Swing It!

The Andrews Sisters Story

John Sforza

• Éditeur: The University Press of Kentucky
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813184272
• Sujet: Media & Performing Arts
• Sous-sujet: Music Biographies

In the years before and after World War II, there were no bigger voices than those of the Andrews Sisters. Maxene, LaVerne, and Patty charted more top ten Billboard hits than Elvis or the Beatles and went on to become the top-selling female vocal group of all time, selling approximately 100 million records. They recorded such instant hits as "Beer Barrel Polka, " "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy, " "Don't Fence Me In, " and "I Can Dream, Can't I?" They dominated the music scene for fifteen years with some 600 recordings, appearances in seventeen films, cabaret performances, and countless radio and television appearances.

Swing It! is the first published biography of this incredibly popular trio. The book includes many rarely published photos and features extensive career data, including a detailed discography, filmography, and listing of their radio and television appearances between 1938 and 1967. The Andrews Sisters had their big break with the 1937 release of the Yiddish tune "Bei Mir Bist Du Schon (Means that You're Grand), " which sold 350, 000 copies in one month and established the trio as successful recording artists. The sisters are now probably best remembered for their work entertaining troops in World War II. They traveled across the U.S. and to Italy and Africa, and their recording of "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" for the film Buck Privates became synonymous with the war effort. Part of the reason for the success of the Andrews Sisters was their ability to perform so many different types of music. They repeatedly achieved major hits with melodies derived from many different countries, becoming the first and most prominent artists of their time to bring ethnic-influenced music to the forefront of America's hit parade. The Andrews Sisters separated for two years in the 1950s as the strain of constantly living, working, and playing together for over four decades took its toll. They reunited in 1956 and continued to perform together until LaVerne's death from cancer in 1967.

The Andrews Sisters remain the most successful and enduring female vocal group in the history of show business. Theirs are the voices that defined an era.

The wonderful thing was that we were together for so many years. We dressed together, we slept together, we ate together, we roomed together, we went shopping together and, of course, we rehearsed together. We were never separated.

—Maxene Andrews

1

We’ll Hit the Big Time

The year was 1931. America was suffering from a grave economic depression. The stock market crash of 1929 was all too recent; bread lines still formed at soup kitchens throughout most of the nation. Times ahead looked bleak and uncompromising. Despite all this, three young girls in Minneapolis were hoping and yearning to break into show business.

In April of 1931, while on Easter vacation from school, Maxene, Patty, and LaVerne Andrews were participating in a talent contest at the local Orpheum Theater. The show was sponsored by the Clausen School of Dance, where LaVerne’s piano accompaniment services earned free dancing lessons for herself and her sisters. A successful touring band directed by Larry Rich provided music for the talent show. Rich and his orchestra had been traveling the RKO vaudeville circuit, and the bandleader was in search of new talent to accompany him on the road. The three Andrews girls performed “On the Sunny Side of the Street” with LaVerne on piano. The trio’s competition included a young, unknown ventril-oquist named Edgar Bergen, who went on to fame with wooden sidekick Charlie McCarthy, and who would later father actress Candice Bergen. The three sisters captured first prize in the contest in a unanimous vote from the judges. Larry Rich acted as master of ceremonies; he was so impressed with the girls that he told them that they would soon hear from him. High hopes teeming, the girls returned to school.

The sisters spent the summer months that year at Lake Minnetonka in Mound, Minnesota, with their two uncles, Pete and Ed (brothers of their mother), who operated a general store. While the trio enjoyed their stay in the country, Larry Rich contacted their parents, Peter and Olga Andrews, and asked their consent to let the girls travel with him as part of his entertainment unit. Olga came from a musical family and had always encouraged her daughters to sing, but their father was not so easily sold on the idea.

The girls were understandably thrilled on hearing of Rich’s offer; however, Peter thought his girls were much too young to leave school and travel the country (Patty, the youngest, was only thirteen at the time). LaVerne and Maxene would not even consider going without Patty, who was the lead singer of the group, so they asked their mother to try to change their father’s mind. Olga tried, and Peter gave in reluctantly. The girls joined the Rich troupe in Atlanta, Georgia. They then boarded a bus for Birmingham, Alabama, to begin performing.

