"The Mother of Us All"

"Starting out in black vaudeville in the early decades of the 20th century, Waters originally performed and recorded the sort of bawdy come-ons ('It’s Right Here for You' and 'I Want to Be Somebody’s Baby Doll So I Can Get My Loving All the Time') that, in the hands of Waters, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and other women, first established the blues as popular music. Waters’s style was advanced: understated, sophisticated, dramatic without being histrionic, ideally suited to the soon-to-emerge repertory of elegiac, subtly blues-influenced pop music that would come to be thought of as the Great American Songbook. It was Waters who made hits of the future standards 'Am I Blue,' 'Supper Time' and 'Stormy Weather' (years before it became associated with Horne)."

David Hajdu in The New York Times reviews Donald Bogle's Heat Wave: The Life and Career of Ethel Waters.