Pointer Culture Funk

I’m just finding out that the Pointer Sisters sang this song in the early 70s.

I was listening to Saturday NPR and the closing music on one of the segments used this song to play out on. Some synapses in my brain started buzzing and all that conditioning the Children’s Television Workshop and pre-school embedded in me started to show itself. I started singing “1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12.”

This discovery probably gets made every hour around the globe. Some 80s baby stumbles on some childhood theme song and then they do a post on it. Here’s mine.

Someone remixed it already.
Sesame Workshop knows how catchy it still is.
Grant money created those songs. According to the wiki article : “Sesame Street was conceived in 1966 during discussions between television producer Joan Ganz Cooney and Carnegie Foundation vice president Lloyd Morrisett. Their goal was to create a children’s television show that would “master the addictive qualities of television and do something good with them”,^[2] such as helping young children prepare for school. After two years of research, the newly formed Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) received a combined grant of $8 million from Carnegie, the Ford Foundation, and the US federal government to create and produce a new children’s television show.”
It’s actually called “Pinball Number Count.” Considering this a serious piece of music, the wiki article states: “Music for Pinball Number Count was composed by Walt Kraemer and arranged by Ed Bogas. The vocals were provided by the Pointer Sisters. The arrangements in the eleven films reflect musical idioms commonly found in 1970s urban culture, predominantly funk and jazz, though other styles including Caribbean steel drum music are also represented. The number-specific middle sections contain one of three different (presumably) improvised instrumental solos over a basic progression, respectively featuring soprano saxophone, electric guitar, and steel drum. Consistent with an abbreviated jazz structure, a prearranged head and turnaround / coda are played during the common starting and ending animation sequences. The vocals work in similar fashion with improvised shouts of the numbers 2–12 during the middle section and a return to the arranged counting at the end. The song is mostly in the time signature of 4/4, with every other couple of measures in 3/4, and one measure that goes into the one 4/4 bar before the open solo section [which is in 4/4] is in 5/4.”
The Pointer Sisters really were the business in the 80s.