All three sisters were born in Minneapolis, but each one at a different address, due to the family’s frequent relocations. LaVerne Sophie was born July 6, 1911, while her father, Peter Andreos, was employed as an ice cream maker (Peter had changed his last name from Andreos to Andrews upon his arrival in America from his homeland of Greece). LaVerne bore a strong resemblance to her father. The trio’s mother, Norwegian-born Olga Sollie, gave birth to a second daughter, Angelyn, two years after LaVerne’s arrival, but the infant died of pneumonia at eight months. This tragedy was a tremendous blow to the family-oriented couple, but they were nonetheless eager to have more children. Maxene Angelyn was born January 3, 1916, the same year that Peter purchased a pool hall. Maxene inherited her mother’s soft and pretty features. Patricia Marie followed on February 16, 1918. Patty inherited physical features from both of her parents and eventually bore a stronger resemblance to Maxene than to LaVerne.

The Andrews family moved from Minneapolis to Mound in 1920, but they returned to Minneapolis four years later when Peter opened a restaurant. Two years elapsed before Peter sold the eatery and began operating the Andrews Fruit Company. He later formed a partnership with friend James Karalis and opened another pool hall, which remained in existence until the mid 1930s. While their parents’ time was occupied with business affairs, the three sisters became engrossed in music.

It began one afternoon when LaVerne brought both of her sisters to the family piano and gave each of them a musical note to sing (Patty was only seven at the time). The girls sang “Dinah” in three-part harmony in an attempt to imitate their idols, the popular Boswell Sisters. Patty handled the easiest part—the lead. Maxene sang second-part harmony, a soprano to Patty’s lead, while LaVerne handled the third-part contralto or bass. LaVerne and Maxene then began weaving harmonies around any lead that Patty would sing. The more they sang, the closer and more polished the harmonious blend became. Maxene recalled, “Musically, it was like something had opened up inside of my head and afterwards, whenever I heard a song, I heard it in harmony. It’s interesting—I even find myself listening to the kitchen radio and I catch myself whistling my harmony part to the songs, never the melody.”

The girls began singing whenever they had the chance. They would race home from school during the weekdays to hear the Boswell Sisters sing on Bing Crosby’s radio show. They were mesmerized by the Boswells, who were the first female vocal group to achieve nationwide success. Patty once told an interviewer that she and her sisters copied the Boswell style so deftly that they even adopted the trio’s New Orleans drawl. The Boswells were innovative singers during the jazz age, and their collaborations with Bunny Berigan, Joe Venuti, and the Dorsey brothers, coupled with their complicated scat arrangements, gained them a great deal of respect among the musical giants of their day. The trio not only had major influence on the Andrews Sisters, but also on the singing styles of artists like the Mills Brothers, Ella Fitzgerald, and Mel Torme. The Boswells laid the groundwork for all ensuing female vocal groups. The Andrews Sisters, in the years following the success of the Boswells, would greatly enhance the dimension of the female vocal group, perfecting singing styles that had never before been attempted by a girl group—styles still widely mimicked to this day.

When Larry Rich hired the Andrews girls to tour with him, the sisters had already been singing together for several years. The girls had been performing for schoolmates at parties, as well as singing at local political meetings, masonic temples, and veterans’ hospitals. While touring with Mr. Rich, the sisters would now have to hone their talents. Unfortunately, fame did not come quickly, and fortune seemed nowhere in sight. The girls’ eyebrows were tweezed upon their arrival in Birmingham, followed by heavy applications of makeup, in an attempt to make the girls appear older. They even donned bellboy uniforms as their stage costumes to mask Patty’s underage figure. A tutor accompanied the girls to ensure that they received adequate schooling, but they seemed to slip out of sight whenever it was time for a lesson. The tutor may have spent more time searching for the girls than she did instructing them.

Traveling with Larry Rich had one great advantage—the girls were now receiving payment for their singing services; however, they were a little disappointed with their actual salary. They received only one dollar per day, and that had to then be divided in three! Compared to today’s astronomical entertainment salaries, these low wages seem mind-boggling, even in the days of the Great Depression. The professional guidance of Rich, however, greatly compensated for the monetary loss, and performing before large audiences was educational for the trio. They toured with Rich and his band until the late summer months of 1932. Maxene attributes the trio’s primary success to Rich, who took the girls under his wing and furnished all of their meals, clothing, and hotel fees. Maxene recalled those days of traveling with Rich’s fifty-five-member troupe: “[He taught us] . . . how to walk on the stage and when to get off the stage. [He told us]. . . ‘You have to empathize with your audience.’ We said to him, ‘What does that mean?’ and he said, ‘You’ve got to bring them into you.’ What he was saying was, you have to try and get something back from them, and we would always practice it, and it seemed like it came very natural to us.”

