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From album
At Last!
Etta James · 2011 · Track 9
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The story behind
The first time Stormy Weather was played in public, it wasn’t just any song: it was the closing act of a show that shared its name. In 1933, Harlem’s Cotton Club premiered a musical revue titled *Stormy Weather Revue*, where the track —written by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler— became the night’s centerpiece. The lyrics, which use the weather as a metaphor for lost love, resonated so deeply that even the German group Comedian Harmonists recorded a German version that same year, completely altering the original text. But beyond the covers, what makes this song special is its ability to turn pain into something universal: every time someone sings *"I don’t know why there’s no sun in the sky,"* they’re not just talking about the weather, but about an absence everyone has felt.
That night in 1933, Ethel Waters premiered it on the Cotton Club stage with the Dorsey Brothers orchestra under the Brunswick Records label. The recording, made that same year, was inducted into the *Grammy Hall of Fame* in 2003 and is now preserved in the *National Recording Registry* of the Library of Congress. Decades later, Etta James elevated it further in her 1960 album At Last!, where the 3:08 track became a bridge between blues and soul. What’s curious is that, despite versions by Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holiday, Waters’ recording remains the gold standard: her voice, blending jazz and theater, gave the song that air of elegant tragedy that still impresses today. And if anyone doubts its power, just look at how Lena Horne performed it in the 1943 film Stormy Weather, where the screen filled with stars in a tribute to World War II soldiers.