Crash Course Timeline, No. 45: The Andrews Sisters...For Fans of the Tabloids

The good times were good. Which makes the bad times worse.

“The following night, they sat in the Edison's soda fountain, hoisting a final toast to their failed dreams.”

“In her 1993 memoir Over Here, Over There, Maxene wrote about that night. As they sat in the soda fountain, in walked a man with pointed-toe shoes and a wide, snap-brim hat. In a gruff New York tone, he announced he was looking for the Andrews Sisters.”

“’Who's asking?’ they responded. ‘Jack Kapp from Decca Records,’ the man said. ‘He wants them to come audition.’”

“In unison, they declared, ‘We're the Andrews Sisters!’”
- MNopedia, short bio (2017)

The Andrews Sisters did plenty in unison – singing, dancing, acting, the classic triple-threat – but long, incredibly bitter feuds defined their lives off-stage, particularly after their parents died. The only performer who out-performed them through the 1940s was Bing Crosby (covered in an earlier chapter, because how could I avoid it?) – but he out-performed (literally) everybody – but Andrews Sisters helped him score several of his biggest hits, including “Pistol Packin’ Mama” and (I love this damn song) “Don’t Fence Me In.” (And that was the tip of the iceberg: Bing and the Andrews Sisters shared 47 recordings through the ‘40s, 23 of them hits.)

With Bing or without him, they recorded over 600 songs, moved 90 million units, and earned 15 gold records on the back of jukebox play and 46 Top 10 hits. The peak of their fame coincided with World War II to the extent that they went a long way to defining the pop culture of the war years – and it goes way beyond “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” (that's a video-clip for a V-disc, btw) Their pop culture footprint both was and is, frankly, stunning (you’ll see). Their success only makes the way they started more surprising.

By birth-year and vocal range, the Andrews Sisters were, LaVerne Sophia (1911; contralto), Maxene Anglyn (1916, soprano) and Patricia “Patty” Marie (1918, mezzo-soprano); there was a second sister, between LaVerne and Maxene named Anglyn, but she died at eight months in 1916. Their mother, Olga “Ollie” Sollie, came from Norwegian stock, while their father, Peter Andreas, was Greek; the Norwegian side didn’t approve of the union, but they got over it after LaVerne’s birth. And, reading between the lines, they went with Andrews as a stage-name.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 39: Jimmy Dorsey, the Nice One

A man and his (signature) horn.

My favorite story about either of the Dorsey Brothers is the one about their famous split. From their Wikipedia page:

“The band performed live mainly in the New England area, with acrimony between the brothers steadily building up, until a definitive falling out between Tommy and Jimmy over the tempo of ‘I'll Never Say Never Again Again’ in May 1935, after which Tommy walked off the stage.”

That brotherly feud didn’t formally end for 18 years. Over tempo. Related, because I placed this chapter in the late 1930s/1940s, I decided to write about each Dorsey as they played and functioned for all those years, i.e., separately. From what I gather, Jimmy, the older brother and the subject of this post, was the nicer of the two. Then again, I’ve only really read his side so far.

James Francis Dorsey was born in 1904 in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. His father worked as a coal miner at the time of his birth, but moved to teaching music at local schools and leading his own marching band shortly after. Both Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey played, and well, from a very young age, as demonstrated by the fact Jimmy started playing in his dad’s band by age seven. He started on trumpet and had the chops to play with a New York-based group called J. Carson McGee’s King Trumpeters by age nine, but he switched to the instrument that made him famous, the alto saxophone, by the time he turned 11. (Just to note it, he played clarinet as well, using the Albert system.)

It's fair to call both brothers precocious: as early as 1920, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey formed a third of their first band together, the Dorsey’s Novelty Six, a name they later changed to Dorsey’s Wild Canaries. They had some success with this group, even landed some airtime on the radio as “one of the first jazz bands to broadcast.” [Ed. - I can’t document it, but that doesn’t sound right.] With so much experience under their belts, and at such a young age, both Dorseys moved to New York to work as professional, full-time musicians.

