Oratorios for Industry

They have probably been heard by more people more times than any other group in the history of sound. Yet next to nobody knows who they are. They are the world's most successful singers of TV commercials.

Calling themselves the "J's with Jamie," they are the original and only singers of the Marlboro song, "You get a lot to like with a Marlboro--filter, flavor, flip-top box." They sing the Campbell's Red Kettle Soup song and "The Campbells are coming with pork and beans." The J's and Jamie are so subtly harmonious that they can sound like six different brews for six different beers.

The group was formed 41 years ago by Tenor Joe Silvia and his brunette wife Jamie. Tired of road trips with bus-traveling bands, they settled in Chicago, took on a bass and a baritone as partners and began singing nothing but dog-chow arias and cantatas of smoke. "We wanted a normal life," says Joe, "children and a home. We wanted to try to live like other people do, and that is what we've done." They make a nice, normal $250,000 a year. Broadway Producers Cy Feuer and Ernie Martin, hearing Jamie's voice, once nibbled in her direction but were told that she was out of their financial class.

They sing about Paper Mate's de-pen-pendible pen, they do the Pillsbury suite ("Nothin' says lovin' like something from the oven"), and Jamie's is the voice of the animated Aero-Shave mermaid. They do Northwest Orient's Oriental airlines song, A.T. & T.'s longdistance elegy, and Alka-Seltzer's bel canto promise: "Relief is just a swallow away." One of their super-specialties is, "Look for the spear and get chewing enjoyment."

They also elect Senators:

Hey look him over

He's your kind of guy

His first name is Birch

His last name is Bayh.

After the Indiana populace heard Jamie sing that for the 22,356th time in the autumn of 1962, Birch Bayh went to Washington.

The group is the best commercial-singing ensemble largely because of what an adman calls "the cutting edge of Jamie's voice." All four singers deliver their words with the sort of enunciation that makes poets out of admen. "Their words seem to be coming from a foot outside of their mouths in a kind of bas-relief," says one such poet.

The Js and Jamie were once purists, but Columbia Records has succeeded in getting them to do noncommercial albums, which have sold well. A third is due in the fall. Assorted nightclubs have been offering them $7,000 a week. But they really prefer the oratorios of industry.

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