I've loved the song "I Think I Love You" since I was a pre-teen, and I watched The Partridge Family show when it aired originally. At the time, I either didn't realize or didn't think much about who was really playing the music and singing most of the parts in the songs.
I remember knowing that Shirley Jones was really a singer as well as an actor, and I knew that David Cassidy was singing, but I don't remember much about what I knew of the rest of the kids, or if I even thought about their abilities. I'm not the most music-literate person, I admit: listening to the song now, it's obvious the people doing the backing vocals are just Shirley Jones and one teen girl plus a couple of kids.
Today I discovered those singers were a group of studio musicians called the Ron Hicklin Singers. They were the voice of a number of other movie and television theme songs, as well as ad jingles. A couple of their best-known works are "Suicide Is Painless" from M*A*S*H and (conversely) the "You Deserve a Break Today" jingle from McDonald's.
One of their members spent 40 years as part of Alvin and the Chipmunks. Another one wrote the Bobby Sherman hit single "Julie, Do Ya Love Me?" (Maybe it's my particular age and gender speaking, but I figure he made a few bucks on that.)
It seems to me as though they probably got the best of Hollywood: good residuals/royalties from their recordings, which allowed them each to be very well off, while still maintaining anonymity so they could be normal people. But I bet anyone who mattered to their careers knew who they were.
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