Songfacts®:

• This solo single from ex-Monkee Davy Jones finds the singer fawning over his new love interest, who has made the world a better and brighter place for him. Songwriting partners Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel, who penned the Roberta Flack hit "Killing Me Softly With His Song," wrote this as the title theme for the 1971 romantic comedy Star Spangled Girl, starring Sandy Duncan. The tune is most associated, however, with The Brady Bunch. Jones appeared on the show in the 1971 episode "Getting Davy Jones," where Marcia Brady tracks him down to perform at her junior prom. She finds him at a recording studio singing "Girl."
• Charles Fox tells Goldmine magazine how the song came together: "We wrote an easier version than the one that Davy Jones did. It was a little more romantic and slower tempo and an easier sound, more strings. That’s really the kind of song we expected it to be. It is that kind of a song anyway. Davy Jones was our choice to sing the song. He had a very positive, upbeat and youthful sound; we wanted to get the youthful quality, and he delivered that. The record he made with his producer (Jackie Mills) and arranger (Al Capps) was more of an upbeat brassy pop sound with trumpets. Davy did a little faster and brighter version, adding a more positive kind of quality to it but the song is a positive song anyway. As with all things, when you write a song for the film, you're trying to capture the essence of the film and the essence of the character you're writing about. This started off with Sandy Duncan coming to town on a bus in the main title and you saw that. It was a romantic song about the effect a girl had on a fellow. It was a premonition of what would happen in the film and yet it was very generalized so it doesn’t tell you anything about the movie itself except for letting it known this was going to be a very upbeat, fun film with romance and a nice warm feeling and aura emerging from the film."
• The single was received so poorly that it was initially left off the Davy Jones album, but was later added as a bonus track for the 2012 release. Despite its commercial failure, the song remains Jones' most memorable solo single thanks to its association with the sitcom, which had a near-ubiquitous presence on TV for years after its five-season run.
  
  At the time of Jones' 2012 death, ABC News reported that "Getting Davy Jones" was the most rerun episode of any TV show ever.
• Jones appeared in the 1995 spoof The Brady Bunch Movie and indeed performed at Marcia's prom. The kids were unimpressed until he launched into a grungy rendition of "Girl."
• Although Fox and Gimbel didn't write the theme to The Brady Bunch - that credit goes to Frank DeVol - they were the masterminds behind several classic TV show themes of the era, including Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, and Love Boat.