Eleonora and Ethel Olson

Between 1905 and 1925 Eleonora and Ethel Olson were well-known figures in Scandinavian communities throughout the United States. They toured extensively in the Midwest, and their recordings on major record labels gained them a nationwide following.

The Olson Sisters were versatile performers, adept at both singing and comedy. They usually worked with a piano accompanist and presented a program of vocal works, piano solos, and comic monologues. Eleonora, a contralto, was the primary vocalist, and Ethel, a soprano, joined her for duets. Their musical repertoire ranged from recital pieces and folk songs to parlor songs and gospel hymns.

Ironically, the sisters' fame rested less on their serious musical ability than on their original Norwegian dialect stories. "Isn't it funny vit people here in America," says the woman in Mabel’s Wedding, "dey don't talk Norvegian and dey don't talk English."

Eleonora and Ethel, whose parents were from Norway, portrayed the immigrant's difficulty in adapting to American life. Their story At The Movies touches on homesickness for the Old Country while The Baseball Game recounts a Norwegian woman's misadventures with the national pastime. The humor in the stories rings true because the Olson Sisters knew their subject firsthand — whether it be a meeting of the ladies' aid, a piano lesson, or a scene witnessed on a train. In The Old Sogning Woman Eleonora used the dialect of her mother's birthplace. Ethel, a native of the Logan Square neighborhood in Chicago, set her monologue The New Bookcase in a store on Milwaukee Avenue, one of the area's busiest commercial streets, while mentioning the locally published Skandinaven.

A magazine article from 1924 relates how Ethel drew upon an incident in real life for her sketch A Norwegian Woman At The Telephone: "One day as a little girl Ethel visited an ice cream parlor. While there her attention was attracted to a woman who had been called to the telephone for the first time in her life. This experience occasioned considerable fright, and a very humorous conversation ensued. A couple of weeks later Ethel was performing before a large gathering in Orchestra Hall; being called upon for an encore, she gave the story."

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