Yo-Yo By The Osmonds

Yo-Yo

1971

The Osmonds

I have a sneakin' suspicion that, as summer 1971 started winding down, The Osmonds were getting a bit tired of being a Caucasian Jackson-5 knock-off. True, One Bad Apple had gone straight up the chart to #1, but there is a price to pay for being a J-5 knock-off, that price being the fact that lots of people think that your to-date-biggest-hit is a Jackson Five song. The Osmonds wanted to develop their own sound...something apart from Bubblegum, something that was more in the direction of what they actually had in mind in the first place...as you may recall they wanted to form a Rock and Roll band.

Of course the actual term 'Rock and Roll' had become sort of out-dated by mid 1971, and was now usually just shortened to 'Rock', but that's where The Brothers Osmond wanted to head, so they did what every successful band since the beginning of modern music history has done when they wanted to adjust their genre...they met with their management and their label.

Both apparently thought it was an excellent idea...Donny was holding down the Bubblegum side of things very competently (While also singing as part of The Osmonds...more on that in a minute) but they also probably didn't want to invest too much time, effort and, most importantly, money in the project until they found out if it would work.

They'd find a song for The Osmonds to cover. Now, when they did the same thing for Donny during just about the exact same time frame, the song they selected had already made it to #1 once and the Top 20 twice, giving it a pretty good spring-board that helped send it to #1 for a second time.

They pretty much went in the exact opposite direction with a new-old Rock tune for The Osmonds. I couldn't find out exactly who picked the donor-tune for their cover, but when they made their decision they must have cleaned out a closet and looked in the back corner of it's highest shelf. What they found...and grabbed...was a 1967 Billy Joe Royal single about a guy talking about the girl who was stringing him along called 'Yo-Yo'.  Note I didn't say Billy Joe Royal hit because, well...it wasn't.

Billy Joe Royal's original release of the song never even made it to the high end of the Hot 100...the best it did was #117, which is actually kind of surprising given it's pedigree. It was penned by a fellow with the eminently awesome name of Joe South who'd written such well loved Country-Soul tunes as 'Down In The Boondocks' and 'Games People Play', and it had a serious, percussion-heavy Motown vibe goin' on, with a rhythm and beat that grabbed you and wouldn't let go. It should have done far far better than it did. But music taste is fickle...always has been and always will be...and BJR's original version of the song just sort of languished.

Then MGM grabbed it and gave it to Fame Studios, whose staff song-scribes dusted it off, completely revamped the intro sending it up-tempo, banished the drums to more of a backing role and gave it a solid guitar-heavy thrum. They went up-tempo with the rest of the song as well, at the same time notching the vocals upward a bit to accommodate Donny's...who sang co-lead with older bro Merrill...as of yet unchanged voice. Really...listen to it closely. Merrill's all but busting a gut and spitting his tonsils out trying to reach those notes. Donny, of course, had no trouble with it at all and had a different timbre and sound to his voice in this one...as one source I read put it, he 'Hit those Blues notes dead-on and really sang it like he meant it!'. The melding and mingling of the two brothers' voices gave the song it's unique sound and sent it to a place that The Osmonds hadn't been before.

It wasn't exactly a Rock song...but it wasn't Bubblegum either, and it was more than well received...it'd become their second Top Ten hit as well as their second biggest hit.

Donny must've gone straight from recording 'Go Away Little Girl' to recording 'Yo-Yo' with his brothers, because 'Yo-Yo' debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at #85 on the exact same week that Go Away Little Girl peaked at #1...September 11, 1971. It cracked the Top 10 at #9 on it's fourth week in, and peaked at #3 two weeks later on Oct 17^th, hanging on at #3 for three weeks before dropping down to #5, and stayed in the Hot 100 for four more weeks before it dropped off the chart at #26 on December 4^th, giving it a  respectable 13 week chart run.

Pretty much everyone who was a teen or tween as school started up for the 1971-72 school year remembers that raspy 'OooOOoo JUST LIKE A YO-YOOOO' blasting from the radio on at least a half-hourly basis as the song chart-climbed and the great majority of us liked it...enough of us to take it to #3 and keep it there for a trio of weeks. Yo-Yo had a more than subtle kick to it, and signaled a new if short era of  'The Osmonds' music.

As noted above, if you hear any Osmonds song other than One Bad Apple on an Oldies station today it'll probably be this one. And a lot of us will sing along with Merrill as he strains his voice trying to hit the same key as his younger brother, whether we want to admit it or not!

So Enjoy! Yo-Yo, by The Osmonds.


And as a bonus, The original version of the tune by Billy Joe Royal, from 1967.