I'm a big fan of the late recording artist Ross Bagdasarian, better known to you as David Seville, a man who had three large singing chipmunks living with him. His chipmunk life began when he recorded "The Chipmunk Song," one of the biggest hit records in the history of big hit records. Actually, he had a pretty hefty hit before that with "The Witch Doctor" and he also recorded a number of novelty tunes that are deserving of attention.
In this sixties when I got my first tape recorder — this was in the reel-to-reel days — I of course began experimenting with speeding my voice up a la Alvin and the Chipmunks. What kid with a variable speed tape recorder didn't? I also recorded "The Chipmunk Song" onto tape at the higher of my machine's two speeds and tried playing it back at the slower. I felt like I'd unlocked the secret of the Aztec Gods when I was able to hear Mr. Bagdasarian speaking Alvin's voice in a slow, deliberate manner.
He later produced vast quantities of Chipmunk material and I'm not sure when he began simplifying the process by hiring others to sing for (and sometimes speak for) Alvin, Simon and Theodore. Stephen Cox reveals the identities of some of these anonymous vocalists.