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Known for:	Cabin in the Sky, The Member of the Wedding, Pinky
Birthday:	31 October 1896, Chester, Pennsylvania, USA

Singer Crystal Waters is her great-niece. 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. Was the second colored actress to be nominated for an Academy Award. The first being Hattie McDaniel, who won for her performance in "Gone With The Wind". Married three times; had no children. Her favorite hymn was "His Eye Is on the Sparrow." She used it for the title of her autobiography. Ethel was born to a 12-year-old mother, Louise Anderson, who had been raped at knife point by a mulatto, John Waters. Although she was raised by her maternal grandmother, Sally Anderson, she took her father's surname. 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. 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. Waters got religion in the late Fifties and performed and toured with evangelist Billy Graham until her death in 1977. Never learned how to read music. Husband Edward Mallory was an orchestra leader whom Ethel performed with.

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