Woof Guide to Popular Music: Sisters, Andrews, Boswell, and Puppini

Here’s a little something upbeat for New Year’s: the Andrews Sisters with “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”. But I was interested to discover (via the magic of Pandora) that the Andrews Sisters’ recipe of upbeat rhythms and close-harmony was anticipated by the Boswell Sisters, a rather jazzier trio that performed with the likes of Jimmy Dorsey, Bunny Berrigan, and Benny Goodman in the first half of the 1930’s. Interesting stuff that you won’t be able to sing in the shower, because you, you ain’t them. And then, in our own day we have the Puppini Sisters, a trio-of non-sisters mining the Andrews/Boswell motherlode. They do lots of the classic songs; but they also do more modern songs in the classic Andrews style.

Here’s the Andrews Sisters, from the 1941 Abbott and Costello movie Buck Privates: pure joy on screen.

And here’s the Boswell Sisters with “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing”. It starts out dark and slow…and then after the first verse takes an abrupt left turn.

And here’s the Puppini Sisters with a couple of songs. First, in the classic vein, here’s “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoene”:

And in the somewhat more modern vein, here’s a disco classic I guarantee you won’t recognize at first.