As the first Black artist making History by having a No.1 hit in the UK Singles Chart, in its history, Winifred Atwell still holds the record as the only female instrumentalist to do so, to date. Bornin in Trinidad & Tobago, she played the piano from a young age and achieved considerable popularity locally, especially playing for American servicemen at the Air Force base on the islands, before enjoying great popularity in Britain and Australia with a series of boogie-woogie and ragtime hits, selling over 20 million records.
It was while playing at the Servicemen's Club at Piarco that someone bet her that she couldn’t 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’.
In 1945, Atwell left for England where she would broadcast for the BBC. Whilst in London, she gained a place at the Royal Academy of Music where she completed her musical studies, becoming the first female pianist to be awarded the academy's highest grading for musicianship. She then went on to top the bill at the London Palladium, after which she said: "I started in a garret to get onto concert stages."
By 1952, her popularity had spread internationally and her hands were insured with Lloyd's of London for £40,000 - with the policy stipulating that she was never to wash dishes. Atwell signed a record contract with Decca, as her sales soon rising to 30,000 discs a week. She was by far the biggest-selling pianist of her time, with her 1954 hit, ‘Let's Have Another Party’, being the first piano instrumental to reach number one in the UK Singles Chart.
With a growing popularity, in 1955, Atwell went to Australia, where she was greeted as an international celebrity, as her tour broke box-office records on the Tivoli circuit, bringing in receipts of £600,000. 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 would tour Australia many times after that!
Championed by popular disc jockey Jack Jackson, who introduced her to Decca Records promotions manager Hugh Mendl, a 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.
Forever modest, shy and soft-spoken, and a skilled interpreter of classical music, in 1954, at London's Kingsway Hall, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Stanford Robinson, Winifred made one of the first stereo classical recordings in the UK of a major repertoire work, the Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16, by Grieg, but the two-channel version appeared not to have been released, but a transfer of the Decca LP was produced and issued by Pristine Audio as an available download. Another Decca recording by Atwell was George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.
In 1962, she made a nationwide tour of Britain, with ‘The Winifred Atwell Show’. For one week only, she gave twice-nightly performances at the Brighton Hippodrome. 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, with millions of copies of her sheet music being sold.
The ‘Bernard Delfont Presents The Winifred Atwell Show’ ran for ten episodes on the new ITV network from 21 April to 23 June 1956, with the BBC picking 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 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.
Atwell bought an apartment in Sydney, where she was a member of the Moby Dick Surf Club at Whale Beach where she performed regularly in support of the surf club. Keenly aware of prejudice and injustice in the country, she was outspoken about the injustices and racism in Australia, she regularly donated her services in a charity concert on Sundays, with the proceeds going to orphanages and needy children.
She also spoke out against the Third World conditions endured by Aboriginal Australians, 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".
Winifred Atwell suffered a stroke in 1980, before officially retired on The Mike Walsh Show, then Australia's highest-rating television variety programme, in 1981. She categorically stated that she would retire and not return as a public performer, and that she had had an excellent career.
Her last TV performance was ‘Choo Choo Samba’, followed by a medley of ‘Black and White Rag’ and ‘Twelfth Street Rag’ Her only non-private performances from that point were as an organist in her parish church at Narrabeen.
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 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.