After leaving Rich’s tour, the girls were joined by their mother in New York City. There they met actor Rufus Davis, who befriended the girls, loaned them some money, and even found them temporary work. The sisters then toured with Joe Howard’s vaudeville unit for several months before joining Ted Mack’s popular band, but were less than thrilled when Mack left them stranded in Denver not long after. Peter then came to New York from Minneapolis to join his wife and daughters. The girls’ parents would now accompany them on all of their road trips, as Peter became very protective of his daughters and insisted on traveling as a family.

Peter’s big touring car, a 1929 Buick and later a 1931 Packard, provided the transportation. Peter handled the driving while the girls rehearsed in the back seat. Travel by car took much longer in those days, as Maxene once recalled,

People drove slower and there weren’t any divided highways. If you got stuck behind a truck going up a mountain, there wasn’t a thing you could do except grin and bear it. We didn’t have tape decks or four speaker stereo systems to entertain us during the long automobile trips, and while only a few cars had radios, that was one luxury we enjoyed. We listened to a lot of music in that car, and thanks to the two most popular radio comedians, Jack Benny and Fred Allen, we got plenty of laughs to relieve our boredom.

The Andrews family was now living in a Chicago hotel. The girls were temporarily unemployed, but as usual, they rehearsed diligently. Daily they retreated to a hot, uncomfortable, windowless storage room in the hotel and practiced their arrangements using the old upright piano in the room. They did not arrive early enough on some days, in which instances the room was already being used by another rehearsing trio—the Gumm Sisters (Virginia, Sue, and Frances Ethel). The Gumms were living with their mother, Ethel, in the same hotel and also were unemployed at the time. Maxene, Patty, and LaVerne soon acquired work with Georgie Jessel at the World’s Fair. They recommended the Gumm Sisters as their replacements when their stint ended. Jessel hired the Gumms and took special interest in the youngest sister, Frances Ethel, who would soon change her name to Judy Garland.

A booking in Texas soon afterward afforded the Andrews Sisters the opportunity to appear regularly at the Riverside Club in Fort Worth in November 1935, and they were broadcast on the radio from the club four times a week, which added to their exposure. They then toured the Midwest with Maury Sherman’s orchestra. During this time the trio began working with Leon Belasco’s orchestra. Belasco had first heard them when they were appearing at the Royal Frolics in Chicago. The sisters soon became featured vocalists with Belasco’s band. Concerning an engagement at the Century Room of Dallas’s Adolphus Hotel, a critic wrote, “An evening with Leon Belasco’s band offers an ingratiating variety of music. There are the Andrews Sisters, a peppy and thoroughly capable trio in the Boswell tradition. Patty goes it solo now and then, as well she can.” Prior to the Dallas gig, the girls recorded three studio sides with Belasco, and these became the trio’s first commercial record releases. Patty once joked that only family, friends, and the girls themselves bought these early discs, released on the Brunswick label.

The band soon began performing at the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan. The girls had become good friends with band trumpeter Vic Schoen, whom Belasco had hired to work with the trio, as well as to rewrite arrangements that had recently been lost in a hotel fire while the band was playing in Kansas City. Schoen quickly developed a rapport—both professional and personal—with the sisters, especially with Patty, and he soon began writing orchestral arrangements that greatly complemented the trio’s somewhat unusual brand of harmony. The foursome would become permanent coworkers when Belasco’s band dissolved in July 1937. Belasco said that he disbanded due to health problems; he went on to become a bit player and character actor in films and television shows over the next three decades. The trio parted from Belasco on friendly terms, grateful to him for allowing them to take all of their arrangements with them.

The girls then returned to Minnesota with their parents, staying with uncles Pete and Ed in Mound. The trip back home was intended to be brief; little did the girls know that their father had other ideas.

Less than a year ago, Patty, LaVerne and Maxene Andrews were obscure vocalists in an overcrowded entertainment world—but today—as if by magic, the name Andrews Sisters is a household word throughout the nation.

—Decca Records, 1938

2

“That’s Us! That’s Us!”

Home again in Minnesota, Peter was sure that his daughters would be eager to return to a normal lifestyle. His intention was to enroll all three girls in business school. Peter was determined to see them settle into secretarial positions, feeling that such occupations were more respectable than entertaining. He thought they would welcome the opportunity, especially after more than six years of living on the road.

