Sidney Easton

Sidney Easton (October 2, 1885 – December 24, 1971) was an African-American actor, playwright, composer, vocalist, and pianist born in Savannah, Georgia. The eldest of six children born to Eva and King Easton, he began performing at a young age, joining the John Robinson Circus in childhood before moving on to work with the A.G. Allan Minstrel Show. Some sources list his birth year as 1886 or 1891. Over the course of his career, Easton performed across minstrel shows, carnivals, burlesque, and vaudeville circuits, and beginning in the 1930s he extended his work into film.

As a composer and lyricist, Easton's songs attracted a wide range of recording artists during the 1920s, among them Elizabeth Smith, Margaret Johnson, Martha Copeland, Fats Waller, Fess Williams and his Royal Flush Orchestra, Joe Simms, Ethel Waters and the Ebony Four, George Bias, Stewart Wille, Virginia Liston, Clarence Williams and the Clarence Williams' Blue Five, and Eva Taylor. One of his most notable compositional collaborations was with Ethel Waters, for whom he wrote the lyrics and music to "Go Back to Where You Stayed Last Night." Easton was also a member of the performing group known as the Easton Trio. In 1920, he served as lyricist, instrumental composer, and co-producer, alongside Joe Simms, of the traveling show Sons of Rest.

Easton's Broadway career included an appearance in 1937 in The Case of Philip Lawrence. He had been married to fellow performer Sarah Dooley from 1913 until her death in 1920.

In the 1940s, Easton filed a lawsuit against 20th Century Fox, alleging that the studio had drawn on his play Lifeboat 13 in writing the script for the 1944 film Lifeboat. The case was settled out of court four years after it was filed. The New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture holds a collection of his papers.