Girl band/Talk

In fact, the all-girl band with the power manager-producer goes back further (yes, I'm a personal friend of the author, but this is an unsolicited endorsement!): Sherrie Tucker, Swing Shift: "All-Girl" Bands of the 1940s (ISBN 0822324857 (amazon.com, search)). --MichaelTinkler

Indeed, and no-one who's seen Some Like It Hot can forget "Sweet Sue and her Society Syncopaters".

I just don't think of groups like that in the heading of "Girl Bands". The musicians written about in "Swing Shift" were exactly that: musicians. I mean, all the members of Led Zeppelin were male, but it didn't make them a boy band :) I suppose you could argue that people like The Andrews Sisters were the spiritual heirs of the Spice Girls, though.

Not all members of girl bands are talentless bimbos - some of them *can* actually sing and dance rather well and would probably feel quite comfortable in , say, a Broadway production or make a career singing backing for other acts. However, the girl bands from the 1940's were from an era when professional songwriters, arrangers, band leaders, and record producers applied the same production-line approach to virtually all popular music. The distinction only really arose with the arrival of rock and roll and the tradition of the singer-songwriters, IMHO. However, if you do have information about the 40's girl groups, I can't see any reason not to add it here. --Robert Merkel

Oh, absolutely. And I wasn't trying to suggest you shouldn't; I was just explaining why I hadn't. -- GWO