The New Orleans Sisters Who Taught Ella Fitzgerald to Sing
Before the Andrews Sisters, before every girl group that ever harmonized into a microphone, there were the Boswell Sisters of New Orleans. Connee, Martha, and Helvetia "Vet" Boswell were the most innovative vocal group of the early twentieth century, and their influence was so profound that Ella Fitzgerald—the greatest jazz singer who ever lived—said she learned to sing by listening to Connee Boswell's records.
The sisters were born in Kansas City but grew up in New Orleans, where the musical culture seeped into them the way it seeps into everyone. They started as instrumentalists—Connee played cello, Martha played piano, and Vet played violin and banjo—before discovering that their voices were their real instruments. The harmonies they developed were unlike anything popular music had heard before: complex, jazz-inflected, rhythmically adventurous, and utterly original.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Boswell Sisters became stars. Their recordings crackled with energy and sophistication—tight harmonies that bent and swayed with a jazz musician's sense of timing, arrangements that were daringly modern. They had twenty top-20 records, including "The Object of My Affection," which hit number one in 1935. They appeared in films, performed on radio, and were among the most popular acts in America.
But the story of Connee Boswell is also a story about performing through adversity that puts most modern inspirational narratives to shame. Connee contracted polio at age four and spent her entire career performing from a wheelchair or seated position. She never let the disability define her or limit her. She simply sat down and sang with a voice so powerful, so emotionally rich, so technically perfect that nobody cared whether she was standing or not.
When the group disbanded in 1936, Connee continued as a solo artist for another two decades, recording hit after hit and performing with an authority that only grew with time. Her influence on other singers was immeasurable. Ella Fitzgerald was explicit about her debt, saying that her mother brought home a Boswell record and young Ella fell in love—tried to sound just like Connee. When the greatest jazz singer in history says you taught her to sing, that's about as significant as musical influence gets.
Connee also became an advocate for disability awareness, working with the March of Dimes and using her platform to change how America thought about people with physical disabilities. She did this quietly, by example—showing that a woman in a wheelchair could be the most commanding performer in any room she entered.
The Boswell Sisters are one of New Orleans's great underappreciated gifts to American music. They invented a style of vocal harmony that influenced everyone who came after them, from the Andrews Sisters to Manhattan Transfer. And Connee Boswell, sitting in her chair, singing rings around every other vocalist alive, proved what New Orleans has always known: the music doesn't care about your limitations. It cares about your soul.
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