Last week on Melody Monday, I went back to New Found Glory and an album that sounded like the year 2000 almost the second I hit play. This week we’re going a hell of a lot further back.
I didn’t really start getting into older music until sometime around 2006 or 2007. Before that, “old music” for me mostly meant whatever happened to be playing in an old movie or something my parents or grandparents listened to. Once I actually started digging into it for myself, though, one of the first groups I really got into was The Andrews Sisters.
And the first album of theirs I picked up was the 1998 compilation The Very Best of The Andrews Sisters, because when you’re getting into an artist with a catalog going back decades, a best-of album is usually a pretty safe place to start.
Turns out, it was.
The album kicks off with Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy, which I already knew long before I ever intentionally listened to The Andrews Sisters. It’s from the old Abbott and Costello comedy Buck Privates, and between the movie, television, commercials and the song just generally being part of American pop culture forever, I had heard it plenty of times.
And really, how can you not like Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy?
It’s catchy as hell, immediately recognizable, and pretty much the perfect way to start a collection like this. If you’re trying to introduce somebody to The Andrews Sisters, you might as well lead with one of the songs everybody already knows whether they realize they know it or not.
Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen follows, and it’s a solid one. Not one of my absolute favorites on the album, but I don’t skip it either. Apparently The Andrews Sisters were paid something like $50 to record the song, which adjusted for inflation would be more than a thousand dollars today. That doesn’t really have anything to do with whether the song is good, but it does give me another opportunity to point out how much less our money is worth every year, so I’m including it.
You’re welcome.
Oh Johnny, Oh Johnny, Oh! is another good one, and I mostly like it because I find the whole thing amusing. Sometimes that’s really all a song needs to do. Make me smile, get stuck in my head for a while, and you’ve done your job.
Then there’s Shortenin’ Bread, another song I knew long before I had any idea who The Andrews Sisters were. My mom used to sing pieces of it. My grandma used to sing pieces of it. I’m sure a ton of people’s parents and grandparents did because the song has been around forever and has been recorded by God knows how many people. Nobody in my family was walking around performing the complete song, obviously, but that little melody was already buried somewhere in my brain before I ever put this CD on.
Say “Si Si” is okay. That’s about all I’ve got for that one.
Pennsylvania Polka, though, I really like. It’s another one of those songs where the harmonies, rhythm and energy immediately tell you exactly why The Andrews Sisters became as popular as they did. Even if this isn’t remotely the kind of music you normally listen to, there’s an infectious quality to a lot of their stuff that’s hard not to appreciate.
The album hits a little bit of a lull for me with There Will Never Be Another One and It Never Entered My Mind. Neither one is terrible, but neither does much for me either. That’s one of the dangers of these huge best-of collections. Whoever assembled it obviously thought they belonged here, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to agree with every choice.
Things pick right back up with Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar, which has that same kind of manic, infectious boogie-woogie energy as Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy. It’s fast, it’s catchy, and it’s just fun. There are songs on this album I appreciate more than I actually enjoy, but this isn’t one of them. This one is fun from beginning to end.
Shoo-Shoo Baby lands somewhere in the middle for me. Sometimes I listen to it, sometimes I skip it. Depends on the day.
And then we get to what is probably my favorite song on the entire album.
Rum and Coca-Cola.
Classic.
I’ve always loved this one. It’s ridiculously catchy, the harmonies are great, and it’s one of those songs that sounds like it belongs playing out of an old radio sitting on a shelf somewhere in the Halls. It’s also Thalia’s favorite Andrews Sisters song to hear around the place, which shouldn’t surprise anybody who knows Thalia particularly well. Give her a song called Rum and Coca-Cola and she’s pretty much already sold.
Tico Tico is another one I really like, and Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree is an absolute classic. That one is almost impossible for me to hear without immediately picturing World War II-era America, old movies, soldiers shipping out, USO shows and everything else that has become attached to that particular sound over the decades.
Yes, My Darling Daughter is another good one, and then you get Count Your Blessings, which is right up there among my favorites on the collection. It’s one of those songs that doesn’t need to be loud or flashy to stick with you. It’s just a damn good song.
Unfortunately, the compilation does stumble a little toward the bottom.
I don’t really care for You Call Everybody Darling, and that’s usually a skip. I Can Dream, Can’t I? doesn’t do much for me either, and neither does I Wanna Be Loved. You’ve got a little stretch there where I’m reaching for the skip button more than I am through the rest of the album.
Thankfully, it recovers.
Chattanooga Choo Choo is great. It’s another one of those big, fun songs where you can practically see the era while you’re listening to it. Alexander’s Ragtime Band is fun too, and Rhumboogie is another favorite of mine. That one has the kind of energy I tend to gravitate toward with The Andrews Sisters. The faster and more playful they get, the more likely I am to enjoy it.
Lullaby of Broadway is good, I’ll Be With You in Apple Blossom Time is alright, and then the whole collection wraps up with A Bushel and a Peck, which is exactly the kind of song I want closing this thing.
It’s goofy. It’s catchy. It’s fun.
Basically everything I like about The Andrews Sisters condensed into one last song.
And that’s probably why this compilation worked so well for me when I first started getting into older music. It didn’t require me to know anything about the era, understand the history of every recording or approach it like some music historian studying an artifact. It was just a bunch of songs, and a lot of them were really damn fun.
That’s what opened the door.
Once I realized I could enjoy music from the 1930s and ’40s just as easily as something released when I was growing up, the idea that music had some expiration date pretty much disappeared. A good song is a good song. It doesn’t matter if it came out five years ago, twenty-five years ago or before my grandparents were grown.
There are definitely some tracks on The Very Best of The Andrews Sisters that I could live without, particularly that little run near the bottom, but there’s far more here that I still enjoy. Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy is a classic, Beat Me Daddy still swings, Count Your Blessings is great, and Rum and Coca-Cola remains my favorite of the bunch.
For an album I bought mostly because “best of” seemed like the safest way to figure out whether I actually liked The Andrews Sisters, it ended up doing exactly what a good compilation is supposed to do.
It made me want to hear more.
And I did. I became a pretty big fan of The Andrews Sisters after that, enough that I’ve actually got an autographed photo of the group hanging in my office. No, it obviously wasn’t signed for me — I wasn’t exactly hanging around in the 1940s asking Patty, Maxene and LaVerne for autographs — but I came across it years later and thought it was too cool not to have. It’s one of those pieces that makes the room feel a little more like mine.
So naturally, if we’re translating the real world into Titanquisitor logic, that picture has a place hanging somewhere in the Halls too.
Almost twenty years after I first picked up this collection, Rum and Coca-Cola still gets turned up whenever it comes on.
Thalia approves.
What’s the oldest music you regularly listen to, and was there one artist or album that first got you interested in music from before your time? Sound off in the comments.
