Sisters were true Norwegian-American stars
Published 12:00 am Saturday, October 5, 2002
Sometimes an advertisement can be somewhat misleading, and that was certainly true regarding two sisters, Ethel and Elnora Olson. An ad on Page 3 of the Sept. 11, 1918, issue of the Tribune said, &uot; … these two artists were raised right here in Freeborn County, at Clarks Grove, and have relatives and many friends here.&uot;
This particular ad was used by the Skinner Chamberlain and Co. store in Albert Lea to promoted the sales of the first record on the Victor label made by the Olson sisters. In reality, the part of this ad’s quotation about the sisters being raised in Clarks Grove isn’t quite right. The part about the sisters having relatives in the area is correct, even now.
The mother of these two singers and entertainers, Johanna Dahlen, was born in Norway during 1846. Her family came to Wisconsin in 1860. She married another Norwegian immigrant, Otto Olson Bing, of Chicago, Ill., in 1865. Their daughter, Eleonora Mathilda Olson Bing, was born in 1870 in Chicago.
For all of her professional life this daughter was sometimes listed as Elnora. And both she and her sister, Ethel Christine, born in 1889, used their father’s middle name for their professional names.
The Olson sisters came from a very musical family. Eleonora attended the Chicago Musical College for two years and evolved into a contralto. She started singing professionally with a concert company in 1905.
Ethel joined her sister in 1905 to perform duets as a soprano. They sang classic and folk songs in both the Norwegian and English languages.
However, it was their humorous stories in dialect about Norwegian immigrants adjusting to life in a new nation and coping with a different language which made the sisters very popular entertainers about eight and nine decades ago.
These original monologues were created by the sisters and sometimes based on personal observations. One incident they specifically mentioned was observing a Norwegian-American woman somewhere in the Midwest trying to use the telephone for the first time.
From 1909 to 1923 the sisters were with several touring groups of entertainers in the Midwest. Their best audiences were in localities like Decorah and Forest City, Iowa, and Albert Lea and Minneapolis with large populations of people of Scandinavian ancestry.
On their tours the Olsons appeared in small town opera houses, civic halls, churches and at several colleges. During the summer months they were a part of the traveling Tent Chautauqua troupes.
One reference book says, &uot;Tent Chautauquas were traveling groups that operated in the United States from 1903 to 1930. They moved from town to town giving a program of lectures, concerts, and recitals in a large tent. These traveling groups brought shows of mixed quality to the people of rural areas. Their popularity decreased with the invention of radio and the development of other forms of entertainment.&uot;
Adding to the popularity of the Olson Sisters were the phonograph recordings they made for three firms.
Their first recording session was sometime in the 1910 era for the Edison firm. Very little is known about these records or even their titles. They could have been of the cylinder type or the thick discs with the sound portion on just one side. It’s likely Eleonora sang in Norwegian and Ethel recited her dialect dialogues in a mixture of Norwegian and English.
In 1918 the sisters started recording for the famous Victor Talking Machine Co. They were featured on a total of 23 songs, duets and comic dialogues on 11 10-inch records for this label.
In the early 1920s these sisters produced at least five ethnic records for the Brunswick firm.
(Several of the Victor and Brunswick records made by the Olson Sisters are in the historical archives of the Vesterheim Museum in Decorah, Iowa.)
Sometime in the late 1910s or early 1920s the sisters and their mother made a permanent move from Chicago to Minneapolis. (Their father died in 1899.)
Whenever the Olson Sisters were in Albert Lea or a nearby town, they made it a special part of their schedules to visits relatives in Clarks Grove and Lerdal. These visits continued up into the 1930s and ’40s, long after they ceased traveling from town to town as singers and entertainers.
These visits may help to explain why Skinner Chamberlain in the 1918 Tribune ad assumed the sisters were raised in that part of Freeborn County.
Elinor (Johnson ) Stotts of Albert Lea wrote, &uot;These sisters were relatives. … They used to visit my grandparents every summer. I remember them well. They used to entertain when they came visiting.&uot;
The Olson Sisters ceased touring in 1923 when Ethel married Dr. R. M. Pederson in Minneapolis.
In 1925 the sisters found another way to share their humorous tales bedsides being on the stage and with phonograph records. They issued a booklet, &uot;Yust for Fun,&uot; which had 14 of their most popular monologues. A second edition of the booklet was issued in 1929.
Johanna Olson Bing, the mother of these two talented sisters, died on 1933. Ethel died in 1943. Her husband, Dr. Pederson, died a year later. And Eleonora died in 1946.
In 1979, a Minneapolis publishing firm named Eggs Press issued a newer version of &uot;Yust for Fun&uot; with added biographical information and photos of the Olson Sisters.
On a trip to Minneapolis some years ago, Elinor Stotts happened to be in a bookstore where she saw copies of the newer version of &uot;Yust for Fun&uot; for sale.
&uot;Those are women I used to know,&uot; was her reaction. She purchased two copies, one for herself and one for her mother.