Swing It!: The Andrews Sisters Story

I'm sure that this book has a lot of valuable information and sentiment for fans of the Andrews Sisters, but the reader should understand that there are some serious factual errors in it. For example, the statement on page 75 that "Rum and Coca-Cola" sold "seven million copies" in 1945 is wildly inaccurate. (Does the author cite sources?) For one thing, there was no organized attempt to collect information on overall record sales until 1958 when the RIAA began to do it as part of their effort to award "gold" and "platinum" labels.
VARIETY magazine reported on December 25, 1946 (p.35) that "Rum and Coca-Cola" sold 2.5 million records and this figure probably includes the other versions of the song. There were seven different different versions of the song released in 1945. Big band recordings by Vaughn Monroe and Abe Lyman also reached the charts in the winter of 1945.
Kevin Burke
Cambridge, Massachusetts