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| "Why don't you choke those Boswell Sisters?" Jesus... |
“Why don't you choke those Boswell Sisters? How wonderful it would be if they sang just one song like it was written. Really when they get through murdering it, one can never recognize the original.”
“Please get those terrible Boswell Sisters off the station! You can't follow the melody and the beat is going too rapidly. And to me they sound like savage chanters!”
Consider that another installment in the “don’t let your grandparents tell you [_______] about how rude people have become these days.” Also, trust me: you will not understand where that anger comes from by the end of this post. Or even after one listen to the sampler.
Despite the rage-mail that haters sent to their employers and sponsors, the Boswell Sisters achieved remarkable renown in their prime - about 1930-1936 - and some of the biggest artists and bandleaders their era appreciated working with people who knew their way around music as well as they did. Unfortunately, that didn’t keep the musical world from forgetting them. As one of the first close-harmony singing groups in the recorded music/radio era, they opened space for contemporary competitors - e.g., the Three X Sisters and the Pickens Sisters - and paved the way for some famous imitators, most notably, the Andrews Sisters. Left-filed shit like “savage chanters” notwithstanding, those disgruntled fans had a point. From a long passage about some of their most famous recording sessions, quoted by Wikipedia (fwiw, my overwhelmingly primary source for this post):
“Some of the sessions with Dorsey Brothers' band musicians were notable in having the young Glenn Miller writing instrumental arrangements for his bandmates from Connie’s dictation. Melodies were rearranged and slowed down, major keys were changed to minor keys (sometimes in mid-song), and unexpected rhythmic changes were par for the course. The Boswells were among the few performers who were allowed to make changes to current popular tunes since, during this era, music publishers and record companies pressured performers not to alter current popular song arrangements.”
Now, the story of how the Boswell Sisters earned the right to tell music publishers and record companies to blow.
The Boswell Sisters - Martha (1905), Connie (1907; later Connee) and Helvetia (1911, aka, “Vet”) - were born into and grew up in a show business family. Their father, Clyde “A. C.” Boswell worked in vaudeville and sang as a barbershop quarter with his wife, Meldania, and Aunt Mattie and Uncle Charlie, and that accounts for many things - their parents' apparent delight in sharing the life with them. Though born in Kansas City, the Boswells raised their three daughters in uptown New Orleans, then (now?) a middle-class, largely white neighborhood. While a lot of comfortable white families of the time hired black housekeepers, the Boswells encourage their housekeepers to sing the music they knew around the house - which, at that time, meant jazz, ragtime, whatever was playing around New Orleans - though I can't speak to how unusual that was (based on most of what I've read, I'm guessing "very").
While all the sister studied both classical music and instruments - and well enough that they all played in the New Orleans Philharmonic Orchestra - the jazz-bug bit them all. As Martha once said, “We studied classical music . . . and were being prepared for the stage and a concert tour throughout the United States, but the saxophone got us.” Far from objecting, both A. C. and Meldania actively encouraged that interest, whether it was Meldania taking her girls to see black performers at the Lyric Theatre’s white-only “Midnight Frolics” or A. C. driving them around New Orleans to take in the sights and sounds of the city. Moreover, the Boswells opened their house to what reads like every musician in New Orleans (including a young Louis Prima) for regular “musical evenings” - often more than once a week. An older brother, Clydie, got bit by the music bug just as hard and was working to make a go in the industry with the help of a cornetist named, Emmett Louis Hardy, but both died too young (22 and 18, respectively) by ailments of the day (tuberculosis and the Spanish flu, again, respectively).
Inspired by the sound around them, each sister picked up new instruments - the banjo and guitar for Vet, saxophone and trombone for Connie, and the piano for Martha, if with a particular focus “on the rhythms and idioms of jazz and ragtime.” Their break onto the stage walked the same path - i.e., while they started playing a mix of classical, semi-classical(?), and some jazz, their stage performances became all jazz before too long. The Boswell Sisters played the New Orleans jazz circuit over the first half of the 1920s and they put in the time, honing their craft and building a name. They would play some form of the same stage show for as long as they performed together, and for the simple, sorta sad reason (see next sentence) that Connie could neither stand nor walk for any length of time. The few sources I read settled on childhood polio as the cause, though Wikipedia mentions that her mom sometimes blamed it on “a go-cart accident” to avoid the “stigma” of polio. A site called The American Vaudeville, hosted by the University of Arizona, described how that worked, if probably later in their careers:
“…when they performed, they were usually in position when the curtain opened and Connee would be sitting down often high up on a stool fitted out with side wheels so that she could be wheeled into her place and so that the others could have good microphone balance with her. She always wore a long gown so that her audiences would never see her weak legs or think of her as having a disability.”
