Ethel Waters, one of the most influential jazz and blues singers of her time, popularized many song classics, including "Stormy Weather." Waters was also the first African-American woman to be given equal billing with white stars in Broadway shows and to play leading roles in Hollywood films. Once she had established herself as one of the highest-paid entertainers in the United States, she demanded, and won, dramatic roles. Single-handedly, Waters shattered the myth that African-American women could perform only as singers. In the early 1950s, for example, she played a leading role in the stage and screen versions of Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding. Waters played a Southern mammy, but she demonstrated with a complex and moving performance that it was possible to destroy the one-dimensional Aunt Jemima image of African-American women in American theater and cinema.

     In a career that spanned almost 60 years, there were few openings for an African-American woman of Waters's class, talent, and ability. She appeared on television as early as 1939, when she made two experimental programs for NBC: The Ethel Waters Show and Mamba's Daughters. But it was her regular  role as the devoted, cheerful maid in ABC's popular situation comedy Beulah (1950-53) that established her as one of the first African-American stars of the small screen.

     Waters's dramatic roles on television were also stereotyped. Throughout the 1950s she made appearances in such series as Favorite Playhouse, Climax, General Electric Theater, Playwrights ‘56, and Matinee Theater. Without exception, Waters was typecast as a faithful mammy or suffering mother. In 1961 she gave a memorable performance in a Route 66 episode, "Good Night, Sweet Blues," as a dying blues singer whose last wish is to be reunited with her old jazz band. Consequently, Waters became the first black actress nominated for an Emmy Award. She later appeared in The Great Adventure ("Go Down Moses"), with Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee in 1963; Daniel Boone ("Mamma Cooper") in 1970; and Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law ("Run, Carol, Run") in 1972. How­ ever, as African-American film and television historian Donald Bogle notes in Blacks in American Films and Television (1988):

Waters' later TV appearances lack the vitality of her great performances (she has little to work with in these programs and must rely on her inner resources and sense of self to get by), but they are part of her evolving image: now she's the weathered, ailing, grand old woman of film, whose talents are greater than the projects with which she's involved.

In the late 1950s, ill health forced Waters into semi retirement. A deeply religious woman, most of her public appearances were restricted to Billy Graham's rallies. She died in 1977 at the age of 80.