Pharmacist, world-renowned musician and unsung hero, the very person who inspired Elton John to take to the keys… but today, Winifred Atwell’s name is all but forgotten. She was born in 1914 on February 27th in Tunapuna, Trinidad and Tobago. Her family were pharmacists and that was the life Winifred trained for, but she loved the piano and the soulful melody spoke to her. From a young age, she achieved considerable local popularity, in particular when she wowed American servicemen in her country. One night, whilst playing for them, someone bet Winifred that she could not play the boogie-woogie style so popular in America. But she did. And she was brilliant. She became a popular local entertainer and so, eventually, she quit the pharmacy, uprooted her life and moved to New York to become a star. This is the story of how one black woman went from rags to riches to make the bigtime…
New York, New London
Winifred studied with Alexander Borovsky but her dreams of being a New York starlet were soon thrown into the air when she was offered a place at the Royal Academy of Music in London. It was too good an opportunity to turn down. She became the Academy’s first female pianist to be awarded the highest grade for musicianship. To pay her way, she played rags at London’s smaller clubs and theatres. She had no idea she would one day go from playing to a few dozen for hardly any cash to treading the boards at the London Palladium to thousands, all with more money that she could ever have imagined.
One night was soon to change her life. She had to substitute for an ill star at the Casino Theatre where she caught the eye of entrepreneur Bernard Delfont. He was desperate to sign her up to a record deal and in the blink of an eye, Winifred’s life changed drastically. In one night, she had gone from small-stage performer to a star of the vinyl, offered by Bernard a long-term contract. How could she turn it down?
Winifred honoured her contract and produced three discs… the reception was immense. She had been completely whisked off her feet and now the critics were going wild for Winifred. Every review was glowing, the discs selling out in no time at all. The third disc, ‘Jezebel’, was so popular it went to the top of the bestseller list in England. But it was to be a fourth disc that would cement Winifred’s name as one of this era’s most powerful and successful black performers.
I starved in a garret to get onto concert stages.
It really was time to boogie…
The Cross Hands
Winifred’s complex arrangement for her fourth disc, Cross Hands Boogie, showcased her fantabulous virtuoso rhythmic technique. I’ve heard it. Holy shit she was good. She was beyond good. She was outstanding. You really won’t hear many better piano players and her fanbase knew that, growing exponentially each and every day. Jack Jackson, a popular DJ of Winifred’s day, went to bat for her. He did all he could to popularise her music and he wanted her to be a household name. He introduced Winifred to Decca promotions manager Hugh Mendl and just like that, Winifred was catapulted into stardom.
The B-side to ‘Cross Hands Boogie’, Black and White Rag, started a craze for her frantic, honky-tonk, insatiably irresistible music… Winfred, when she performed, didn’t always look at the piano keys. She often played up to the crowd, a natural born performer. It was unreal. Winifred was impossible. How could anyone play like this?
She soon married stage comedian Lew Levisohn, a man vital in shaping Winifred’s career as a variety star. It was rather common at the time for ‘honky-tonk’ pianists to play a specially designed piano just for that genre but Winifred didn’t… she played an ordinary piano. Which makes what she did all the more remarkable. Lew made the choice to have Winifred start her performances with a concert grand, but then move on to a beaten-up old piano, just to show how good she was. It was so beaten, her old piano. It was bought at a Battersea junk shop for just 50 shillings or around £120 in today’s money. Winifred introduced her piano on stage as ‘my other piano’ and played most of her concerts with it. She never played without it. From performances at Las Vegas to Sydney, it was always by her side, travelling some half a million miles by air throughout Winifred’s life…
Even now, in the 1940s, Winifred was only making a few pounds a week. But by the 1950s, life would be very, very different for her.
The Ragtime Riches
By 1950, Winifred, a poor black women from a pharmacy family in Trinidad and Tobago who always dreamed of making it big in the world of piano, had gone from a few pounds to a week to an average of $10,000 a week. Try $97,000 in today’s money. You may not have heard of Winifred Atwell. But in her day, she was one of the most famous performers on Earth. She was so famous she insured her hands with Lloyd’s of London for £40,000. Try £955,000 in today’s money. Yes, Winifred had landed and she was on top of the world. The one condition of Lloyd’s insurance was that Winifred could never wash dishes.
