ALL IN THE ARMENIAN FAMILY
WILLIAM SAROYAN was born in 1908 into an Armenian-American family in Fresno, California, which had a large Armenian immigrant population, including many of his relatives. One of them, a cousin named Ross Bagdasarian, played a newsboy in The Time of Your Life’s world premiere in 1939. The two men drove cross-country from Fresno to New York for the Broadway production, and while in New Mexico, they wrote a song together for a musical they were planning. The show, called The Son, was a flop when it was finally produced off-Broadway in 1950, but the song, “Come On-a My House,” was an enormous hit for Rosemary Clooney who recorded it a year later.
Bagdasarian soon adopted the professional name David Seville and had his own Top Ten hit with “Witch Doctor” in 1958. In the same year he created a trio of cartoon and record-album-recording chipmunks, naming them Alvin, Theodore, and Simon after three Liberty Records executives. Their first single, “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late),” sold more than four million copies in the first three months after its 1958 release.
Bagdasarian was an incredibly savvy businessman as well as an unlikely prospect for success in the music business. As Shana Alexander noted in a 1959 Life magazine article, “The Chipmunk Song” was the first time “in the annals of popular music that one man has served as writer, composer, publisher, conductor, and multiple vocalist of a hit record, thereby directing all possible revenues from the song back into his own pocket.” It was a remarkable achievement, she wrote, for someone who “can neither read nor write music nor play any musical instrument in the accepted sense of the word.” — M.T.