Ya sang along with it and ya KNOW ya did!!!: Hey Girl by Donnie Osmond

Hey Girl

1971

Donny Osmond

As 1971 started winding down the suits at MGM probably figured, with good reason, that they should leave a winning combination alone...Donnie had taken his cover of a Carole King and Gerry Goffin penned song to #1 only a few months back, so they figured that he could at the very least take another one into the Top 10. And if that was indeed how their thought process was working, they would have been right.

They reached back almost a decade for this one, to a classic Soul tune that Freddie Scott took to #10 on The Hot 100 back in 1963. Freddie's song about a man begging his woman not to leave him was soul in it's purest form, with his smooth voice cranking up a quarter octave or so into a pleading rasp on the chorus. It was Soul and it was smooth...and MGM took it, gave it to Donnie, and made into a bubblegum (Or, as it was sometimes called 'Blue-Eyed Soul) tune very competently.

They stayed true to the lyrics and tempo but, of course, kicked the key upward to accommodate Donny's 13 year old, still unchanged voice. The outro was completely revised, with the rest of the Osmonds pulling back-up singer duty, the instrumentals were changed up, and it was sent out into the world for hopeful approval by Donny's prepubescent and barely pubescent fans.

I hadn't heard this one in decades when I pulled it up on YouTube while I was researching this post...

you never hear this one any more...and I'd forgotten how good it was. It was a little more Soul and a little less Bubblegum than Donny's earlier hits. Only subtly so, and you really have to listen for it, but the difference was there. Like his brothers, Donny's music was evolving and maturing just a bit, at least for this one tune....more on that in a couple of posts.

I have a feeling that it was still the young ladies who took him into the Top 10 though. And I'm going to give Donny props for something else here too...at 13, the kid had a work ethic that was astounding! Hey Girl was released only a couple of weeks after 'Go Away Little Girl' dropped off of the charts, which mean he recorded that hit, Yo-Yo with his brothers, then 'Hey Girl pretty much back-to-back-to-back.

Hey Girl debuted on the Hot 100 at #70 on Nov 27^th, 1971, and gave Donny and MGM a Christmas present 4 weeks later when it cracked the Top 10, at#10, on Christmas Day, matching the Freddy Scott version's peak chart position. It hung on to #10 for three weeks before jumping up a single notch to peak at #9 and stay there for one week, besting Freddie by a single notch. It dropped off the chart altogether two weeks later for a ten week chart run.

I gotta admit, I only vaguely remember this one being on the radio, probably because as 1971 drew to a close there was such a glut of really awesome music out there. Also, I wasn't exactly in the fan demo for Donny's music. And, as his hits go chart performance-wise, this one was a relative sleeper.

Then it dropped off the face of the earth altogether, overshadowed by both the rest of the music of the early Seventies, and by the rest of Donnie's own hits.

But I have a feeling his real fans remember it!