walking upstream…
Connee Boswell
photo: nbc / ernest a. bachrach · public domain ↗Connee Boswell
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Connee Boswell contracted polio at four and sang her whole career from a wheelchair, a fact most of her audience never knew. Raised in New Orleans with her sisters Martha and Vet, she spent seven years on classical cello, groomed for a concert tour of Europe, until their parents gave the three of them saxophones one Christmas and, as Martha put it, "the saxophone got us." As the Boswell Sisters the trio turned pop songs into tempo-bending jazz arrangements that stunned New York in 1931 and changed how bands let a singer work. After the group split in 1936, Connee kept recording and broadcasting into the 1940s. She never took a voice lesson; everything she knew about phrasing and breath she taught herself, ear to a phonograph, wearing two records smooth until the copying became a style of her own.
the sound in question
1935
The Object of My AffectionConnee Boswell
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Mamie Smith1920s · Blues / Vaudeville / Jazz
Every Friday night in New Orleans, only white patrons paid triple to get into the "colored" show at the Lyric Theatre, and Connee never missed one. Decades later, on television with the newsman Mike Wallace, she remembered exactly who she'd gone to see: the blues singer Mamie Smith, "a colored woman, and she could open her mouth and you could hear her in London, you know... Mamie was my favorite." Unprompted, she named Smith as one of only two people she credited with shaping how she sang.
listen: upstream & here
1920
Crazy BluesMamie Smith
1938
Mr. Freddie BluesConnee Boswell
listen forSmith's "Crazy Blues" is a full-throated shout built to carry a room with no microphone to help it. Boswell's 1938 "Mr. Freddie Blues," cut with Ben Pollack's band after the Boswell Sisters had disbanded, drops the pop polish for that same declamatory power: a big, unhurried lower-register belt on a blues line, phrased like a singer who spent her Friday nights studying exactly how loud a voice could get and still stay in tune.
Enrico Caruso1900s-10s · Opera / Bel canto
Boswell called it her most direct debt: studying Caruso's records as a girl, over and over, though she never understood a word of the Italian he sang in. "I loved the way he breathed," she told Mike Wallace in 1961. "He could take, oh, ever so many notes and hold it on one breath. And I studied from the record trying to do what he did." She credited that discipline, learned off a dead man's 78s, with letting her sing and breathe properly on blues and swing for the rest of her career.
listen: upstream & here
1906
M'appari tutt'amor (Martha)Enrico Caruso
1937
Martha (Ah! So Pure)Connee Boswell
listen forCaruso's 1906 recording of "M'appari tutt'amor," the aria from the opera Martha, holds long phrases across a single unbroken breath. Boswell's 1937 swing version of the same aria, retitled "Martha (Ah! So Pure)" and cut with Bob Crosby's Bob Cats, keeps that same held line even as the tempo doubles and a jazz band works underneath her — the operatic breath control she said she studied off his records, now driving a dance number instead of an aria.
Santo Pecora1920s-30s · Dixieland / New Orleans jazz / Jazz
Before blues records or opera, there was a trombone player around the New Orleans jazz scene: Santo Pecora, later a fixture of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. A 1944 Down Beat profile of the family reported that Pecora was young Connee's earliest idol — so much so that she bought her own trombone hoping to master his "tailgate" style, the sliding, syncopated lines a trombonist plays under a band's front line. She never became a trombonist, but critics later heard the instrument's logic in her singing anyway, noting she phrased "more like an instrument than a vocalist."
listen: upstream & here
1925
She's Crying for Me BluesSanto Pecora
1932
Everybody Loves My BabyConnee Boswell
listen forOn "She's Crying for Me Blues," which Pecora wrote and recorded with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings in New Orleans in January 1925, his trombone slides and growls under the ensemble, answering the horns with short, syncopated phrases instead of carrying the melody straight. On the Boswell Sisters' 1932 "Everybody Loves My Baby," listen for that same instinct moved to voices: where a horn break would normally sit, the trio's harmonies dip and slide through a wordless chorus, phrased like players trading a line rather than singers holding a note.