NRR Project: 'Stormy Weather' (1933)

 

NRR Project: ‘Stormy Weather’

Music: Harold Arlen Lyrics: Ted Koehler

Performed by Ethel Waters

Recorded May 3, 1933

3:12

On April 16, 1933, a new show opened at the Cotton Club in New York. It soon became known as the Stormy Weather Review, due to the success and impact of the singing of Ethel Waters.

Up until this time, Black women were typed as blues singers – shouting, stomping, with big-mama energy. Waters was one of these . . . but then she got a chance to sing this song, originally intended for Cab Calloway. Her rendition made her famous.

In doing so, the culture showed itself open to a new style of song – neither a Victorian ballad nor a low-down blues but something in between. It’s a torch song, bluesy but not a blues, replete with catchy lyrics and an essential emotional vulnerability that appealed to audiences not used to seeing it onstage. Soon it and many songs like it from the period would be codified in the national imagination as the Great American Songbook.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Next up: If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again.