Winifred Atwell (27 February 1914 – 28 February 1983) was a pianist who enjoyed great popularity in Britain and other countries (including Australia) from the 1950s with a series of boogie woogie and ragtime hits.
Atwell was born in Tunapuna in Trinidad and Tobago as Una Winifred Atwell. She and her parents lived in Jubilee Street. Her family owned a pharmacy, and she trained as a druggist, and was expected to join the family business, Winifred, however, had played the piano since 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 couldn't play something in the boogie woogie style that was popular back home in the USA. She went away and wrote "Piarco Boogie" which was later renamed "Five Finger Boogie".
Biography
Leaving Trinidad
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
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 recorded in an unusual fashion, with technicians having "de-tuned" a concert grand for the occasion. (Contrary to popular legend, it was not recorded on a "honky tonk" piano at all.) The exuberant bell-like sound of the record was Atwell's ticket to popular success. In austere, post-war England, her brilliant playing and effusive presentation made her the nation's favourite instrumentalist.
A classic Decca recording by Winifred Atwell is George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue with Ted Heath's band which contains an arrangement in the slow section in the Glenn Miller style.
Winifred 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 fifty 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 Winifred Atwell first came to Britain, she initially earned only a few pounds a week. By the mid-fifties, 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 quarter of a million dollars (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. 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, such as Let's Have a Party, "Flirtation Waltz", Poor People of Paris (which reached number one in the charts in 1956), Britannia Rag and Jubilee Rag. Her signature "Black and White Rag" became famous again in the 1970s as the theme of the highly popular BBC snooker programme "Pot Black", which also enjoyed great popularity in Australia when screened on the ABC network.
Her stage persona was of a gentle, warm and dignified woman who came alive at the piano. Her dazzling smile and charisma could light up a concert stage. She was the first of the post-war "personality pianists", attired in dazzling clothes and playing directly to the audience with winks, grins and invitations to sing along. Though not a jazz pianist in the strictest sense, since she did not improvise, she is nevertheless regarded as one of the world's finest popular pianists, with a technique that featured a left hand maintaining remarkable bass lines while the right produced a delightful lyricism. Her piano style was widely imitated by other keyboard players such as Russ Conway, Crazy Otto, Mrs Mills and Joe Henderson. She herself believed that her finest work was her late-sixties albums, "Chartbusters", a tour-de-force of piano pops, and the exquisite album of standards variously released as self-titled or under the name "The Plush Piano of Winifred Atwell".
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 ponderously titled, Bernard Delfont Presents The Winifred Atwell Show. It ran for ten episodes on the new ITV network from April 21 to June 23 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 Winifred 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 $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 enormous popularity in Australia led to her settling in Sydney in the 1970s. She became an Australian citizen two years before her death.
Later life
Winifred Atwell purchased waterside properties in Bilgola and Seaforth in Sydney, as jumping-off bases for her worldwide performance commitments. Enjoying the deep 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 Winnie's will and is reported to have been granted $30,000 from her estate.
Winifred Atwell also created headlines in the 1960s with her spectacular dieting (slimming from sixteen to twelve stone on what would today be called a protein diet). One of her gifts to British show business was discovering Matt Monro.
In 1978, Winnie appeared on Australian TV's This Is Your Life and was much admired by the younger generation in Australia in the 1970s.
Though a dynamic stage personality, Atwell was, in person, a shy, retiring and soft-spoken woman of genuine modesty. Eloquent and intellectual, she was well read and, unlike many in the frenetic world of professional showbusiness, keenly interested in and remarkably 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.
Winifred 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, Winifred Atwell's deep sense of loss following her husband's death made her consider returning to Trinidad to live, but she found the weather too hot.
Winifred Atwell suffered a stroke in 1980. She officially retired on The Mike Walsh Show, then Australia's highest rating television variety program, 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 a medley of "Black and White Rag" and "Twelfth Street Rag", before being given a standing ovation and awarded a bouquet. In 1983 following a 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.
Discography
Singles 7" (UK Charts)
- Britannia Rag
- Coronation Rag
- Flirtation Waltz
- Let's Have A Party
- Rachmaninoff's 18th Variation On A Theme By Paganini
- Let's Have Another Party
- Let's Have A Ding Dong
- The Poor People Of Paris
- Port-Au-France
- Left Bank (C'Est A Hamburg)
- Make It A Party
- Let's Rock 'N' Roll
- Let's Have A Ball
- The Summer Of The Seventeenth Doll
- Piano Party
External links
