The show didn’t last long, but their faces adorned the walls of teenage girls in the late ’60s and early ’70s, including mine, right alongside Donny Osmond and David Cassidy. And when Davy Jones went to the prom with the oldest girl with “hair of gold” on “The Brady Bunch,” you could hear jealous cries of “Marcia! Marcia! Marcia!” across the nation.
It’s safe to say that Davy was one of my first crushes, and ushered in my love affair with TV shows built around music. “The Monkees,” “The Partridge Family,” “Sonny and Cher,” “The Bobby Sherman Show,” the “The Hudson Brothers” and cartoons based on the Osmond Brothers and the Jackson 5 had me glued to the screen. I had to see what sorts of shenanigans they would get into, knowing it would all end up OK in a song at the end.
My parents were fans of the countrified shows: “Hee Haw,” “The Porter Wagoner Show,” “The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour,” “The Johnny Cash Show” and “Midwestern Hayride.” My sister and I would just roll our eyes and think how unhip they were. I may not have had a poster of Buck Owens on my wall, but little did I know how those TV shows would shape my life just as much as the Osmonds.
I could do the Monkees’ walk just as easily as I could stand with a pretend pitchfork and crow, “Where oh where are you tonight?” Thanks to my parents’ love of country, today’s “posters” have morphed into actual photographs with my crushes, Dierks Bentley and Jason Aldean.
Who would have known way back when that a little tambourine-playing English guy would make me a “Believer”?
Contact Nancy Wilson, a morning-radio personality at WHKO-FM (K99.1), by email through k99online.com.
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