“One Bad Apple” (1971) – The Osmonds

“One Bad Apple” (1971) – The Osmonds * Written by George Jackson * 45: “One Bad Apple” / “He Ain’t Heavy…He’s My Brother” * LP The Osmonds * Produced by Rick Hall * Label: MGM

In his Soul Country: Making Music and Making Race in the American South (pp. 118-124), Charles L. Hughes writes that the Osmonds’ “One Bad Apple” was as “controversial as any piece of U.S. popular culture.” This was because its successful mimicry of the Jackson 5 sound came off to some as participation “in the white rip-off of black cultural resources.” Its inclusion in soul station playlists, too, seemed to fly in the face of “soul’s extramusical meaning.” Hughes points out that the single can also be seen as a model specimen for the “racial and stylistic crisscrossing” going on at the FAME studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. The record was, after all, the product of a white producer (Rick Hall) and a black songwriter (George Jackson) who had been recommended to Hall by another white producer (Billy Sherrill). The record’s multiracial Fame Gang studio musicians backed five white young men singing in a black idiom for a label run by a conservative white man (Mike Curb). In spite of any controversy, the song would launch ongoing successes for everyone involved, and lives on as a cheerful signifier of seventies youth. An Osmonds cartoon created in 1972 used the song for its opening sequence.