A Surprising Discovery

I was moving around the house the other morning with the TV set to a morning news show. I stopped to listen to the day's top news stories and the weather forecast, and only half listened to the rest of the stories they covered. But the sound of wonderful a-cappella singing of Stevie Wonder's You Are The Sunshine Of My Life caught my ear, and I stopped what I was doing to look at the screen.

I saw about ten middle-aged people, just one woman in the group, notable for full heads of hair (in some cases gray) on all the men and lots and lots of teeth. My first thought was that the Kennedy cousins had formed a singing group. Then the camera panned across the group in close-up and I recognized Marie Osmond. The entire Osmond family was being featured to promote their new show in Las Vegas.

I never regarded the Osmonds as having any particular musical talent. I saw them as a rip-off of the Jackson family, back in the day when they were known as the Jackson Five (I know for a fact that there are plenty of people out there who would erroneously say with absolute authority that One Bad Apple was recorded by Michael and his brothers.) That song with its R&B sound, a big hit for the Osmonds in the early 70s, was clearly an effort to cash in on the success of the Jacksons. Jumping on the bandwagon is nothing new, but I resented it, yes, for racial reasons. Black people have always been denounced, but that hasn't stopped our fashions, style, and music from being copied and profited from.

As I watched their a-cappella performance I suddenly realized that these people can really sing. No augmentation or other studio tricks, no music . . . just wonderful harmony reminiscent of Take 6 or the Emotions.

After an introduction that included a playful jibe at the decades-old rivalry with the Jacksons ("You forgot Tito," somebody quipped) and a brief interview, they sang their big hit, One Bad Apple. Little Donny at 50 can't hit those high notes he nailed at 13, but again, I was struck by how good they sounded. Those brothers (and I mean brothers in the Biblical sense, not, well, brothas of the brownskin type) can really sing!

Funny how I never noticed that before. Makes me wonder what else I've overlooked.