[Dixielandjazz] The Boswell Sisters - Temporary Fame, Longstanding Loyalty

[Robert Ringwald]

Temporary Fame, Longstanding Loyalty
by Will Friedwald
Wall Street Journal, October 15, 2014
NEW ORLEANS -- On Oct. 9, at Snug Harbor here, the vocal trio Duchess reached a point
in the middle of a number when the arrangement called for an abrupt tempo change
-- and all of a sudden the three singers up front realized that they were going one
way while their rhythm section was going another. Singer Amy Cervini waved the band
to stop and told the crowd, “Tempo changes were one of the Boswell Sisters’ signatures.”
Then she added, “We have no idea how they did it!”
There’s a lot about the Boswell Sisters that people don’t know, even those who have
studied their music and career for decades. For five years at the start of the 1930s,
the Boswell Sisters were perhaps the most popular musical group in the country, and
to this day they are ranked among the most important vocal-harmony ensembles in all
of jazz. They dazzled Depression-era audiences not only with their telepathic stop-and-start
arrangements (likely the product of their classical music training), but their bluesy
cadences, luminescent vocal blend, and -- most of all -- their freewheeling interpolation
of jazz techniques, essentially rendering irrelevant the boundaries between composition,
improvisation and interpretation. They did for group harmony what Bing Crosby did
for popular singing and Louis Armstrong for jazz improvisation.
The Boswell family arrived in New Orleans on Oct. 9, 1914, when the three sisters,
Martha, Connie and Helvetia (“Vet”), were 9, 6 and 3, respectively. Kyla Titus, granddaughter
of the youngest sister, has named this date as the centennial of the Boswell Sisters,
which she commemorated by organizing “Shout, Sister, Shout!” -- a four-day celebration
in New Orleans that began last Thursday. (Its title came from the sisters’ radio-show
theme song, which they recorded in 1931.) That same day, Mayor Mitch Landrieu declared
the start of Boswell Sisters Week. The exhibition “Shout, Sister, Shout! The Boswell
Sisters of New Orleans” is winding up its run at the Historic New Orleans Collection
museum on Oct. 26 before moving on to Lake Charles, La. There’s also a documentary
about the trio being readied for PBS.
The sisters grew up in the Crescent City, and even long after all three moved away,
“they never considered anyplace else their home,” Ms. Titus said when we spoke. The
Boswells were inseparable from the bloodline of New Orleans music: The city was the
only place in the world where three teenage girls of Irish descent could become immersed
in African-American gospel music as well as Italian opera, and their music combines
the formalized, high discipline of chamber music with the unrestrained passion and
majesty of the blues. Theirs is a sound of the streets as well as the concert halls,
a sound that continues to inspire young singers around the globe.
The four-day celebration included presentations by Ms. Titus, who will publish this
month “The Boswell Legacy,” the first book on the sisters, and historian David McCain,
a New Orleans native who has devoted his life to researching the Boswells (and other
sister acts). Ms. Titus and Mr. McCain shared rare private recordings made by the
family, as well as home movies and photographs. They also co-hosted a bus tour of
the city, which included the house on Camp Street where the family lived from 1914
on, the Orpheum Theater where they established themselves as professionals in 1925,
and the Palace Cafe, the spot where they made their first recordings that same year.
But this wasn’t an academic conference so much as a music festival, in which seven
trios from all over the world re-created vintage Boswell arrangements in six different
venues. None of the groups who performed at the Centennial’s central event, the Friday
night concert at the Louisiana State Museum’s Mint Building, attempted to mimic the
trio’s famous Southern drawl. In fact, a great deal of the fun was in hearing Australia’s
The Boswell Project, Canada’s Company B and Israel’s Hazelnuts revisit the classic
charts with their own regional accents. The popularity of Boswells even among non-English-speaking
singers was illustrated by O Sister from Seville, Spain, whose show included choreography
and a male “sister” who harmonizes with two women.
The Boswells didn’t become nationally known until 1930-31 and stopped working together
(after, among other things, two tours of Europe) in 1936, when Martha and Vet essentially
stepped aside so their middle sister, Connie, would be free to pursue a solo career.
In time, the Boswells were overshadowed by their contemporaries the Mills Brothers
and the Andrews Sisters, two acts that stayed together much longer -- the Andrews
becoming to World War II what the Boswells were to the Depression.
But the Andrews Sisters freely admitted that they started as Boswell wannabes, and
Connie Boswell was the only singer Ella Fitzgerald admitted to learning from. Indeed,
in their free-flowing use of scat singing, and their farsighted approach to melody
(which caused some conservative listeners at the beginning of their radio career
to dismiss them as “savage chanters”), the Boswells constitute a crucial link between
Armstrong and Fitzgerald in the development of vocal improvisation.
As influential as they were, they had few serious imitators -- perhaps not until
the Pfister Sisters began honoring their legacy on a regular basis beginning in the
1970s. (The Pfisters are still going strong, after singing this music for 35 years,
and were prominent throughout the Centennial.)
It’s amazing that a sound produced for so short a time could command such longstanding
loyalty.
-30

-Bob Ringwald
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