To the contrary, the girls had fallen in love with show business, not minding the long hours of rehearsals, late night shows, missed meals, and cheap hotels. They pleaded with their father to allow them three more months of pursuing their dreams. Peter agreed to the arrangement, and the family returned to New York City’s Tin Pan Alley, a booming Manhattan music publishing mecca at the time. Rehearsals resumed immediately as the girls visited scores of music publishers. One of these gentlemen, Bernie Pollack of Mills Music, gave the girls a piano and allowed them to rehearse all day in his office in the Brill building, but there were many others who told Olga, “Mrs. Andrews, take your girls home—they sing too loud and move too much!”

The girls did not despair, nor did they change their style. Perhaps they sensed that the public would welcome a new sister act, since both the Boswells and the Pickenses had recently disbanded. This doubtless fueled their determination to succeed. Daily, Maxene, Patty, and LaVerne would go to Hector’s cafeteria at Fiftieth Street and Broadway for lunch, splitting one sandwich and one cup of coffee between them, purchased with the fifteen cents that their mother had given them. Throughout these early years, the girls took solace in the fact that they had each other when times were hard. They truly enjoyed one another’s company, though each had her individual likes and dislikes.

The girls soon found work at New York’s Hotel Edison, thanks to Vic Schoen, who was working there with Billy Swanson’s band. When Schoen heard that the girls were in town, he set up an audition for them. Although Swanson was unimpressed with the girls when they auditioned, the hotel’s owner, Maria Cramer, was quite pleased. She insisted that Swanson hire the girls to sing on a radio show called Saturday Night Swing Club, which aired from the hotel every Saturday night. Needless to say, the girls were excited—perhaps this would be their big break—but their optimism proved short-lived.

Saturday night arrived and the trio sang one chorus of “Sleepy Time Down South.” Immediately following the broadcast, Swanson fired the girls, taking full advantage of the fact that Maria Cramer had returned to South America to nurse her ailing husband. All hope was not lost, however. A man by the name of David Kapp had heard the trio’s broadcast on a taxi cab radio. Contrary to popular belief, this was not the first time that Kapp had heard the girls—he first heard them singing “Christopher Columbus” a year earlier in Kansas City, with Belasco’s band. Kapp’s brother, Jack, was president of Decca Records, a newly established company that employed such successful artists as Bing Crosby, Al Jolson, Connee Boswell, the Mills Brothers, and newcomer Judy Garland. David was the director of artists and repertoire at Decca. He was so taken with the trio’s Edison broadcast that he asked friend and business associate Lou Levy, a vaudeville actor-dancer turned music publisher, to find the trio and arrange an audition. Levy located the trio at the Edison the night after their broadcast. Maxene remembered,

The Edison had a nice soda fountain off the lobby, and the next night we went in there for a soda. We were leaving New York. We’d had one shot. You might say it was the low point of our career. Then this fellow walks in and says his name is Lou Levy. He was this much above being a zoot-suiter. He had pointed toe shoes, with the wide snap brim hat, and the pockets in the back of his jacket. We were terrified of zoot-suiters. But he told us that Dave Kapp had been at a Tommy Dorsey opening at the Hotel Commodore, and over a radio in a taxi on the way home he heard us singing on the broadcast from the Edison, and he wanted to sign us to Decca.

The Andrews Sisters entered Decca studios in Manhattan the following Monday morning, accompanied by Peter and Olga. After a brief audition, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews signed the contract, as the girls were too young to make it legal, and their daughters went to work. Patty remembers the audition for Jack Kapp, “We only had one song we sang for him, and it was very funny because it was ‘Night and Day,’ and instead of singing the melody,...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 We’ll Hit the Big Time
• 2 “That’s Us! That’s Us!”
• 3 They Made the Company Jump
• 4 Three of a Kind
• 5 Voices of an Era
• 6 We’ve Got a Job to Do
• 7 Riding High
• 8 Success Abroad
• 9 A Love Song Is Born
• 10 Disharmony
• 11 The Last Mile Home
• 12 The Love We Used to Know
• Appendix A: Top-Thirty Hits (Compiled from Billboard)
• Appendix B: Top-Ten Hits (Compiled from Variety)
• Appendix C: Most Played Jukebox Records of World War II
• Appendix D: Gold Records
• Appendix E: On the Air
• Appendix F: The Small Screen
• Notes
• Filmography
• Discography
• Bibliography
• Index
• Song Index