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For a brief, shining moment in a far more innocent time, they were the embodiment of wholesome family entertainment, a good-looking brood of fresh-faced kids singing their way into the hearts of Middle America.
They looked wholesome, anyway, and that was good enough for MGM Records.
You couldn't pick up a copy of "16" magazine in 1967 or 1968 - or "Spec" or "Tiger Beat" - without finding another spread on those photogenic Cowsills: Bill, Bob, Barry and John, who were joined soon enough by mom Barbara, little sister Susan and younger brother Paul.
Their hard-driving father, an irascible Navy man named Bud Cowsill, managed the business and tried to keep an increasingly rambunctious crew in line.
Truth was, the Cowsills could actually sing: Sweet, complex harmonies that were easily molded into hits like "We Can Fly," "The Rain, the Park & Other Things," "Indian Lake" and even "Hair" from the Broadway musical. They moved from Newport, R.I. to New York. They sang the theme song for the TV show "Love, American Style." Pop-culture historians say the Cowsills were the real-life model for "The Partridge Family." They were the first band to do a milk commercial, long before that gig had its current whiff of reverse cool.
But then, like millions of lesser known American families, the Cowsills more or less blew apart: Scattered across the continent, lost to the road and the counter-culture, focused on their own families and careers. The times they were a-changing, indeed.
Why VH-1 hasn't done a Cowsill retrospective, I do not know.
As Barry Cowsill, now 46 and living in New Orleans with his wife and two young children, was saying when he and I first spoke a few weeks ago: "There's something in the Cowsill DNA. We're not the kind of family that could run a business together long-term. We're all over the place - in every imaginable way."
I was in New Orleans for Labor Day. On my first night in town, I was walking up Decatur Street with my wife and my brother Bill, a couple of blocks from the House of Blues. We made our way into an Irish bar, where a guy was on a small stage with a guitar.
He obviously wasn't a kid. In the spotlight, you could see the gray running through his hair and beard. And he was singing pop songs from the Sixties, "Don"t Let the Sun Catch You Crying," "Love Her Madly" that sort of thing. There was something naggingly familiar about the voice.
"I'm Barry," he said at one point. "Barry Cowsill."
It's been almost 30 years since al the singing Cowsill children performed together. (Their mom died in 1985, their dad in the early 1990s.) But this weekend, in their hometown of Newport, the kids will reunite on stage for the first time since the early 1970s.
"The black sheep meet the white sheep," Barry laughed on the phone from New Orleans yesterday. "And for the first time ever, Dickie is performing with us. I know. He hates to be called Dickie. Richard Cowsill."
Ah, yes, Richard.
He was "the other Cowsill," Bob's twin brother, who was kept off stage by their father, for reasons that were never entirely clear. When the other kids went on "The Ed Sullivan Show," Richard waited backstage. When the rest of the family went out on tour, he got to carry the equipment for them.
"You're in New York?" Richard said excitedly into the phone yesterday from Rhode Island, where he lives. "That's great. You know, there were six 'gifted' Cowsill kids and one 'ungifted' one. That's what my father said. He was one sick dude. My dream, one of my dreams is to appear on the Ed Sullivan stage, where I was not allowed to participate before. My siblings graced that stage four times.
"Maybe someone from the 'Letterman' show will read about the show this weekend. Maybe they'll get an idea."
Maybe.
What's for sure is that this weekend, Barry, Richard and the others will also be joined by oldest brother Bill. The "fragile genius" of the group - the "Brian Wilson" Cowsill - he has been living in Canada for years and, like Barry, has deflected repeated reunion overtures.
The others - Bob, Paul, John and Susan - have taken to the road in recent years under the Cowsills name, playing the old hits.
"Nobody in our family cares who uses the name," Barry said. "For the rest of us, this might be just a one-time thing, I don't know. I'm definitely not a ghost-band kind of guy."
As for the weekend reunion?
"The best way to put is, 'Hell, I don't know,' " Barry said.
As in any big family, there are lingering issues by the carload, some of the unexplored for years.
There were long, bitter fights over what kind of music the band should play. The record company - and Dad - pushed for syrupy pop tunes. The brothers wanted rock-and-roll.
There's plenty of head-shaking over the goody publicity stunts.
"Someone brought me a tape not long ago of an old TV special we did," Barry said. "Buddy Ebsen was the host. It was so cheesy. They wanted us to be the Osmonds. We were musicians. We couldn't act at all."
And there are genuine questions about where all the money went. "When I turned 18, I had a trust fund with $1,800," Barry said. "I was like, 'I gotta get a job.' "
But all that can be put aside, for one weekend at least.
The Cowsills are bock on stage again.
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