Ethel Ennis was born on the third floor of a Calhoun Street rowhouse in West Baltimore. Earl Arnett was born in Indiana and raised with his military family in Austria. She was Black; he is white.
When they married in 1967, in Colorado, they were among the first interracial couples to be wed after a Supreme Court decision struck down anti-miscegenation laws. Ennis, a much-praised though shy jazz singer who disdained the glamor of the entertainment industry, died in 2019 at age 86. Her obituary in The New York Times was headlined, “Singer Who Walked Away from Fame.”
Arnett, a former Baltimore Sun features reporter, has spent 10 years writing a lovely and evocative memoir of their story, entitled “A Jazz Romance: Ethel Ennis, Baltimore & Me,” which publishes this week. It depicts a revealing portrait of Baltimore in the last 60 years. He calls their relationship an “improbable, problematic romance.” His wife encouraged him to write this loving memoir.
Hired by The Sun in the mid-1960s, Arnett created a reporter’s beat that sought to highlight the arts and perhaps shed light on the bohemian side of the city. Though trained in the police districts, as all new reporters were, he gravitated to the music scene along Pennsylvania Avenue, which, 60 years ago, retained its vitality as a lively Black entertainment and shopping district.
It was there he encountered George “Foxie” Fox, “a short, profane, coarse Jewish man who drank quarts of scotch, smoked cigars, and tipped the scale at about 300 pounds. He was also a New York refugee, a gambler who claimed he’d been a millionaire by the age of nineteen….”
Fox owned and operated the Red Fox, a lounge with entertainment and an early advocate for Ennis, who had that voice. As Billie Holiday once told her in a late-night phone call, “You have a great voice; you don’t fake it.”
The couple formally met in March 1967 (he’d first seen her in 1962) and married in August of that year, just two months after the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Loving v. Virginia.
“She had never resided more than three miles from the N. Calhoun Street rowhouse where she was born. I had never lived more than five years in one place, and that was Muncie, Indiana, where I was born,” Arnett writes.
“As a police reporter, I’d explored all sections of the city and thought I knew something. But once coming back from New York on a late-night train, I gave a cabbie my address, and he looked at me strangely. ‘You sure?’ he asked. ‘That’s the heart of Africa.’ ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘that’s where I live,’” Arnett writes.
Arnett understands that when you marry into an established Baltimore family, you become part of their world. He was a listening fly on their wall. He observes how Ethel Ennis became such a beloved performer and Baltimore jazz advocate. She realized she really preferred Baltimore, and all its polite conventions, to Las Vegas clubs and the harsh requirements of playing the celebrity game.
“Ethel’s family, the Ennises and Smalls, were generally not marchers for justice or protestors against inequality. They were among the many Black people who applauded the work of lawyers in court, preachers at the pulpit and diligent organizers on the street, but they never picketed, marched or spoke to media,” he writes.
Of her music, he says, “Ethel had neither the temperament nor the boldness to fight segregation openly, and her audiences were a mixture of Black, white, young, old, straight and gay who wanted to be entertained, not taught. With her songs and cheerfulness, she appealed to human commonality and universality — not protest and division. Even her blues were playful, never painful or resentful.”
In short, Ennis was a part of Baltimore’s well-established Black middle class who were settling in comfortable Northwest Baltimore neighborhoods. Arnett and Ennis lived off Gwynns Falls Parkway near the Mondawmin Mall. She filled the home with her record library and he his expanding library. It’s a cozy spot and nicely accommodated their marriage and interests.
Arnett’s memoir, published by Johns Hopkins University, will be featured at a book launch from 2 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Saturday at An die Musik LIVE!, 409 N. Charles St. The event includes a talk and questions with Arnett, a concert of Ennis’ most memorable love songs, reception and book signing.
Have a news tip? Contact Jacques Kelly at jacques.kelly@baltsun.com and 410-332-6570.