The Boswell Sisters did record a couple songs in the mid-1920s, but on the crap, acoustic systems of the day. Victor, the label that recorded the session, kept two songs - “I’m Gonna Cry (Crying Blues)” (in which Connie tried to riff on Mamie Smith's sound) and “Nights When I Am Lonely” (both written by Martha) - and chucked the rest, but they only really started on the road to real fame after winning an amateur contest in New Orleans. The sources leave the question of how that happened somewhat open - Wikipedia has them working a larger Southern Midwest circuit (e.g., Arkansas, Texas and Oklahoma), while The American Vaudeville makes it sound like they bounced from a radio program on New Orleans’ WSMB straight to Los Angeles’ KFWB. Because Wikipedia seems less in a rush, I’m inclined to trust their notes about a tour ending in LA and the Boswell Sisters getting one or more leg(s) up from old New Orleans acquaintances - first by way of Martha landing a role as “Miss Somaphine” in a radio serial titled Tom and His Mule Hercules (later, Tom and Miss Somaphine, and later still as Radio Periscope(?)), then later a succession of radio shows - e.g., The Navigator Hour, The Paramount Hour, then finally a regular stint with Warner Brothers Pictures’ station, KFWB, the same platform that launched Bing Crosby and Ronald Reagan. They also picked up some “side-miking work” in the movies (aka, singing for those who cannot as well) in features like They Learned About Women (MGM), Let's Go Places (Fox), and Under Montana Skies (Tiffany Productions).
After taking all the jobs the West Coast had to offer, the Boswell Sisters moved to still bigger things in New York City. In 1931, they landed a year-long contract with NBC where they headlined the Pleasure Hour (sponsored first by Camel cigarettes, then by Chesterfield). They moved to CBS for the next two years, and recorded with Brunswick Records under the guidance of their A&R man, Jack Kapp. Those included the sessions noted above with the Dorseys, but the Boswell Sisters recorded with just about every (white) household name of the early big band/swing era, but they’d reached a point of reputational and stylistic fame where Okeh Records felt good about having them split 78 rpms with the likes of Louis Armstrong and Frankie Trumbauer. Offers to perform in movies kept coming as well, including a chance to perform “Shout, Sister, Shout” in 1932’s The Big Broadcast, which featured icons like Bing Crosby and Cab Calloway. They also appeared in 1934’s Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round, where they performed their own song, “Rock and Roll" - quite possibly the squarest way those words could have entered the American lexicon. (That said, that clip does come from the movie.)
The end came so abruptly that the Boswell Sisters recorded just six songs for Decca before calling it quits. Both Martha and Vet married and decided to quit the business in order to stay closer to home to raise their kids. Connie - who changed her name to “Connee” in 1940, on the very practical reason that it made signing autographs easier - continued the contract with Decca and carried recording into the mid-1950s. She also did some remarkable charity work, particularly during World War II. When the USO rejected her offer to perform due to the issues with her legs, Connee Boswell focused on the home-front, where she’d visit wounded soldiers who had shipped home. And, perhaps an even greater accomplishment, she and Eddie Cantor counted among the original founders of the March of Dimes.
The Boswell Sisters would each go into the beyond one by one, Martha in 1958, Connee in 1976, and Vet in 1988. Their names had largely passed out of pop culture by then - e.g., more people remember Ella Fitzgerald than Connie Boswell, even though the former admired the latter so much that she sang The Boswell Sisters’ “The Object of My Affection” in her style for the Amateur Night contest at Harlem's Apollo Theater that started her career - so, it’s possible that few people noted the passing. Still, they had a great run for as long as it lasted, the respect of both their peers and industry and, perhaps most importantly, they did some things that no one else had before. And that’s a good career by any county.
About the Sampler
“Rather than assign each vocalist to a particular range, such as contralto, alto, soprano, etc., the sisters were comfortable moving unexpectedly across one another's natural ranges. Martha Boswell described it as ‘a desertion, at various times, of the tones in which we would normally sing,’ but with the end effect being a ‘blending’ of tones.”
