Songfacts®:

• The Brady Bunch, which ran for five seasons on ABC from 1969-1974, is one of America's most beloved sitcoms. It's about a couple and six kids (plus a housekeeper, Alice) who live in suburbs and have lots of adventures. How did this family come together? That's explained in the theme song, where we find out it's a blended family, with the lovely lady and her three girls joining forces with a man named Brady and his three boys. If there is any trauma left behind from their previous relationships, we never hear about it.
  
  It's a half hour show, which means there is about 23 minutes of show content (leaving room for commercials), and the theme song takes up nearly a minute. Still, removing the theme song or even cutting it down would have been unthinkable. Viewers didn't mind hearing the origin story at the beginning of every episode, and it offered a cradle of familiarity. The hits of the day would come and go, but the Brady Bunch theme was always there, even after the series ended; it lived on in constant reruns.
• The lyrics were written by the show's creator, Sherwood Schwartz, the man responsible for another classic show with a memorable theme song: Gilligan's Island, which ran from 1964-1967. He wrote the lyric to that one as well, which also explains what's going on in the show.
• In the pilot episode, the song was performed by a group called Peppermint Trolley Company. For the rest of season 1, the music from this version was used but with three session singers doing the vocals. This version has more prominent instrumentation - you can really hear the drums. Starting with season 2 in 1970, the six actors who played the Brady kids did the singing, making it a gang vocal singalong.
  
  That year, the Brady children were turned into a singing group, releasing a Christmas album called Merry Christmas From The Brady Bunch. Not coincidentally, The Partridge Family debuted that year and quickly crossed over to the world of music with a theme song that went to #1 in America. The Brady Bunch became a performing act with the actors actually singing, which they did surprisingly well (according to Barry Williams, who played Greg, Christopher Knight, who played Peter, was the only one who couldn't sing). In the fourth season, The Brady Bunch performed in the episode "Amateur Night," where they sing on a TV talent show. In that episode, they perform an original tune called "It's A Sunshine Day," which became their most popular song. They released two more albums in 1972 and another in 1973. Their final season (1974) opens with them singing a song called "You've Got To Be In Love (To Love a Love Song)" for another talent contest, but Greg becomes ensnared by an agent who feeds his ego and turns him into "Johnny Bravo."
  
  In 1976, the family returned with a variety show called The Brady Bunch Hour, where they did a lot of singing, still in character. It lasted just nine episodes.
• Frank De Vol, who worked on the My Three Sons theme song, composed the music.