By the mid-1950s, Winifred was selling 30,000 discs a week, by far the best selling pianist of her time. She was known for her boogie-woogie and ragtime hits, in her life, selling some 20 million records. She had been propelled to stardom. Her 1954 hit, Let’s Have Another Party, was the first piano instrumental to reach number one in the UK Singles Chart. To this day, Winifred is the only holder of two gold and two silver discs for piano music in Britain and she was the first black artist in the UK to sell one million records. She was happy, vivacious and had a lust for life unparalleled. Her music was her, defined.
Tens of millions of copies of her sheet music sold whilst Atwell mania gripped the world all whilst Winifred continued to smash the charts. In 1956, she struck gold with another UK number one, The Poor People of Paris. And in the 1970s, if you’ve ever seen the hit UK television show ‘Pot Black’, it made ‘Black and White Rag’ famous once more as it became the television show’s theme tune. Even into the 1970s, Winifred remained on the lips of every single fan of music across the entire world. She was huge. And not just in England but in Australia, too, where screaming crowds turned out in their thousands to watch her. She reached her peak in the 1950s.
In this decade alone, she performed in front of a total 20 million people…
The Eternal Pinnacle
In the late 1950s and into the 1960s, Winifred’s performances often drew standing room only crowds across Europe and Australasia. She played three Royal Variety Performances and played in every single capital city in Europe. She even played privately for Queen Elizabeth II. Yeah, I bet you’re wondering why you’ve never heard of her. The Queen loved Winifred’s performance but was saddened when it ended. So much she called for an encore, to which Winifred, ever happy, duly obliged.
It was in the 1950s when Winifred made one of the first stereo classical recordings in British history at London’s Kingsway Hall with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. It was never released but in recent years, it has been made available for download. By the time Winifred landed in Australia, she was an international celebrity. Her tour broke every single box office record in the country. She brought in, in 1955, £600,000 in box-office receipts. I hope you’re sitting down for this. Are you ready? In today’s money… that’s £14.39 MILLION. Holy shit! Winifred could do no wrong.
She was paid the far smaller sum of money of $5,000 per week, Australian, around $50,000 in today’s money, for her performances in the nation. She was the highest paid star from a Commonwealth country to visit Australia at the time. She loved Australia and toured the country many, many times. And they loved her so very much.
Winifred’s fame grew and grew. She became a television star in 1956 when, inevitably, she was given her own television show. ‘Bernard Delfont Presents The Winifred Atwell Show’ ran for a massive… 10 episodes on ITV, one of the UK’s major television networks. The BBC picked up the series after its run on ITV ended. And in 1960, she recorded another television series charting her 1960-1961 tour of Australia.
She earned an absolute fortune in her career and it’s easy to see why…
The Impossible Dream
Winifred never quite made it in America because of the fact she was black, but I hope any Americans reading this today delve into her career and realise that although she may not be known in America, that doesn’t mean she wasn’t a star. In 1956, she was booked to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show but the reaction in the American south was hugely negative and, as such, her appearance was never recorded. She had far greater success in the UK.
Not only was Winifred the first black person to have a number one hit in the UK Singles Chart… and to this day the only female instrumentalist to have done so… she actually managed the feat twice. She had 11 UK top 10 hits. She had an aura and a presence. The audience lapped it up. She always had her two pianos on stage and the audience waited eagerly for her to ditch her Steinway and move onto her battered old piano that was quite out of tune, not that you’d know it. Cue rapturous applause. You can only compare the mania around Winifred to the mania around The Beatles. She was that big.
She toured Britain in the 1960s and was given her own radio series. The Palladium, The Brighton Hippodrome, she played them all. But it was Australia that seemed to love her the most. So much that, in the 1970s, she settled in Sydney and became an Australian citizen, which, trust me on this, is ridiculously hard. She bought an apartment on the beach in Flight Deck in Collaroy, Sydney, and she threw herself into the down under lifestyle. She could be heard regularly across the country’s surf clubs. Yeah, why not? Surf, beer, piano. Beautiful.
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.
– Keith Emerson.
Winifred was a superstar. She loved every single human being and let everyone know just how much she adored the affection she received. She never took anything for granted, she was super appreciative of where she had come from and all she had accomplished. But she could never escape prejudice. Whilst it’s known that America suffered from, and in many regards still does, racial tensions, Australia has, and still does, many issues of its own. Even in Australia Winifred was not invulnerable to racial abuse.
