Ethel Waters was born in Chester, Pennsylvania, on October 31, 1896, and grew up poor in and around Philadelphia in the care of her grandmother, a housemaid, moving so often that she rarely stayed in one home for more than a year. She married at thirteen, left the marriage soon after, and worked as a hotel maid in Philadelphia for $4.75 a week. On her seventeenth birthday she was talked into singing two songs at a costume party in a Juniper Street nightclub, and the reaction produced an offer to sing and dance at the Lincoln Theatre in Baltimore. From there she worked the Black vaudeville circuit, then a carnival headed for Chicago, then Atlanta, where she shared a club with Bessie Smith. Smith objected to competing with her on the blues, so Waters stuck to ballads and popular songs. Around 1919 she moved to Harlem, took a job at Edmond's Cellar, and became part of the Harlem Renaissance scene.

Her recording career began in 1921, when she became the fifth Black woman to make a record, for the small Cardinal label. She soon moved to Black Swan, the Black-owned label run by Harry Pace, where Fletcher Henderson was her accompanist and the company's musical director. "Down Home Blues" and "Oh, Daddy" became Black Swan's first real hit, and her contract made her the highest-paid Black recording artist of the day. From October 1921 to July 1922 she toured with Henderson and the Black Swan Troubadours. Paramount bought Black Swan in early 1924 and she stayed with the label through that year. She was playing the Plantation Club on Broadway in 1924 when she introduced "Dinah," and the Columbia record she made of it in 1925, credited to Ethel Waters and Her Plantation Orchestra, became the first of the hits that carried her through the decade.

The Columbia sessions of 1925 to 1931 put her in front of a changing set of jazz players. Discographers credit Coleman Hawkins on bass saxophone, cornetist Joe Smith and pianist Pearl Wright on "No Man's Mamma," recorded October 28, 1925, and Henderson on piano with Smith in January 1926 for "I've Found a New Baby." James P. Johnson played piano on "Guess Who's in Town" and "My Handy Man" in August 1928, and Clarence Williams played on her "West End Blues," the first of several 1928 recordings of that song. The sides of 1929 to 1934 credit Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Manny Klein and Joe Venuti among the studio players. Meanwhile she was a headliner. She toured the white Keith vaudeville circuit with Earl Dancer, appeared in the Broadway revues Africana (1927), The Ethel Waters Broadway Revue (1928), Lew Leslie's Blackbirds (1930) and Rhapsody in Black (1931), and in 1929 sang "Am I Blue?" in the Warner Brothers film On with the Show!, a song she and Wright had arranged themselves. It became her signature number.

On December 22, 1932, she recorded "I Can't Give You Anything but Love" and "Porgy" for Brunswick with Duke Ellington and his orchestra. In spring 1933 she was a headliner at the Cotton Club in Harlem, where she introduced "Stormy Weather" by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler; she recorded it for Brunswick in New York on May 3, 1933, with a studio band that discographers link to the Dorsey brothers. Irving Berlin heard her at the club and wrote for her in his revue As Thousands Cheer, which opened that year. It was the first Broadway show to give a Black star billing equal to its white stars, and she sang "Heat Wave," "Harlem on My Mind" and "Supper Time," Berlin's quiet lament of a woman whose husband has been lynched. Late in 1933 she cut "A Hundred Years from Today" and "I Just Couldn't Take It, Baby" for Columbia with Benny Goodman's orchestra. She was in the revue At Home Abroad in 1935 and 1936, and her Bluebird sides of 1938 to 1941 were made with a band led by the trumpeter Eddie Mallory, her husband from 1938 to 1945; the August 15, 1939 session credits Danny Barker on guitar, Milt Hinton on bass and Tyree Glenn on trombone.

The stage and screen work then moved to the center. She starred in Mamba's Daughters on Broadway in January 1939, and on June 14 of that year NBC broadcast The Ethel Waters Show, a variety special that made her the first African American to star in her own television program. Cabin in the Sky opened at the Martin Beck Theatre on October 25, 1940, with her as Petunia; "Taking a Chance on Love" went into the score three days before opening after she objected to another song. In the 1943 film version, directed by Vincente Minnelli, she shared the screen with Lena Horne and Louis Armstrong and sang "Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe." On April 16, 1946, she recorded for Continental with a combo led by drummer J.C. Heard, remaking "Taking a Chance on Love," "Cabin in the Sky," "Dinah" and "Am I Blue," and in 1948 and 1949 she toured again with Henderson.

Dramatic roles brought her the widest acclaim. She received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for Pinky (1949), directed by Elia Kazan, which made her the second African American performer nominated for an Academy Award. She won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1950 for The Member of the Wedding on Broadway and repeated the role of Berenice Sadie Brown with Julie Harris in the 1952 film. She starred in the ABC television series Beulah from 1950, left in 1951 because she felt the portrayal of Black people was degrading, and published her autobiography His Eye Is on the Sparrow in 1951, written with Charles Samuels. Her last film role was Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury (1959), and she received an Emmy nomination in 1962 for an episode of Route 66.

The last chapter was gospel. In 1957 she attended Billy Graham's crusade at Madison Square Garden, rededicated her life, and in later years often toured with Graham. She sang "His Eye Is on the Sparrow," the hymn that gave her autobiography its title, as a soloist with the crusade's New York choir on record, and made a gospel LP of the same name for Word in 1960. She passed away on September 1, 1977, at age 80, in Chatsworth, California, and is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale. Her 1933 recording of "Stormy Weather" is in the Library of Congress National Recording Registry, three of her recordings ("Dinah," "Stormy Weather" and "Am I Blue?") are in the Grammy Hall of Fame, and she was inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 1983 and the Christian Music Hall of Fame in 2007. Her papers are held at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas.

Waters was a singing actress first and a jazz singer by association, and her career ran on four tracks: Black vaudeville and the classic blues of the 1920s, Broadway and Harlem nightclub revues, film and television, and, in her last decades, gospel. Her jazz credentials come from the musicians behind her: Fletcher Henderson, Coleman Hawkins, James P. Johnson, Duke Ellington, the Dorseys, Benny Goodman and, in 1946, a combo led by J.C. Heard. She said later that Henderson's piano leaned classical and left her wanting more bass underneath. Gary Giddins and others have noted that she scatted on record in the 1920s, ahead of Louis Armstrong. Histories of classic blues single her out as one of the singers who adapted to the swing era while many of her peers faded, and after her early run of blues and novelty songs she moved to ballads and show songs, the material that suited the theaters, nightclubs and film studios that hired her. In her later life she praised Mel Tormé as the one white singer who sang with the soul of a Black man. Most of her public fame came from the stage, the screen and gospel, and the Subgenres tags above describe only the jazz and blues side of the work.