Songfacts®:

• The Partridge Family was a TV series that ran from 1970-1974 about a musical family that travelled in a very colorful tour bus. They were based on the family band The Cowsills, who had a hit called "The Rain, The Park And Other Things" in 1967.
  
  Two of the lead actors - David Cassidy (son of the actor Jack Cassidy) and his real-life stepmother Shirley Jones - were real singers and performed on their songs, which were released in the real world as The Partridge Family. "I Think I Love You" was released in August 1970, about a month before the show debuted on September 25, 1970. On November 21, 1970 it went to #1.
  
  The lead vocal on the song is by Cassidy, who quickly became a teen idol. Jones, a veteran of movie musicals Oklahoma and The Music Man, sang backup. Most Partridge Family songs had this configuration with Cassidy singing lead and Jones in the background.
• Like The Monkees, The Partridge Family was created for their TV series and released music under those band names. The actors who played The Monkees did sing on their songs, but at first they didn't play their own instruments, which became a point of contention when they pushed to perform their own songs. Their TV series ran from 1966-1968 and delivered four #1 hits, including "I'm A Believer" and "Last Train To Clarksville."
  
  The casting directors for The Partridge Family made sure all of the actors other than David Cassidy and Shirley Jones had no musical ambitions, and they ran a disclaimer in the opening credits that read: "The voices and music of the Partridge Family were augmented by other performers." Two of those actors, Susan Dey and Danny Bonaduce, had long careers in Hollywood.
  
  Top-tier session musicians played on The Partridge Family's songs, including Hal Blaine, Larry Knechtel, Joe Osborn, Louie Shelton and Tommy Tedesco. On their singles and albums, the group was credited as "The Partridge Family starring Shirley Jones featuring David Cassidy." Some of those session players also played on songs for The Monkees.
• Over the next few years The Partridge Family scored six more Top 40 hits, each release declining in chart position. They were:
  
  "Doesn't Somebody Want To Be Wanted" (#6)
  "I'll Meet You Halfway" (#9)
  "I Woke Up In Love This Morning" (#13)
  "It's One Of Those Nights (Yes Love)" (#20)
  "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do" (#28)
  "Looking Through The Eyes Of Love" (#39)
• "I Think I Love You" was written by Tony Romeo, who also wrote songs for The Seekers, The Everly Brothers and Richard Harris. He also wrote "Indian Lake" and some other songs for The Cowsills, the band The Partridge Family was based on.
• While The Partridge Family was still on the air, David Cassidy nurtured his solo career, releasing hit singles including "Cherish" and "Daydreamer." His half-brother Shaun Cassidy also had some hits, scoring in 1977 with "Hey Deanie" and "Da Doo Ron Ron."
• "I Think I Love You" was used twice in the first season of the TV series, with producers taking care not to show too much footage of the band "playing" the song. The Partridge Family didn't perform the full song on their show until the 12th episode, "My Son, the Feminist," which aired on December 11, 1970. By this time, the song was already a huge hit.
• The group Voice Of The Beehive took this song to #25 UK in 1991. Other artists to cover it include Paul Westerberg and Declan Galbraith. The hip-hop duo Nice And Smooth sampled it for their 1991 song "Hip Hop Junkies."
• In 2002 the American teenage singer Kaci recorded a cover that reached #10 in the UK. Kaci Lynn Battaglia was a child star who by the age of 10 had sung the national anthem at a New York Yankees baseball game and presented a Disney Christmas TV special.
• In 1977, a young couple was ambushed by serial killer David Berkowitz, aka the Son of Sam, while sitting in a parked car listening to this song. The scene is recreated and discussed in the 1994 thriller Copycat, starring Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter.
• The ska-punk band Less Than Jake recorded a rapid-fire version for the 1997 Scream 2 soundtrack. They originally wrote the song "Faction" - which ended up on their 2000 Borders & Boundaries album - for the movie, but director Wes Craven asked them to do a cover tune instead. The band told In Music We Trust in 2001: "We were like, "What the hell?" and did 'I Think I Love You' by the Partridge Family, but we had a great time doing it."
• David Cassidy was less than enthused by Less Than Jake's punk rendition, even though he didn't actually hear it. "A couple people told me they didn't like it," he told Yahoo Music in 2017. "When I heard what they wanted to do with it, I assumed it would be a grunge sort of ear-crunching thing. Not that I don't like some of that stuff, but it's a great melody and it’s a great lyric, so if you want to kill the melody and kill the lyric, why even cut it? Find something else."
• This is a very unusual song with a vocal intro (ba, ba ba ba...) that made it challenging for disk jockeys to talk over the song. The harpsichord sound and cathartic chorus helped the song endure long after the TV show went off the air.