She never stayed silent, though. She was an outspoke critic of widespread racism in Australia and America. She cared deeply for social issues, too, using her money to help many charities. Every Sunday, she played charity concerts on the condition that every penny made went to local orphanages and went to feeding poor children.
That was the thing about Winifred. Just when you think you can’t love her anymore, she finds a way…
The Social Warrior
Winifred continued to raise awareness for the conditions of poorer nations and the horrific treatment of the Aborigines, the indigenous people of what is now Australia. She made headlines for this and not all were pleasant. She didn’t care about racism in her own life, ‘spoiled by the public’ as she often claimed to be, no, she cared about everyone else. She was selfless and courageous.
Winifred’s final performance was the ‘Choo-Choo Samba’ followed by a medley of ‘Black and White Rag’, by far her biggest hit. She lost her husband in 1977 and considered moving back to Trinidad and Tobago but she stayed in Australia. Only one year later, she appeared on Australia’s version of ‘This Is Your Life’. She was dynamic on stage but privately, she was modest, very quiet and very shy. Softly-spoken, extremely intelligence and very kind, she was passionate about her music and making the world better. She loved her books and was a devotee of crosswords. She confessed to hating new shoes and having, in her own words, ‘an unhealthy love of mangoes’. Perhaps most bravely of all, she loved cricket, brave because, whilst living in Australia, she supported England. Well that takes balls.
Winifred never forgot where she came from, regularly visiting Trinidad and Tobago, where she had a home she wonderfully named ‘Winvilla’, later turned into a music school. Tragically, Winifred suffered a stroke in 1980 and in 1981, on The Mike Walsh Show, then Australia’s most watched television show, she officially retired. She said she would never, ever return to public performances. And she didn’t. although she did play the organ in her parish church at Narrabeen in Sydney, a devout Catholic.
But her life fell apart. In 1983, her home in Narrabeen burned down. She was completely distraught and the stress brought on chest pains and anxiety. She never recovered. Shortly after, whilst staying with friends in Seaforth, she collapsed and never woke up. She had suffered a heart attack and died at the age of just 69, which is really no age. That said, what a life she lived.
And what a legacy she left behind…
The Unsung Hero
Winifred was buried alongside her husband in New South Wales. Not only a talented musician who made more money than we’ll ever know, she was also a social campaigner as well as a pretty awesome human being. She left almost her entire estate to the Australian Guide Dogs for the Blind and a small amount to her goddaughter. In November, 2020, Winifred was awarded a Nubian Jak Community Trust black plaque at the former site of a hair salon she owned in Brixton, south London. If you’re in London, go and see it. It’s one of the very, very few memorials to Winifred, a person who has been almost completely forgotten.
Just because you may not know her name does not mean Winifred wasn’t huge, an international star who made tens of millions of pounds and generated even more in ticket and record sales. So many firsts to her name, a hugely inspirational figure to many artists alive today, a warrior for social inequality and most impressively of all, one of the greatest musicians who ever lived and all whilst being kind, selfless and courageous.
Winifred was born into a very poor family of pharmacists in Trinidad and Tobago. From rags to riches, she became an international celebrity and enjoyed great popularity across Britain and Australia in a career that lasted decades, selling some 20 million records. The first black person to have a number one hit in the UK Singles Chart and to this day, the only female instrumentalist to do so. A prominent pianist, her music innovative for her day, who became a household name known as the ‘Queen of the Keyboard’. She deserves to be a household name to this day. She is an idol and an icon. She is unique. She is Winifred Atwell.
In his memoir, ‘Me’, Elton John described Winifred as:
A big, immensely jolly Trinidadian lady with a sense of glee… [I loved] the way she would lean back and look at the audience with a huge grin on her face while she was playing, like she was having the best time in the world.
Toodle-Pip :}{:
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Images & Video: 1) Winifred Atwell, 2) Cross Hands Boogie, 3) All the Best, 4) Let's Have Another Party. Image & Videos Credits: https://www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/10437044/winifred-atwell-pianist-influence-elton-john/, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZ4ZXGCkfEU&ab_channel=cdbpdx, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJagAMtp6AE&ab_channel=MikeWoollett, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umJxL4Gmx3Y&ab_channel=GoldenOldiesOn45RPM
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