Our Inspiration, The Boswell Sisters

Tom McDermott, Gambit Weekly, April 2000

"The Boswells - Martha, Vet and Connie (also known as Connee) - grew up on Camp Street in New Orleans 90 years ago during

the last days of Storyville. After extensive classical training, they switched to jazz and recorded their first sides as teens in 1925, a

mere two years after Jelly Roll Morton and other jazz greats waxed their first cuts. Their earliest influences were Mamie Smith,

Bessie Smith, Enrico Caruso and the colossus of early jazz singing, Louis Armstrong. From Satchmo, they learned how to phrase,

attack certain notes, use dynamics and the like. They also borrowed his habit of throwing out the melody altogether and fashioning

a simpler, more swinging line.

The sisters hit their stride around 1930, and soon became nationally known through radio and movie shorts. In 1936, they

disbanded when Martha and Vet each married.  Connee continued for many years as a solo act.

It's possible to think of the Boswells as a conduit between Armstrong's innovations and white pop Americana like the Andrews

Sisters. In fact, they also influenced the black musicians of their day, such as the Mills Brothers and a young Ella Fitzgerald, who

was unstinting in her praise of Connee Boswell as her main inspiration. The sisters were pioneers in vocal harmony, using

arrangements with as many as four or five tempo changes - which somehow always worked. They recorded rumba rhythms 15

years before Professor Longhair, and might have been the first New orleans musicians to record with a clave beat. And they

certainly had the Crescent City penchant for pleasure at all costs: their music is out-and-out loony at times, as though delighting

themselves was as important as entertaining their listeners."

Reader's Digest, May 1998

In October of 1998, the Boswells were named part of the first group of inductees into the new Vocal Group Hall of Fame in

Pennsylvania. Named as Pioneers of Musical Style, the Sisters shared the honor with the Mills Brothers, The Five Blind Boys of

Mississippi, The Golden Gate Quartet, The Ravens, and The Orioles. They were the only women and the only white persons so

honored.

Wynona Judd called the Boswells "our favorite group" and says about the records they bought out of sale bins, "Those records

helped me discover my own creativity. I found in them joyful reminders that music is so much more than what the music industry

says it is."

Gary Giddins, Village Voice, March 17, 1999

"The Boswells and the Mills Brothers brought the genre to a level never equaled, though fifties groups like the Hi-Lows made a big

deal of showing off flashy progressive harmonies. They sound corny today. The Boswells and the early Mills do not. While the

Brothers imitated instruments simulating Ellington voicings, the Sisters sang as though they were instruments."

Ella Fitzgerald, CBS news interview compilation aired at the time of her death

On amateur night at the Apollo in 1934, on a dare, a teenaged Ella Fitzgerald froze on her turn in the spotlight. "The man said, 'Do

something!' and so I tried to sing like Miss Connie Boswell, and somebody in the audience said, 'That little girl can sing!' and I won

first prize!" (Ella Fitzgerald, Lost Chords, Richard Sudhalter, Oxford University Press, 1999). "I know that Connie Boswell was doing

things that nobody else was doing at the time. You don't have to take my word for it. Just check the recordings made at the time

and hear for yourself."

David McCain, Unbeatable Harmony:

The Boswell Sisters, 1988

"To those of us who are fans, and we are a small but hardcore lot, no one will ever be able to top Martha, Connie and Vet, the

Boswell Sisters. The recorded evidence, be it 78, LP or CD, says it all to us."