The Hillside Singers
American folk music group (1971)
The Hillside Singers were an American folk pop group. The ensemble was created by advertising agency McCann Erickson to sing in a television commercial. McCann Erickson had written the jingle "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony)" for Coca-Cola, and had sought to have the New Seekers sing it, but that group could not fit the project into their schedule and turned it down. McCann Erickson then got in touch with producer Al Ham, who put together a group of singers for the project (including his wife, Mary Mayo, and their daughter Lorri). The commercial began airing in July 1971 and was extremely popular, convincing Ham to rewrite the song as "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" and to record an album and a Christmas record. The single hit No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, No. 5 on the Adult Contemporary chart, and No. 58 in Canada, which convinced The New Seekers to issue it as a single as well. The Hillside Singers version of the song sold a million copies, earning a gold certification from the Recording Industry Association of America.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Hillside Singers” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.