Winifred Atwell

All Music Guide:

Winifred Atwell was one of the stars of the early British charts when they were introduced for the first time in the 1950s, playing an upright piano in a boogie-woogie style of ragtime. She was born on February 27, 1914, in Tunapuna on the island of Trinidad. Her father owned a pharmacy, and although the young Winifred was trained in chemistry and was expected to join the family business, she was always more interested in performing for U.S. servicemen either at the air base or a local club, Piarco. Having trained from a very early age on the piano, she was proficient enough to satisfy the troops stationed in the Caribbean, when someone asked her to play in the popular style of boogie-woogie. When she returned to the club, she had written the song "Piarco Boogie," which was later to be retitled "Five Finger Boogie." Atwell moved to America in the early '40s to study the piano with Alexander Borovsky and later to London, where she studied at the Royal Academy of Music and became the first female pianist to be awarded the highest grade for musicianship. Supplementing her income while studying, she played ragtime at various London clubs and was spotted at the Casino Theatre by entrepreneur Bernard Delfont, who signed her to a recording contract with Decca Records.

In 1946 Atwell met the comedian Lew Levisohn, who was to become her husband. Levinsohn suggested that an original sound and stage presentation might be achieved if Atwell first played a classical piece on a concert grand piano and then a ragtime on a battered upright, which they purchased in a junk shop for £2.50. This would become known as Atwell's "other piano," and would travel with her around the world, even to the Sydney Opera House. Both pianos would be very slightly detuned to give a faint off-key sound, and this originality was one of the stepping stones to her successful career. She also appeared cheerful with a dazzling smile and a warm personality, and in Britain during the late '40s, dominated by rationing after World War II, it was a welcome relief to be entertained by this very special lady. One of her recordings that became extremely popular in the early '50s was actually written in the 1920s by George Botsford and titled "Black and White Rag," which received an enormous amount of radio play and would later become famous as the signature tune for the BBC snooker series Pot Black.

When Britain introduced pop charts in November 1952, Atwell was one of the first black artists to hit the Top Ten and the first instrumentalist in the chart, with the song "Britannia Rag." The hits continued throughout the 1950s, including "Coronation Rag" in the summer of 1953 to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, and at Christmas she recorded the first of her piano medleys of music hall songs under the title "Let's Have a Party," which included "If You Knew Susie," "The More We Are Together," "Knees Up Mother Brown," "Daisy Bell," "Boomps a Daisy," and "She Was One of the Early Birds." Setting a trend that would continue on all of her medleys, side one of the single was an uptempo rag while the B-side was a slightly slower medley. Reverting to her classical training, she hit the charts in 1954 with Rachmaninov's 18th Variation on a Theme by Paganini, and at Christmas she achieved her first number one hit with another medley, "Let's Have Another Party." The mid-'50s were a period of peak popularity for her in Britain, with Atwell playing at the Royal Variety Show and even at a private party for the Queen, where a personal encore of "Roll Out the Barrel" was requested.

Her breakthrough performance in the U.S.A. was due to have been as a guest on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956, but she was confronted with racist opposition to the idea of a black woman appearing as a guest, and the show was never even recorded. She encountered no such problems in Australia, where she visited in 1956 and became equally as popular. Back in Britain in that year she enjoyed her second number one single, a version of the French song "Poor People of Paris." After this hit, her massive popularity diminished with the two-pronged attack from the rise of rock & roll and a new young British pianist, Russ Conway, who began to have hit records with the same style of honky tonk/ragtime playing, and she found the Top Ten of the singles chart a difficult goal to reach, apart from her subsequent Christmas season medleys "Let's Have a Ding Dong," "Make It a Party," and "Piano Party." She was also exceedingly popular in Australia and was an outspoken critic of the plight of the Aborigines, and eventually she and her husband settled in Sydney. When Lew Levisohn died in 1977, she considered relocating back to Trinidad but remained in Australia. Tragedy struck in the early '80s when a fire destroyed her home in Narrabeen and she suffered a heart attack shortly afterwards. She died on February 28, 1983.

Wikipedia:

Una Winifred Atwell (27 February or 27 April, 1910 or 1914 – 28 February 1983) was a Trinidadian pianist who enjoyed great popularity in Britain and Australia from the 1950s with a series of boogie-woogie and ragtime hits, selling over 20 million records. She was the first black person to have a number one hit in the UK Singles Chart and is still the only female instrumentalist to do so.

