Crash Course Timeline, No. 31: The Boswell Sisters, Queens of Prog Swing

"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.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 30: How Chick Met Ella

“This is it. I have a real singer now. That's what the public wants.”
- Chick Webb, NPR review of a Chick Webb box-set (2013)

No one really knows the year of William Henry “Chick” Webb’s birth - some say 1905, but they wrote 1909 on his tombstone - but he was born in Baltimore, MD. While he would become one of the most famous drummers of his era, the path he took to playing that instrument has to be rare in music history, if not unique. A spill down the household stairs as (according to Wikipedia) an infant crushed several vertebrae; tuberculosis crept into his spine furthering the damage, “leaving him with short stature and a badly deformed spine which caused him to appear hunchbacked.” In a diagnosis that sounds straight out of the times, a doctor suggested Webb pick up the drums in order to “loosen up” his bones. Whether medically-sound or not, doctor's orders paid off...but Downbeat Magazine’s 1937 edition used some tres passe phrasing to  hail Webb at the height of his success:

‘The Rise of a Crippled Genius”

Webb never let his childhood injury hold him back. He moved to Harlem at age 17, where he signed on to a number of tours and sustained other acts through residencies and generally established himself in one of jazz’s hottest scenes. It didn’t take long either, as noted in an article posted on the site Modern Drummer:

“In 1926, the drummer formed his first band and began performing at various NYC jazz clubs, including Black Bottom, Roseland, The Cotton Club, and the Strand Roof. As the ’20s came to a close, Webb’s band—dubbed The Harlem Stompers—gradually picked up more members, eventually growing into a full-size eleven-piece big band.”

By 1931, Webb established his orchestra as the house band for the Savoy Ballroom, a premier club in Harlem. Though unable to read music, he managed his band just fine by memorizing the arrangements and guiding them through from a platform in the middle of stage. His reputation grew through the early 1930s, but, per the quote up top, he thought it would take a star vocalist for him to breaktrough. Webb’s orchestra played behind a guy named Charles Linton, “an old-school crooner…with pre-jazz-age enunciation.” And then came 1935 and Ella Fitzgerald…