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She has been described as a “mini-mom.”
But perhaps the title “maxi-mom” would be a better fit for Barbara Cowsill, whose daughter Susan stands out as “the youngest” and “the only” in the Cowsill family and with the Cowsills as performers.
Barbara and Susan are not a typical mother-daughter team since they are two members of a family group which took the record industry by surprise and audiences by storm.
Susan tells how she was finally “accepted.” “They used to practice on the porch in Newport, and I kept asking. I found out that if they didn’t yell at me, that meant I wasn’t in the group. Finally they yelled at me. I was in.”
For Barbara, it was another story. “I was scared to death. I’d been a star in my own home for 20 years, but suddenly I was out there in front of the world; me, a ‘kitchen singer!’ The kids had to bribe me with a promise of a new dress for every song I recorded with them when they asked me to do ‘The Rain, the Park, and Other things’ “.
But in other ways, Susan and Barbara enjoy the same things as other families. Barbara’s primary goal-function in life is that of being a good mother. And the funny thing is that no one, much less Barbara Cowsill, seems to see anything incongruous about a rock-singing mother. For Barbara, generation and communication gaps don’t exist.
Susan, especially, appreciates her mother’s talents in the kitchen. As she puts it, “I like to cook. Scrambled eggs. But I like to cook when my mother bakes cakes. You get all that goo on your hands.”
When Barbara Cowsill winds up by describing her family as “little giants,” it’s not an excess of parental pride. It’s her way of explaining that she isn’t the mother of a group at all, but of seven really quite remarkable human beings. And that’s the way she wants it.
The Cowsills will be performing at the B.J. Thomas Show at 8 o’clock tomorrow evening at the Salinas Rodeo grounds, with special guest star Bobbi Martin.
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