Before listing the songs on the sampler, I wanted to note the Boswell Sisters’ unique contribution to the sound of the swing era one more time. No less importantly, they worked a lot of their magic with just their voices; Martha (mostly, from what I gather) wrote the arrangements, but they mostly performed around “a simple piano part which could be amplified to include a small orchestra later on.” The American Vaudeville embedded the Youtube clip of them performing “Crazy People” to give readers a taste of what that looked like.
You’ll hear something else in that clip (as well as on their “Everybody Loves My Baby”) - a singing/rhythmic technique later called “Boswellese Gibberish,” that they learned from their father. Wikipedia has a little more on that, as well as where it came from:
“Along with the blackness of their vocal quality, the sisters' musical style incorporated many elements that could be associated with blackness, blues, and hot jazz. ‘Boswellese”’ gibberish, although primarily an effective way of making a straight tune more rhythmically sophisticated, was also alienating and foreign to the listener, redolent of both scat and the 'jive talk' being developed by the alternative black jazz community.”
Now, to finally roll out the rest of the sampler. Apart from, and including some songs listed above, I pulled just over half of the sampler from a list of Boswell Sisters hits at the bottom of their Wikipedia page - all of which came between 1931 and 1935. Most of them share the same qualities - the unique approach to vocals played over music that, with the exception of “I’m Gonna Cry” and “Nights When I Am Lonely,” mapped the transition from 1920s jazz to the big band/swing sound. Here’s the full list:
“Stop the Sun, Stop the Moon,” “Concentratin’ on You” (cute one), “Dinah” (one of their bigger hits after “The Object of My Affection”), “Roll On, Mississippi, Roll On,” “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” “Was That the Human Thing to Do,” “When I Take My Sugar to Tea” (two of their best for me), “An Evening in Caroline,” “If It Ain’t Love,” “We Just Couldn’t Say Goodbye,” “It’s the Girl,” “There’ll Be Some Changes Made” (good for their tempo change thing), and “Making Faces at the Man in the Moon.”
Finally, if you want to hear what pissed off all those fans so much, have a listen to what The Boswell Sisters did with Cab Calloway’s (follow-up) hit, “Minnie the Moocher’s Wedding Day.”
Till the next one…which features another group famous for vocal innovation...
“Please get those terrible Boswell Sisters off the station! You can't follow the melody and the beat is going too rapidly. And to me they sound like savage chanters!”
Consider that another installment in the “don’t let your grandparents tell you [_______] about how rude people have become these days.” Also, trust me: you will not understand where that anger comes from by the end of this post. Or even after one listen to the sampler.
Despite the rage-mail that haters sent to their employers and sponsors, the Boswell Sisters achieved remarkable renown in their prime - about 1930-1936 - and some of the biggest artists and bandleaders their era appreciated working with people who knew their way around music as well as they did. Unfortunately, that didn’t keep the musical world from forgetting them. As one of the first close-harmony singing groups in the recorded music/radio era, they opened space for contemporary competitors - e.g., the Three X Sisters and the Pickens Sisters - and paved the way for some famous imitators, most notably, the Andrews Sisters. Left-filed shit like “savage chanters” notwithstanding, those disgruntled fans had a point. From a long passage about some of their most famous recording sessions, quoted by Wikipedia (fwiw, my overwhelmingly primary source for this post):
“Some of the sessions with Dorsey Brothers' band musicians were notable in having the young Glenn Miller writing instrumental arrangements for his bandmates from Connie’s dictation. Melodies were rearranged and slowed down, major keys were changed to minor keys (sometimes in mid-song), and unexpected rhythmic changes were par for the course. The Boswells were among the few performers who were allowed to make changes to current popular tunes since, during this era, music publishers and record companies pressured performers not to alter current popular song arrangements.”
Now, the story of how the Boswell Sisters earned the right to tell music publishers and record companies to blow.
The Boswell Sisters - Martha (1905), Connie (1907; later Connee) and Helvetia (1911, aka, “Vet”) - were born into and grew up in a show business family. Their father, Clyde “A. C.” Boswell worked in vaudeville and sang as a barbershop quarter with his wife, Meldania, and Aunt Mattie and Uncle Charlie, and that accounts for many things - their parents' apparent delight in sharing the life with them. Though born in Kansas City, the Boswells raised their three daughters in uptown New Orleans, then (now?) a middle-class, largely white neighborhood. While a lot of comfortable white families of the time hired black housekeepers, the Boswells encourage their housekeepers to sing the music they knew around the house - which, at that time, meant jazz, ragtime, whatever was playing around New Orleans - though I can't speak to how unusual that was (based on most of what I've read, I'm guessing "very").