Neither of them struggled for work. They played live, worked recording sessions, and did radio work throughout the 1920s, a lot of that time with decade’s best (e.g., the Paul Whiteman Orchestra). Jimmy, at least, played every orchestra of the 1920s I’ve ever heard of; he even recorded “the iconic 1927 jazz standard” “Singin’ the Blues” with the Frankie Trumbauer opposite the half-legendary Bix Beiderbecke. Before long, the Dorseys, some friends, peers and competitor built on what they learned playing in the ever-expanding orchestras of the late 1920s/early 1930s to create (white, mainstream) popular music’s next big thing. To name one early partner, Glenn Miller co-wrote, arranged and played trombone on a couple of collaborations with the Dorseys at the tail-end of the 1920s - e.g., “Annie's Cousin Fanny,” “Tomorrow’s Another Day,” and “Dese Dem Dose.”

Crash Course Timeline, No. 34: Bing Crosby, American Colossus

His happy place, from what I gather.

“396 chart singles, including roughly 41 No. 1 hits. [Bing] Crosby had separate charting singles every year between 1931 and 1954; the annual re-release of 'White Christmas' extended that streak to 1957."

“For fifteen years (1934, 1937, 1940, 1943–1954), Crosby was among the top ten acts in box-office sales, and for five of those years (1944–1948) he topped the world.”

“If he’s not the most important vocal artist of the 20th century, he’s in the top 1 1/2.”
- Will Friedwald (American author/critic)

That last quote comes out of a good, but fairly hagiographicPBS documentary, while the other two came from Wikipedia - which, for the record, was the only one of the few sources I read willing to pick through the garbage. I’ll get to that, but I wanted to start this post by driving home the main truth about Bing Crosby: the man was fucking HUGE, nothing less than a colossus of American popular culture. When they asked GIs to name who they thought contributed most to winning World War II, they named Crosby. His famous 1941 recording “White Christmas” (released on vinyl in discs, V-Records, and shipped to the troops) sold 50 million copies, making it the best-selling single of all-time (and No. 2’s a ways behind; full, weird list here); A Public Broadcasting Service timeline of his career pegged his all-time sales land somewhere between 500 million and 1 billion - after a certain point, why count? - and he spent the 1930s and 1940s, two entire decades, as the most successful vocal artist, quite likely in the world. As noted by the once-best-selling artist in Africa, Dorothy Masuka, once said, “Only Bing Crosby the famous American crooner sold more records than me in Africa.”

Now, for how that happened.

He didn’t start as “Bing,” for one. His parents, Harry Lowe Crosby, Sr. and Catherine Helen Crosby named him Harry Lillis Crosby, Jr. at his birth in 1903. A child of the Pacific Northwest, he was born in Tacoma, Washington, and grew all the way up in Spokane, even attending college at Gonzaga University. As for the nickname he made famous, Crosby told several stories - e.g, a story about the sounds me made firing an imaginary gun - but Wikipedia, which I trust for its comparative sobriety, gives the honors to a one-time neighbor, Valentine Hobart, who named him “Bing” after an old comic called “Bingo from Bingville.” (Another story has it that was Bing’s favorite comic.)

Though a decent student and a solid athlete, Crosby fell in love with singing at age 14, when he got a summer job working at Spokane’s Auditorium, a venue for vaudeville acts and orchestras. He watched the performances from the wings and, thanks to an audiographic memory, Crosby could perform the songs he heard when he got home after his shifts; when the legendary (and complicated) Al Jolson came to town, he discovered his first idol.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 23: Introducing the 1930s, Conductors, Crooners, and Big Bands

The medium of the moment.

This post kicks off the exploration of bands and artists from the 1930s, which will extend over the next 21(?) posts in this series. Before digging the selected artist, I wanted to provide a little context for the decade to help put people in the mood for the music.

