Today we are really travelling back in time. Looking through YouTube you will find that many modern groups will cover songs orginally made famous by the Andrews Sisters, so today we shall celebrate the originals. The Andrews Sisters were an American close harmony singing group of the swing and boogie woogie eras. The group consisted of three sisters: contralto LaVerne, soprano Maxene, and mezzo-soprano Patty.
The sisters were born to Olga “Ollie” (née Sollie) and Peter Andreas. Peter Andreas (later “Andrews”) was Greek and his wife was of Norwegian ancestry raised in the Lutheran faith. The Sollie family disapproved of Olga’s marriage, but the relationship was repaired once their first child, LaVerne, was born in 1911. Their second daughter, Anglyn, died at eight months of age in 1914. Maxene arrived in 1916, and Patty in 1918. Patty, the lead singer of the group, was 7 when the trio was formed, and 12 when they won first prize at a talent contest at the local Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis, where LaVerne played piano accompaniment for the silent film showings in exchange for dancing lessons for her and her sisters. Following the collapse of their father’s Minneapolis restaurant, the sisters went on the road to support the family.
They started their career as imitators of an earlier successful singing group, the Boswell Sisters, who were popular in the 1930s. After singing with various dance bands and touring in vaudeville with Leon Belasco (and his orchestra) and comic bandleader Larry Rich, they first came to national attention with their recordings and radio broadcasts in 1937, most notably via their major Decca record hit, “Bei Mir Bist Du Schon” which the girls harmonized to perfection. They followed this success with a string of best selling records over the next two years and, by the 1940s, had become a household name.
In the years just before and during World War II, the Andrews Sisters were at the height of their popularity, and the group still tends to be associated in the public’s mind with the war years. They had numerous hit records during these years, both on their own and in collaboration with Bing Crosby. Some of these hits had service or military related themes, including “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and “Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree”. The sisters performed their hits in service comedy films like Buck Privates and Private Buckaroo. During the war, they entertained the Allied forces extensively in Africa, and Italy, as well as in the U.S.
The sisters’ 1945 hit “Rum and Coca Cola” became one of their most popular and best-known recordings, but also inspired some controversy. Some radio stations were reluctant to play the record because it mentioned a commercial product by name, and because the lyrics were subtly suggestive of local women prostituting themselves to U.S. servicemen serving at the then naval base on Trinidad. The song was based on a Trinidadian calypso, and a dispute over its provenance led to a well-publicized court case. The sisters later told biographers that they were asked to record the tune on short notice and were unaware either of the copyright issue or of the implications of the lyrics.
In the 1950s, Patty Andrews decided to break away from the act to be a soloist. She had married the trio’s pianist, Walter Weschler, who became the group’s manager and demanded more money for Patty. When Maxene and LaVerne learned of Patty’s decision from newspaper gossip columns rather than from their own sister, it caused a bitter two-year separation. The trio reunited in 1956 and signed a new recording deal with Capitol Records, for whom Patty was already a featured soloist. By this point however, rock-and-roll and doo-wop were dominating the charts and older artists were left by the wayside. The sisters recorded a dozen singles through 1959, some of which attempted to keep up with the times by incorporating rock sounds. None of these achieved any major success. The Andrews Sisters were the most imitated of all female singing groups and influenced many artists.