While all the sister studied both classical music and instruments - and well enough that they all played in the New Orleans Philharmonic Orchestra - the jazz-bug bit them all. As Martha once said, “We studied classical music . . . and were being prepared for the stage and a concert tour throughout the United States, but the saxophone got us.” Far from objecting, both A. C. and Meldania actively encouraged that interest, whether it was Meldania taking her girls to see black performers at the Lyric Theatre’s white-only “Midnight Frolics” or A. C. driving them around New Orleans to take in the sights and sounds of the city. Moreover, the Boswells opened their house to what reads like every musician in New Orleans (including a young Louis Prima) for regular “musical evenings” - often more than once a week. An older brother, Clydie, got bit by the music bug just as hard and was working to make a go in the industry with the help of a cornetist named, Emmett Louis Hardy, but both died too young (22 and 18, respectively) by ailments of the day (tuberculosis and the Spanish flu, again, respectively).
Inspired by the sound around them, each sister picked up new instruments - the banjo and guitar for Vet, saxophone and trombone for Connie, and the piano for Martha, if with a particular focus “on the rhythms and idioms of jazz and ragtime.” Their break onto the stage walked the same path - i.e., while they started playing a mix of classical, semi-classical(?), and some jazz, their stage performances became all jazz before too long. The Boswell Sisters played the New Orleans jazz circuit over the first half of the 1920s and they put in the time, honing their craft and building a name. They would play some form of the same stage show for as long as they performed together, and for the simple, sorta sad reason (see next sentence) that Connie could neither stand nor walk for any length of time. The few sources I read settled on childhood polio as the cause, though Wikipedia mentions that her mom sometimes blamed it on “a go-cart accident” to avoid the “stigma” of polio. A site called The American Vaudeville, hosted by the University of Arizona, described how that worked, if probably later in their careers:
“…when they performed, they were usually in position when the curtain opened and Connee would be sitting down often high up on a stool fitted out with side wheels so that she could be wheeled into her place and so that the others could have good microphone balance with her. She always wore a long gown so that her audiences would never see her weak legs or think of her as having a disability.”
The Boswell Sisters did record a couple songs in the mid-1920s, but on the crap, acoustic systems of the day. Victor, the label that recorded the session, kept two songs - “I’m Gonna Cry (Crying Blues)” (in which Connie tried to riff on Mamie Smith's sound) and “Nights When I Am Lonely” (both written by Martha) - and chucked the rest, but they only really started on the road to real fame after winning an amateur contest in New Orleans. The sources leave the question of how that happened somewhat open - Wikipedia has them working a larger Southern Midwest circuit (e.g., Arkansas, Texas and Oklahoma), while The American Vaudeville makes it sound like they bounced from a radio program on New Orleans’ WSMB straight to Los Angeles’ KFWB. Because Wikipedia seems less in a rush, I’m inclined to trust their notes about a tour ending in LA and the Boswell Sisters getting one or more leg(s) up from old New Orleans acquaintances - first by way of Martha landing a role as “Miss Somaphine” in a radio serial titled Tom and His Mule Hercules (later, Tom and Miss Somaphine, and later still as Radio Periscope(?)), then later a succession of radio shows - e.g., The Navigator Hour, The Paramount Hour, then finally a regular stint with Warner Brothers Pictures’ station, KFWB, the same platform that launched Bing Crosby and Ronald Reagan. They also picked up some “side-miking work” in the movies (aka, singing for those who cannot as well) in features like They Learned About Women (MGM), Let's Go Places (Fox), and Under Montana Skies (Tiffany Productions).
