Robin Ward (born 1941) is an American singer, regarded as a one-hit wonder due to her 1963 million-selling smash Wonderful Summer; however, she was also a session singer under her real name, Jackie Ward. Her voice can be heard in several popular U.S. television series and motion pictures since the 1950s. In 1963, songwriter-producer Perry Botkin needed a session singer to make a demo recording of Wonderful Summer, a song that he wrote with his co-writer and co-producer, Gil Garfield.[2] A now-married Ward agreed to record it in Gold Star Studios. After an experiment in which Botkin sped up the recording by wrapping splicing tape around the capstan of the recorder, he and Ward agreed that the finished recording (with bird and surf sound effects added) would not be just a demo but a recording to be released as a 45 revolutions-per-minute single. The altered recording resulted in the then 21-year-old woman sounding like a high school girl; so Ward suggested changing her first name on the record label to that of her daughter, Robin. That fall, Wonderful Summer was released on Dot Records. Sales were over one million copies in the United States, propelling the recording to the #14 position on Billboardmagazines Hot 100 singles chart in November 1963. Her voice is heard in dozens of television theme songs, including Flipper; Batman; Star Trek: The Original Series; Love, American Style; Maude (with Donny Hathaway providing the lead vocal); and The Partridge Family. She has sung in hundreds of television commercials, most notably those for Rice-a-Roni (The San Francisco treat). The theme song was not the only recording that she did for The Partridge Family: she was one of a group of four background vocalists — herself, brothers John and Tom Bahler, and Ron Hicklin — to record all the music for television play and record releases while posing as the Partridge Family (only two members of the TV series — Shirley Jones and David Cassidy — recorded with them).
Posted on: Wed, 20 Aug 2014 03:09:11 +0000
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