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. 8: Ethel Waters' Succession of Hard Times

Barely north of her prime...

“Life isn’t the easiest thing, but if we can learn to do more laughing about it, it won’t weigh so heavily on us.”

Ethel Waters should have never had a chance in the world, but she reigned as one of the leading performers of the 1920s and opened doors for black Americans across the emerging media of the decades that followed. She caught hell for opening a few of them - from black Americans, specifically - but her career embodied the progress and stumbles of an evolving American culture, both pop and otherwise.

Because so much of Waters’ story takes place after the 20s, placing her in that decade feels a little like cheating - i.e., since so many of her achievements came after 1930, why include her while pushing a legend like Duke Ellington to the 1930s? I don’t have a good answer for that beyond, well, I made a choice.

Ethel Waters came into the world in 1896 in Chester, Pennsylvania, but not into a stable family. Her birth resulted from the rape of her mother, Louise Anderson, by a family acquaintance, John Waters, who happened to be a pianist. Her mother passed her to her grandmother, a housemaid who provided her less a home than a rapid succession of places where she happened to live. Waters married, and poorly, at the disturbing age of 13, but had the sense and confidence to leave her abusive husband before too long. As the rest of her life proved, she knew how to survive. Still, and not surprisingly, she described growing up in bitter terms:

“I never was a child. I never was cuddled, or liked, or understood by my family.”

Her career started while she lived in Philadelphia, supporting herself as a maid at a hotel. One night, Waters attended a costume party at a nightclub and somehow got an opportunity to sing. She nailed her unplanned debut and parlayed that to performing at Baltimore’s Lincoln Theater earning $10/week, twice as much as she did as a maid (Wikipedia’s entry notes that her managers stole her tips, so who knows what she might have earned). That stumble into show business started a long, fraught career that continued somewhere between A-List and B-List until the 1950s.