After taking all the jobs the West Coast had to offer, the Boswell Sisters moved to still bigger things in New York City. In 1931, they landed a year-long contract with NBC where they headlined the Pleasure Hour (sponsored first by Camel cigarettes, then by Chesterfield). They moved to CBS for the next two years, and recorded with Brunswick Records under the guidance of their A&R man, Jack Kapp. Those included the sessions noted above with the Dorseys, but the Boswell Sisters recorded with just about every (white) household name of the early big band/swing era, but they’d reached a point of reputational and stylistic fame where Okeh Records felt good about having them split 78 rpms with the likes of Louis Armstrong and Frankie Trumbauer. Offers to perform in movies kept coming as well, including a chance to perform “Shout, Sister, Shout” in 1932’s The Big Broadcast, which featured icons like Bing Crosby and Cab Calloway. They also appeared in 1934’s Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round, where they performed their own song, “Rock and Roll" - quite possibly the squarest way those words could have entered the American lexicon. (That said, that clip does come from the movie.)
The end came so abruptly that the Boswell Sisters recorded just six songs for Decca before calling it quits. Both Martha and Vet married and decided to quit the business in order to stay closer to home to raise their kids. Connie - who changed her name to “Connee” in 1940, on the very practical reason that it made signing autographs easier - continued the contract with Decca and carried recording into the mid-1950s. She also did some remarkable charity work, particularly during World War II. When the USO rejected her offer to perform due to the issues with her legs, Connee Boswell focused on the home-front, where she’d visit wounded soldiers who had shipped home. And, perhaps an even greater accomplishment, she and Eddie Cantor counted among the original founders of the March of Dimes.
The Boswell Sisters would each go into the beyond one by one, Martha in 1958, Connee in 1976, and Vet in 1988. Their names had largely passed out of pop culture by then - e.g., more people remember Ella Fitzgerald than Connie Boswell, even though the former admired the latter so much that she sang The Boswell Sisters’ “The Object of My Affection” in her style for the Amateur Night contest at Harlem's Apollo Theater that started her career - so, it’s possible that few people noted the passing. Still, they had a great run for as long as it lasted, the respect of both their peers and industry and, perhaps most importantly, they did some things that no one else had before. And that’s a good career by any county.
About the Sampler
“Rather than assign each vocalist to a particular range, such as contralto, alto, soprano, etc., the sisters were comfortable moving unexpectedly across one another's natural ranges. Martha Boswell described it as ‘a desertion, at various times, of the tones in which we would normally sing,’ but with the end effect being a ‘blending’ of tones.”
Before listing the songs on the sampler, I wanted to note the Boswell Sisters’ unique contribution to the sound of the swing era one more time. No less importantly, they worked a lot of their magic with just their voices; Martha (mostly, from what I gather) wrote the arrangements, but they mostly performed around “a simple piano part which could be amplified to include a small orchestra later on.” The American Vaudeville embedded the Youtube clip of them performing “Crazy People” to give readers a taste of what that looked like.
You’ll hear something else in that clip (as well as on their “Everybody Loves My Baby”) - a singing/rhythmic technique later called “Boswellese Gibberish,” that they learned from their father. Wikipedia has a little more on that, as well as where it came from:
“Along with the blackness of their vocal quality, the sisters' musical style incorporated many elements that could be associated with blackness, blues, and hot jazz. ‘Boswellese”’ gibberish, although primarily an effective way of making a straight tune more rhythmically sophisticated, was also alienating and foreign to the listener, redolent of both scat and the 'jive talk' being developed by the alternative black jazz community.”
Now, to finally roll out the rest of the sampler. Apart from, and including some songs listed above, I pulled just over half of the sampler from a list of Boswell Sisters hits at the bottom of their Wikipedia page - all of which came between 1931 and 1935. Most of them share the same qualities - the unique approach to vocals played over music that, with the exception of “I’m Gonna Cry” and “Nights When I Am Lonely,” mapped the transition from 1920s jazz to the big band/swing sound. Here’s the full list:
“Stop the Sun, Stop the Moon,” “Concentratin’ on You” (cute one), “Dinah” (one of their bigger hits after “The Object of My Affection”), “Roll On, Mississippi, Roll On,” “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” “Was That the Human Thing to Do,” “When I Take My Sugar to Tea” (two of their best for me), “An Evening in Caroline,” “If It Ain’t Love,” “We Just Couldn’t Say Goodbye,” “It’s the Girl,” “There’ll Be Some Changes Made” (good for their tempo change thing), and “Making Faces at the Man in the Moon.”
Finally, if you want to hear what pissed off all those fans so much, have a listen to what The Boswell Sisters did with Cab Calloway’s (follow-up) hit, “Minnie the Moocher’s Wedding Day.”
Till the next one…which features another group famous for vocal innovation...
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