Winifred Atwell was the first Black musician to have a UK No 1. She also became the first female pianist to be awarded the highest grading for musicianship during her time at the Royal Academy of Music and was possibly the first Black artist in Britain to sell a million records. In 2020 she was still the only female instrumentalist to achieve the coveted top spot, selling over 20 million records.
1914
1983
Trinidad and Tobago
1946- Studied at the Royal Academy of Music
1948- Performed in a charity concert at London Casino which led to her breakthrough
1951- Signed a contract with Decca Records
1952- Appeared in the first Royal Variety Performance for the newly crowned queen, Elizabeth II.
1954- Topped the British pop charts with Let’s Have Another Party, becoming the first Black recording artist to reach Number One
1954- Became the first recording artist from Britain to have three hits selling a million records
1954- Her recording of the eighteenth variation from Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini reached Number Nine
1954- Performed to a packed audience in the Royal Albert Hall
1958-9- Went on her Australian tour which lasted thirteen months
Atwell was born in Tunapuna in Trinidad and Tobago. Her family owned a pharmacy, and she trained as a pharmaceutical dispenser and was expected to join the family business. Winifred, however, had played the piano since she was young and had achieved considerable popularity locally. At the age of two and a half she was given her first formal piano lessons by her mother, and aged five she played Chopin in public. When Winifred was six years old she gave piano lessons and by the age of eight she was the official organist at St Charles’ Church in Tunapuna. One of her best friends from childhood was Evadne Price who went on to be a writer.
Atwell took a degree in pharmacy but after performing in Trinidad’s Services Club during World War II she went to New York to study piano technique with the celebrated classical pianist Alexander Borovsky. In 1946 she came to Britain, determined to become a concert pianist, and studied at the Royal Academy of Music. She supported herself by working in the evenings, playing the piano in dance halls and clubs. Encouraged by her husband, Atwell turned her attention to playing ragtime music and became one of Britain’s most popular entertainers. Atwell’s breakthrough came in 1948 at a charity concert at the London Casino. She was almost completely unknown before the curtain rose but, after captivating the audience with her ragtime music, she found herself taking several curtain calls. In 1951 she signed a contract with Decca Records, and in 1952 she appeared in the first Royal Variety Performance for the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II. Winifred closed her act with Britannia Rag, a number she had composed specially for the occasion and which reached Number Five in the pop charts. She received a rapturous reception that evening.
In the bleak postwar years a party was not complete without Atwell’s records being played, and they sold in their millions. In 1954 when she topped the British pop charts with Let’s Have Another Party, she became the first Black recording artist to reach Number One. By 1954 she had also become the first recording artist from Britain to have three hits selling a million records: Black and White Rag (1952), Let’s Have a Party’(1953), and Let’s Have Another Party (1954). Between 1952 and 1960 she had eleven top ten hits and at the end of the twentieth century she was the most successful female instrumentalist ever to have featured in the British pop charts. At the peak of her popularity her hands were insured at Lloyds for £40,000 – a vast sum in the early 1950s – and her fan club had more than 50,000 members.
Atwell never made a secret of the fact that her heart lay with classical music. Despite her success with ragtime music, she never lost sight of her original ambition to become a concert pianist. In 1954 her exquisite recording of the eighteenth variation from Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini reached Number Nine in the pop charts. On 28 November 1954 Atwell packed the Royal Albert Hall as a soloist, accompanied by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, to play a piano concerto by Edvard Grieg, Concerto and George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Though Atwell attempted to keep up with a new trend in popular music – rock and roll – it hastened the end of her career in the charts. However, she was one of the most successful and beloved entertainers of her time, as well as the first Caribbean artist to become a household name in an era when Black performers in Britain had more chance of success if they were American.
In the 1950s Winifred Atwell’s carefree, happy-go-lucky records were extremely popular. In the severity of the postwar years she was one of Britain’s most successful and best loved entertainers. Her warm personality and glamour were just what the British public needed, and she was always consistent, rarely attempting to do anything outside her speciality. Audiences knew what to expect from her, and she never let them down. By the 1960s tastes in popular music had changed and Atwell’s rapid style of piano playing, with its famous ‘tinny’ bar-room sound, went out of fashion. Happily,Atwell had become well known abroad. Her first Australian tour in 1958–9 lasted thirteen months. Her popularity with Australian audiences was so great that, when her record sales began to fall in Britain, she settled there with her husband.
In 1947 she married Lew Levisohn, a variety artiste who gave up his stage career to become her manager. Atwell never completely recovered from the death of her husband in 1978. Three years later she became an Australian citizen; she died from a heart attack in Sydney on 27 February 1983.
https://www.npg.org.uk/devotional/winifred_atwell.html
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08989575.2019.1542827?journalCode=raut20
Winifred Atwell’s song Lets Have Another Party 🡪 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7_FSuz04Es
