Monday Morning’s Earworm №124

Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (with Anyone Else but Me) by The Andrews Sisters

What is an earworm?

It’s a snatch or a snippet, a captured fragment, a line or two, or maybe a bit more, from a cultural reference point, that stays in your head, that keeps bubbling up accompanying your day.

It’s part of the language of your landscape that stays in your mind, whether it’s one single line, a couplet or maybe a whole verse, from a poem or song, or a part of a speech from a play, or a quote from a book, or something you heard somebody say, that won’t let you go.

Sometimes it won’t involve what we call language in the everyday. It could be purely a musical phrase that plays on your time, on a loop that follows you through day and night.

That’s what an earworm is. And so is this…

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Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (with Anyone Else but Me) by The Andrews Sisters

UK Chart peak: N/A US Chart peak: №2

About the Song of This Monday’s Moment

With less of a song title and more of a paragraph, this was a morale-boosting wartime hit in 1942 for the Andrews Sisters, recorded in April two months after the Glenn Miller Orchestra’s version.

While there are no records of how well the song, as recorded by either the Andrews Sisters or Glenn Miller, did in Britain at the time, it was undoubtedly popular and would’ve featured on both the BBC’s wartime radio incarnations: The BBC Home Service (the amalgamation of the BBC’s regional and national services at the outbreak of war in 1939), and The Forces Programme (introduced in 1940 to entertain the troops).

It would also have generated significant sheet music sales, subject to wartime restrictions, for both versions. However, as the Melody Maker music paper’s sheet music chart wasn’t established until 1947, as the earliest organised measure of a song’s success by sales, collated statistical measures of any song’s success in Britain in 1942 are non-existent.

About the Act of This Monday’s Moment

Just as Glenn Miller is the most recognisable single musician/bandleader, if there is one vocal act synonymous with those wartime years of the early 1940s, it’s The Andrews Sisters.

Miller’s band had The Modernaires, of course. But they weren’t an independent unit, and this five-piece group included only one female singer, so they lacked the female glamour that the sisters as a group naturally had. Especially when the sisters wore military uniform-styled outfits, resonant of those uniforms worn by the female branches of the US military.

Composed of three sisters, Laverne, Maxene and Patricia, in order of birth, were the daughters of a Greek father, Peter Andreas, and a mother of Norwegian descent, Olga Andreas (née Sollie). The family nameAndreas was Anglicised to become Andrews.

The most popular image of the Andrews Sisters will always be one of them in these uniform-style outfits. The collective imagination seems to have forgotten that they were established big stars before the war; they didn’t become big stars because of it.

How the Sisters Rose to Fame

Influenced by an earlier group of female siblings, the Boswell Sisters, they’ve been referred to as being Boswell imitators in their early days. Though there were marked differences between the two groups.

The Boswells were from a white middle-class family in New Orleans and had a close affinity to the black music of the time, especially jazz. But the Boswells were not just a singing group, as the Andrews Sisters would be; they were also instrumentalists.

The Boswell sisters were Connee, a multi-instrumentalist, Martha, who played piano and the wonderfully named Helvetica, who played banjo, guitar and violin. The Boswells also worked with Bing Crosby, as the Andrews would, and also recorded with some jazz big hitters of the era, such as Bunny Berigan, Jimmy Dorsey and Tommy Dorsey.

They would be enormously popular in both America and Europe, but by breaking up in 1936, they would never be show business contemporaries of the Andrew Sisters.

They are one of many acts that started performing as children and entered local talent contests. Patty, the youngest, became the lead singer and by the time she was 12, they won first prize at a talent contest at the local Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis,

Wikipedua tells us that:

“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 Schön” (translation: “To Me, You Are Beautiful”) originally a Yiddish tune, the lyrics of which Sammy Cahn had translated to English… 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.

At the peak of their popularity when the war began, they had numerous hits during these years, including, “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”, “Three Little Sisters”, “A Hot Time In the Town of Berlin”, “Rum and Coca-Cola” and the song of this morning’s moment, “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (with Anyone Else but Me)”

Their success would continue beyond the war years, but by the following 1950’s would see their star gradually begin to dim. Patty would leave the group to go solo with Laverne and Maxene, apparently finding out through the media. There was disputes over who got what from their parents’ estate after they passed (their mother died in 1948 and their father in 1949). Then, in 1954, Maxene is reported to have attempted suicide.

The decline of the forces’ sweethearts appears to have been a bitter affair. By the middle of the new decade, with the emergence of rock’n’roll, they, like the majority of those wartime stars, who were so important to not just their own nation’s morale, would acquire the unwanted patina of the stars of a bygone era.

Recommended Listening:

The Golden Age of the Andrews Sisters, the Andrews Sisters, Jasmine, 2002

Sources:

Offline:

The Virgin Encyclopedia of Popular Music: Concise Edition, Colin Larkin, Virgin Books, 1997

Online:

Discogs Wikipedia

As always, tell me what you thought of this week's earworm in the comments.