Biography [edit]

Childhood [edit]

Atwell was born in Tunapuna in Trinidad and Tobago. She and her parents lived in Jubilee Street. Her family owned a pharmacy, and she trained as a pharmacist, and was expected to join the family business. Winifred, however, had played the piano from a young age, and achieved considerable popularity locally. She used to play for American servicemen at the air force base (which is now the main airport). It was whilst playing at the Servicemen's Club at Piarco that someone bet her she could not play something in the boogie-woogie style that was popular back home in the United States. She went away and wrote "Piarco Boogie" which was later renamed "Five Finger Boogie".

Leaving Trinidad [edit]

She left Trinidad in the early 1940s and travelled to the United States to study with Alexander Borovsky and, in 1946, moved to London, where she had gained a place at the Royal Academy of Music. She became the first female pianist to be awarded the Academy's highest grading for musicianship. To support her studies, she played rags at London clubs and theatres. These modest beginnings in variety would one day see her topping the bill at the London Palladium. She said later, "I starved in a garret to get onto concert stages".

Life in the UK [edit]

She attracted attention with an unscheduled appearance at the Casino Theatre, where she substituted for an ill star. She caught the eye of entrepreneur Bernard Delfont, who put her on a long-term contract. She released three discs which were well received. The third, "Jezebel," scurried to the top of the best seller lists. It was her fourth disc that catapulted her to huge popularity in the UK. A fiendishly complex arrangement called "Cross Hands Boogie" was released to show her virtuoso rhythmic technique, but it was the B-side, a 1900s tune written by George Botsford called "Black and White Rag," that was to become a radio standard. Atwell was championed by popular disc jockey Jack Jackson, who introduced her to Decca promotions manager Hugh Mendl, who launched his career as a staff producer at Decca producing Atwell's recordings.

"Black And White Rag" started a craze for her honky-tonk style of playing. The rag was originally performed on a concert grand for the occasion, but Atwell felt it did not sound right, and so got her husband to buy a honky tonk piano for 30 shillings which would then be used for the released version of the song.

A Decca recording by Atwell is George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue with Ted Heath's band, which contained an arrangement in the slow section in the Glenn Miller style.

Atwell's husband, former stage comedian, Lew Levisohn, was vital in shaping her career as a variety star. The two had met in 1946, and married soon after. They were inseparable up to Levisohn's death in Hong Kong in December 1977; they had no children. He had cannily made the choice, for stage purposes, of her playing first a concert grand, then a beaten-up old upright piano. The latter was purchased from a Battersea junk shop for 50 shillings. This became famous as Winifred Atwell's "other piano". It would later feature all over the world, from Las Vegas to the Sydney Opera House, travelling over half a million miles by air throughout Winifred Atwell's concert career. While contributing to a posthumous BBC radio appreciation of Atwell's career, Richard Stilgoe revealed that he was now the owner of the famous "other piano".

When Atwell first came to Britain, she initially earned only a few pounds a week. By the mid-1950s, this had shot up to over $10,000. By 1952, her popularity had spread internationally. Her hands were insured with Lloyds of London for a £40,000 (the policy stipulating that she was never to wash dishes). She signed a record contract with Decca Records, and her sales were soon 30,000 discs a week. She was by far the biggest selling pianist of her time. Her 1954 hit, "Let's Have Another Party", was the first piano instrumental to reach number one in the UK Singles Chart. She is the only holder of two gold and two silver discs for piano music in Britain, and was the first black artist in the UK to sell a million records. Millions of copies of her sheet music were sold, and she went on to record her best-known hits, including "Let's Have a Party", "Flirtation Waltz", "Poor People of Paris" (which reached number one in the UK Singles Chart in 1956), "Britannia Rag" and "Jubilee Rag". Her signature "Black and White Rag" became famous again in the 1970s as the theme of the BBC snooker programme Pot Black, which also enjoyed great popularity in Australia when screened on the ABC network. It was during this period that she discovered Matt Monro and persuaded Decca to sign him.

Winifred Atwell's peak was the second half of the 1950s, during which her concerts drew standing room only crowds in Europe and Australasia. She played three Royal Variety Performances, appeared in every capital city in Europe, and played for over twenty million people. At a private party for Queen Elizabeth II, she was called back for an encore by the monarch herself, who requested "Roll Out the Barrel". She became a firm television favourite. She had her own series in Britain. The first of these was Bernard Delfont Presents The Winifred Atwell Show. It ran for ten episodes on the new ITV network from 21 April to 23 June 1956, and the BBC picked up the series the following year. On a third triumphal tour of Australia, she recorded her own Australian television series, screened in 1960-1961. Her brilliant career earned her a fortune, and would have extended further to the U.S. but for issues of race. Her breakthrough appearance was to have been on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956, but on arrival in America she was confronted with problems of selling the show in the south with a British-sounding black woman. The appearance was never recorded.

