“Who knew?” You go down through the comments section on YouTube and you read a lot of that. Just a month or 2 ago I did a similar post on Marie Osmond where I was metaphorically shaking my head. I lived through the 70s, swear to God we had no idea this was the pinnacle of musical expression. We had just assumed it would always be this way. Boy were we wrong. In this song Down by the Lazy River (written by Alan & Merrill Osmond), Merrill sings the lead. As he was The Osmond’s lead singer. Sometime later in the 80s maybe when they shifted to country, they became The Osmond Brothers.

But as I was saying the comments were just amazed with other ignorant people like me who had no idea the Osmond’s were such a high-energy, fun group! They think back to 10 – 15 years prior to this when they were doing the barbershop quartet thing on The Andy Williams Show in the early to mid 60s. This video is around 1972 or 1973 as Donny looks to be around 15 or 16. (Alan 1949, Wayne 1951, Jay 1955, Merrill 1953, Donny 1957, Marie 1959, Jimmy 1963) People were blown away by their musicality, vocals and dance ability. Clean-cut, well dressed, didn’t end up in jail, “nice boys”. This particular video is a little odd visually as its doing the ‘psychedelic 70s’ thing, but the audio is superb.