Her family moved to Denver and she started listening to Billie Holiday, whose life and singing had a profound influence on her.
Albert Ayler heard her in a dining club and introduced her to Bernard Stollman,[2] the owner of the experimental jazz label ESP-Disk.
Her best known recording is a nearly fourteen minute version of the traditional song "Black Is the Colour (Of My True Love's Hair)" (from Sings), which is rendered in a haunting, anguished wail.
[3] In the late 1960s, she spent time in Europe and then left the music world to raise her son (born in 1969) in California.
Waters returned in 2019 with the album Live (Blank Forms) recorded at the First Unitarian Congregational Church in Brooklyn.