For the past few summers, Mrs. Pincus and I, along with a couple of friends, have spent our evenings attending various free concerts hosted by nearby Camden County in New Jersey. At the beginning of the summer, a series of upcoming concerts at various outdoor venues are announced on the public website. The concerts have featured a wide range of performers and musical genres from folk rock, Tex-Mex, blues, experimental, jazz and a few I have forgotten. The performers are local acts, popular national acts, as well as once-popular national acts. Sprinkled among these are niche performers including a trio of young ladies we saw as the summer came to a close.
I have loved music from the Big Band era since I was a little kid. My mom was a huge fan of swing music and she introduced me to the likes of Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller and the Dorsey Brothers. My mom was partial to Frank Sinatra, that skinny kid from Hoboken, as well as America's "girl next door," Doris Day. My mom had a stack of big band albums and they were played often in the Pincus house. She tried to teach me to jitterbug, a dance she loved. She even was able to coax my stick-in-the-mud father to "cut a rug" at weddings and bar mitzvahs over the years. One of my mom's favorites from the World War II era was The Andrews Sisters. I have to admit, my first exposure to The Andrews Sisters was Bette Midler's 1973 cover of "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy." I remember hearing this catchy ditty on the radio and my mom — as my mom often did — explained that the song was originally done by The Andrews Sisters in the 1941 Abbot & Costello war farce Buck Privates. She then produced a load of Andrews Sisters albums and — even though I was deeply immersed in the music of Elton John and Alice Cooper — I was in heaven. The Andrews Sisters were the shit! Tight harmonies, infectious wordplay, and a boogie-woogie jump beat that defied your feet to keep still. And hits? The Andrews Sisters recorded over 600 tunes — six hundred! They sold over one hundred million records. They charted 113 songs, including 23 with crooner Bing Crosby. They appeared in 17 movies. And they served as ambassadors and "cheerleaders" for the war effort, stirring patriotic pride in a time when actual patriotic pride had a meaning.
So, when I saw that Camden County was welcoming "American Bombshells" as part of the 2024 Free Concert series, I marked it off on my calendar and did my best convincing to get my wife and our concert friends to go. "It's a tribute to The Andrews Sisters!," I cajoled, reciting the promo lines verbatim from the website. That fact that it was free, it was a beautiful night and we'd be picnicking on local hoagies all worked in my favor.
We met at the lakeside park and set up our camp chairs. We ate our hoagies and chatted before show time. I noticed that the crowd was particularly lighter than the throng that attended a free Spin Doctors show earlier in the summer. Despite not having a charting hit in over thirty years, The Spin Doctors commanded a huge crowd with folding camp chairs and territory-claiming blankets covering the ground for as far as the eye could see. The American Bombshells, however... not so much. With just minutes to go before the scheduled 7 PM start, the area reserved for seating showed more grass than patrons.
As cute as it was, this was somewhat puzzling to me.
My mother and father were the target audience for the Andrews Sisters and all music of the Swing Era. My father entered the United States Navy in 1944. He was 18 years old. My father passed away in 1993 at the age of 66. If he were still alive, he would be 98 — hardly an age at which jitterbugging would be advisable or even possible. If my mother were still with us, she would be 101. As agile and vivacious as my mom was, I think her boogieing days would be looooong behind her. The few couples who were showing off their fancy footwork to the jump-blues stylings of this Andrews Sisters homage looked to be in their 70s. This means they were born around ten years after World War II ended and around the time that the Andrews Sisters were embarking on solo careers. Sure, I am in the minority in my love of the Swing Era, but these impromptu dancers were too young to have experienced a war-time visit from Bob Hope or a trip to the Hollywood Canteen.
Nevertheless, we were there to enjoy an evening of 40s nostalgia — just like the website advertising promised. The singers treated us to the hits "Bei Mir Bist Du Schön" and their take on "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy." They moved on to songs popularized by Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. Then, for some reason, they jumped ahead to some hits from the 1950s. They sang "Mr. Sandman" and "Please Mr, Postman." They paused the music to thank our servicemen and women and offered a flag-waving salute while singing a medley of service branch songs — "Anchors Aweigh," "The Caisson Song" (with different lyrics from the ones my dad sang around the house when I was little), "The Marine Corps Hymn." The young ladies proceeded to sing some folk-rock songs of the 1960s before launching into a full-blown vocal tribute to all things America, including "My Country 'Tis of Thee" and "God Bless America." They capped the evening with the Toby Keith musical "line drawn in the sand" threat "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue" and the right-wing "pick a fight with me" anthem "God Bless The USA."
Midway through the 1950s segment of the performance, I lost interest. By the time they reached their nationalistic frenzy, I was ready to leave.
At the risk of starting a political debate, the current state of our country is fragile. The less it is discussed in non-political situations the better. A night of music and reminiscing is not the place to stir up polarizing feelings among an audience of unknown political leanings. Just sing and leave your political affiliations behind. I found the progression of the evening to be very uncomfortable and I think I was not alone.
The hoagies were good, though.
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