So we’d keep singing until she was done washing.”
“We found out if we sang for her, she’d let us out of doing the dishes. Lou remembered practicing with her sisters while their mother, Bertha, was at the sink. Momma would have killed us if she’d known we were down there.” When we were about 11 we’d go down to a place that was a real dive and put a nickel in the jukebox and play the Andrews Sisters’ ‘Hold Tight.’ Then men would put in nickels over and over while we learned it. “Our ambition always was to be like the Boswell Sisters and later the Andrews Sisters. “We were very dedicated to a career,” recalled Jean. Lou, Jean and Ginger entered and won several amateur music contest and had a 15-minute radio show in Enid, Kansas. The family moved often, living mostly in Oklahoma and Kansas. John Dinning, the girls’ father, lost the farm in the Great Depression and became a Maytag salesman. One day Jean and Ginger were singing a song for my brother, Wade, and I guess I was behind a door, and I began singing the third part. “I was even more shy as a child, and if I sang, it was off by myself somewhere. “When Jean and Ginger were very small, 7 or 8, they sang a duet,” Lou remembered. Her reticence was apparent at the first-ever Dinning Sisters performance, an impromptu event in the family’s Oklahoma farmhouse. I’ve been shy my whole life, and I just can’t tell you why.” “You’d have thought I was the biggest ham in the world when I forced myself to be that way,” Lou said. They also had their own daily “Dinning Sisters Show,” cut records and performed in a few Hollywood “B” Westerns. The Dinnings were under contract to NBC much of their career and kept busy performing on such NBC radio programs as Don McNeill’s Breakfast Club, Garry Moore’s Club Matinee, the Roy Shields Review and the National Barn Dance. Lou said she forced herself to be outgoing during the group’s singing years. I’m one of those people who couldn’t wait to be old so that nothing would be expected of me.” “I’m happy for Frank, because he worked so hard,” she said, “and for the girls, because they’re excited. “I’ve had letters or calls from 56 people who want to be on a Dinning Sisters mailing list.” “The response has been unbelievable,” Lenger said. His crusade caught the attention of writer Bob Greene, whose story on Lenger and the Dinning revival appeared in the May issue of Esquire. A delighted Lenger wrote the liner notes for the second two albums. In 1986 a German label, Cattle Records, released a collection of country songs by the trio. In 1982, Capitol Records released “The Dinning Sisters,” followed by a second volume two years later. He vowed to get their work reissued and, after “countless” letters to record companies, finally succeeded. Lenger, however, had struck up a correspondence with Ginger, and he met the sisters at a family reunion. But the group soon disbanded, and by the 1960s Dinning Sisters records were out of print. “I fell in love with them because they sang like angels.”Īfter Lou moved west in 1952, Jean and Ginger limped along for a time with their younger sister Dolores (known today as Dolores Edgin, she is a singer on the Nashville edition of television’s “Hee Haw”). Lenger is more effusive in his regard for the Dinnings. They recorded it with the Art Van Damme Quintet.” My favorite is ‘Years and Years Ago.’ I think it’s their best song. “But they had a very close harmony and a very pretty sound. “They never had the real popularity that the Andrews Sisters had,” said disc jockey Chuck Cecil, whose syndicated radio show “The Swingin’ Years” is in its 30th year.
#Down in bermuda....by the denning sisters movie
In 1948 they had their only million-seller, “Buttons and Bows,” which appeared in the Bob Hope movie “Paleface” and won the Academy Award for best song.
In 1947 they were Billboard’s vocal group of the year. In 1946 they won the Cashbox Magazine Award and placed first in the Billboard poll of jukebox operators. Nor did the 63-year-old twins-Jean, who lives near Nashville, Tenn., and Ginger, of Vernon, N.J.-recall meeting Lenger in their heyday.īut those were busy times for the Dinnings. “I have no memory of it,” Lou says today. One cherished item is an autographed photo given to him by Lou Dinning in 1946 after a performance at the College Inn nightclub in Chicago’s Sherman Hotel. He collected all their records, along with other memorabilia. Although the Dinnings did not know it, Lenger became their biggest fan.
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