

Sources

• National Museum of African American History and Culture (Smithsonian), Ethel Waters (accessed 2026-10-16) — Ethel Waters (1896-1977), blues singer and actress; first African American to star in her own television show and to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award; joined the Braxton and Nugent vaudeville troupe around Baltimore; overnight sensation singing 'St. Louis Blues'; first African American woman to integrate Broadway in Irving Berlin's As Thousands Cheer; among the highest paid actresses on Broadway; film Cabin in the Sky; second African American to be nominated for an Academy Award; died September 1, 1977 — https://nmaahc.si.edu/ethel-waters (primary source · build store)
• Library of Congress, National Recording Registry essay: 'Stormy Weather' — Ethel Waters (1933), by Stephen Bourne (accessed 2026-10-16) — in 1933 Waters performed at the Cotton Club in the 22nd Cotton Club Parade, introducing 'Stormy Weather' with Duke Ellington and his orchestra, at the highest salary the club had paid any star; Irving Berlin heard her there and offered her As Thousands Cheer the next day; she recorded 'Stormy Weather' on May 3, 1933 for Columbia; the recording entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2003 and the National Recording Registry in 2004 — https://sup1rpbqhrl3qi.vcaahomes.top/static/programs/national-recording-preservation-board/documents/StormyWeather.pdf (build store)

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Record CTL-E-6181 · Combined Graph record U-07380 · CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph · 2 sources · 2 mapped relationships.
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Researched and maintained by the CultureTechLens research program · CultureTechLens Combined Graph, Release 2026-11-04. Corrections are public: the corrections log.

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