Female Vocal Quartet Celebrates Songs About American Destinations

The most recent outing for Anthology, Somerville’s female vocal quartet, was at the Lily Pad in Inman Square last Saturday. With a brand new program of songs came a choreographed performance that broke from its traditional voice-only content. The premise of the concert was to visit American places that had been celebrated in song, resulting in a mixture of styles covering the gamut from the early 19th century folksong Shenandoah to mid-1920s pop to the Indigo Girls.

Basin Street Blues was a standard down-home blues punctuated with a chorus showing off the scatting abilities of the quartet. While there were renditions of old standards such as Carolina Moon, Sweet Georgia Brown, and Over the Rainbow, the women also performed rarely heard novelty numbers.  After Vicky Reichert posed the question “What did Delaware?” and got the obvious answer: “her brand New Jersey,”  the audience was subjected to a series of outrageous puns on state names that left them in stitches and assured that they would not be left in “Missouri.” 

Each of the singers chose a song representing her home state. The only Bay Stater in the group, Allegra Martin from Lexington, praised the state with Old Cape Cod.  Reichert offered the Randy Newman hit Dayton, Ohio, in 1903 as a look at her hometown in far quieter times, although Michelle Vachon, who had lived in Dayton as well, said she had never heard of the song.  A native of Kingsport, Tennessee, she and the others chug-chugged to Chattanooga Choo-Choo .  Traverse City, Michigan’s Anney Gillotte used Snap, Crackle, Pop, complete with appropriate sound effects, since everybody knows that Rice Krispies are made in Battle Creek.

The first set ended with Rhapsody of New York, a tour de force that takes themes from the orchestral version of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and accompanies them with lyrics describing a kaleidoscope of sights and sounds in the Big Apple, with its “pulsing and convulsing,” while at the same time vocally duplicating the instrumental flashes of the opening clarinet glissando and the harmonies of the pounding piano.

Two numbers from the musical The Music Man were incorporated into the show: Iowa Stubborn and Rock Island, after which the audience was surely convinced that the Music Man would never succeed in selling trombones since “he didn’t know the territory!”  Allegra Martin’s Long Tall Texan convincingly conveyed that, in Texas, she was the law. Michelle Vachon wanted to go to the beach, so the quartet headed out Route 66 to California and Surfin’ USA.

The finale was the old Hank Snow tune of heading up the dusty Winnemucca road singing I’ve Been Everywhere.  This proclamation of cities large and small resembles a reading of an American gazetteer recorded on a LP but played on a 78 turntable. The audience, enthusiastic about the group’s new program, was rewarded with an encore but was left worrying if Charlie would ever get off the M.T.A.