The 1920s ended with a literal crash, of course, when an overheated, over-leveraged stock market imploded in October 1929. The rot went deeper - farms had been struggling through the 1920s - and soon seeped into every corner of the economy, leading to insolvent banks and the collapse of the consumer economy. Decades of over-farming/grazing in habitats that couldn’t handle it (America’s Great Plains) created the infamous Dust Bowl (it was no spontaneous event), which expanded the misery still further and sent people scrambling to the cities and the coasts in search of work. A popular statistic notes that 25% of Americans couldn’t find work in the depths of the Great Depression, something that points to the long-standing, glass-half-empty that most people (myself flaming included) talk about the news - i.e., that means 75% of the country could. Belts tightened, but the world still turned, basically, as demonstrated by the series of details I mined out of a 1930s timeline.

1930 saw the invention of the analog computer by Vannevar Bush and Clarence Birdseye patented the quick-freezing process that made frozen food possible; the Empire State Building opened for business in 1931 and Congress and President Herbert Hoover made the “Star-Spangled Banner” America’s national anthem the same year; voters swapped Hoover for Franklin Delano Roosevelt the following year and Bruno Hauptmann kidnapped the son of (Nazi afficionado) Charles Lindbergh; the New Deal launched during FDR’s first 100 days in early 1933, which he promoted over the then-common radio with his famous Fireside Chats, and the country collectively decided it needed a damn drink and repealed Prohibition; the Securities and Exchange Commission launched in 1934, along with the Master’s Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club (dude who won it hit only four under par); Social Security started the next year, but wouldn’t pay out benefits until two years later, and Porgy & Bess (“the first distinctly American opera") opened, but Babe Ruth’s career ended; in 1936, a strong majority of Americans handed FDR a second term (he won 62% of the vote) and Jesse Owens took four giant, salutary shits on Hitler’s “master-race” delusion at the Berlin Olympics (one for each gold medal); San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937, first to pedestrians, then to cars; a National Minimum Wage was set at $0.25 in 1938 and Orson Welles broadcast his radio drama, War of the Worlds; and, finally, the United States held not one but two big, optimistic World’s Fairs in 1939, one in Queens, New York, the other, San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition: a lot of shit happened, and that’s just about a quarter of it.

Popular culture did what it could to soothe all the trouble and uncertainty by putting on a happy face. For instance:

“Hollywood responded to the economic anxiety that dominated the lives of Americans during the Depression by producing films that maintained a self-conscious optimism.”

Crash Course Timeline, No. 21: The (Paul) Whiteman Cometh

Paul Whiteman at the office.

Paul Whiteman led the most popular “jazz” orchestra for the duration of the 1920s, but the internet doesn’t have much to say about him or that. All of what’s below mainly relies on just two sources (Wikipedia and a piece for Syncopated Times), and most of the information between those two sources repeats. Call it historical revisionism, call it historical correction, the memory-hole has by and large swallowed Whiteman’s legacy. Still, his life and career open a revealing window into how popular music and the way people talk about it has evolved.

Some part of the that follows from a latter-day controversy over his promotional nickname as “the King of Jazz,” an appellation that doesn’t work on at least two levels. First, and on a purely stylistic level, Whiteman discouraged improvisation - aka, the “heart of jazz” - to the point of excluding it outright; his orchestras played carefully constructed arrangements instead, in which no one went off script. Second, and more significantly, he borrowed a musical form created by Black artists - a lot of them his contemporaries - polished it up and presented it to White audiences. To repeat a phrase I read over and over in the light research I did, Whiteman wanted to “make a lady out of jazz.” Or, to borrow from a couple places:

“While most jazz musicians and fans consider improvisation to be essential to the musical style, Whiteman thought the genre could be improved by orchestrating the best of it, with formal written arrangements.” (Wikipedia)

“But for the ‘King of Jazz’ title to be given to a white musician who never took a jazz solo instead of Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, or any of a dozen other African-American jazz greats hurt Whiteman’s reputation despite his contributions to American music and the jazz age.” (Syncopated Times, 2020)

I appreciate that he had nothing to do with it, but the fact that his surname is “Whiteman” borders on Dickensian…