In 1955, Atwell arrived in Australia and was greeted as an international celebrity. Her tour broke box-office records on the Tivoli circuit, bringing in £600,000 in box office receipts. She was paid AUS$ 5,000 a week (the equivalent of around $50,000 today), making her the highest paid star from a Commonwealth country to visit Australia up to that time.

She toured Australia many times and took on Australian guitarist Jimmy Doyle as her musical director in the 1960s. Her popularity in Australia led to her settling in Sydney in the 1970s. She became an Australian citizen two years before her death.

Keith Emerson noted her influence on his playing in an interview: "I've always been into ragtime. In England- and I'm sure Rick Wakeman would concur- we loved Winifred Atwell, a fantastic honky-tonk and ragtime player."

Atwell was also a skilled interpreter of classical music. On 1 and 2 December 1954, at London's Kingsway Hall, she made one of the first stereo classical recordings in the UK, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Stanford Robinson, of a major repertoire work, the "Piano Concerto in A-minor, Op. 16", by Grieg. The two-channel version (engineered by Decca's Roy Wallace) appears not to have been released, but a transfer of the Decca LP (mono) LF1206 has been produced and issued by Pristine Audio as an available download.

Later life [edit]

Atwell purchased waterside properties in Bilgola and Seaforth in Sydney, as jumping-off bases for her worldwide performance commitments. Enjoying the affection of the public, she was nevertheless keenly aware of prejudice and injustice and was outspoken about racism in Australia. She always donated her services in a charity concert on Sundays, the proceeds going to orphanages and needy children. She spoke out against the third world conditions endured by Australian Aborigines, which made headlines during an outback tour of the country in 1962. Dismissing racism as a factor in her own life, she said she felt she was "spoiled very much by the public." She left her estate to the Australian Guide Dogs for the Blind and a small amount to her goddaughter. However a cousin of Lew Levisohn contested Atwell's will and is reported to have been granted $30,000 from her estate.

Atwell also created headlines in the 1960s with her dieting (slimming from sixteen to twelve stone on what would today be called a protein diet).

In 1978, she appeared on Australian TV's This Is Your Life and was admired by the younger generation in Australia in the 1970s. She played her "other" piano at the end of the show with a few bars from "Black and White Rag" after the piano being in retirement for many years.

Though a dynamic stage personality, Atwell was, in person, a shy, retiring and soft-spoken woman of modesty. Eloquent and intellectual, she was well read and, unlike many in the world of professional showbusiness, keenly interested in and informed about issues and current events. Voracious in her reading habits and a devotee of crosswords, she confessed to an inordinate love of mangos, a dislike of new shoes, and a keen interest in televised cricket (she backed England). She was also a devout Catholic, who unpretentiously played the organ for her parish church.

Atwell often returned to her native Trinidad, and on one occasion she bought a house in Saint Augustine, a home she adored and later renamed Winvilla and which was later turned into the Pan Pipers Music School by one of her students, Louise McIntosh. In 1968 she had recorded Ivory and Steel, an album of standards and classics, with the Pan Am Jet North Stars Steel Orchestra (director/arranger Anthony Williams), and supported musical scholarships in the West Indies. She was awarded the Gold Hummingbird, Caribbean music's highest award for achievement. In the early 1980s, Atwell's sense of loss following her husband's death made her consider returning to Trinidad to live, but she found the weather too hot.

Atwell suffered a stroke in 1980. She officially retired on The Mike Walsh Show, then Australia's highest rating television variety programme, in 1981. Her only public performances from this point were as an organist in her parish church at Narrabeen. She categorically stated on the Mike Walsh Show that she would retire and not return as a public performer, but that she had had an excellent career. Her last TV performance was "Choo Choo Samba" followed with a medley of "Black and White Rag" and "Twelfth Street Rag", before being given a standing ovation and awarded a bouquet. In 1983, following an electrical fire that destroyed her Narrabeen home, she suffered a heart attack and died while staying with friends in Seaforth. She is buried beside husband Lew Levisohn in South Gundurimba Private Cemetery in northern New South Wales, just outside Lismore.