Ethel Waters – Stormy Weather (1933) *NEW VIDEO

FESCH.TV INFORMIERT:

One of the greatest pop jazz songs in history, sung by the one who originally made it famous, Ethel Waters. In a video I did a short while ago using footage from Of Mice and Men, she sings „Am I Blue?“ In the lyrics she says her man has run off to Chicago while she was stuck in Birmingham, vowing she would get the money to travel there and reunite with him.

You might say this is the sequel. Four years later she makes it to Chicago, only to find more unhappiness and seemingly constant „stormy weather.“ The video opens with actual camera footage of a busy Chicago street during a rain storm in 1933, restored, colorized, and sound designed by NASS. The song begins as we pan on shore to a bridge and the singer walks through a series of outtakes of a city experiencing perpetual night, thick clouds, downpour and drizzle modelled on New York City, Chicago and San Francisco. Mostly Chicago scenes are used. CGI animation courtesy of the Hangar 13 gaming series, Mafia.

Ethel Waters‘ recording of the song in 1933 was inducted in the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2003, and the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry in 2004.