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STUART — Susan Cowsill could have been a Partridge.
At 10, she was the pixie-faced focal point of the Cowsills, a Rhode Island pop/rock band that included four of her brothers and — improbably — their mother. Screen Gems Productions loved the fact that mom sang with the group, which had hits with "The Rain, the Park and Other Things," "Hair" and several others, and began to develop a TV sitcom for them.
Fast forward: Shirley Jones and David Cassidy did not star in "The Cowsill Family." But now you know where it got started.
Now 48, Susan will sing with two of her surviving brothers Saturday at the Lyric Theatre. It's been a long road — mom Barbara died in 1985, and eldest brother Barry was a victim of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
With her then-husband Peter Holsapple, Cowsill wrote, sang and played guitar for 10 years in the New Orleans-based alt-rock band the Continental Drifters. Today, she lives in Los Angeles, where she's recording solo CDs.
But the Cowsills — such as they are — remain. "When you're in a family band," she said, "you never break up. No matter what we're doing individually, we always make music together."
Q. Tell me about 'The Partridge Family' connection.
A. It was actually a TV show that was designed for my family. Screen Gems came out and stayed with us for a couple of weeks. It came from all of our (Ed) Sullivans; they said, 'We need to make a TV show about these people, with them in it.' By the time they got to us, it was two or three years later, and they realized we weren't actors. Due to my mom's nonstage presence — beautiful voice, but she was not an entertainer — they decided unequivocally that they wanted to use a name woman as the mom. And my dad vetoed it. Ultimately, we weren't the (people) they were looking for. And we had grown up quite a bit. So they went ahead and just created us in their own likeness.
Q. The Cowsills' harmonies were legendary. Did the all-pervasive image of 'the cute little girl' mortify you in those days?
A. It mortified my brothers at certain points, because they wanted to be a rock band. Having their little sister in their band certainly wasn't very cool. But I was a musician truly from the get-go. I wasn't just a little kid up there for the hell of it. I knew what I was doing. And Mom as well. It was the image they didn't want to project — they wanted to be the Beatles.
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