BY MELISSA RUGGIERI/AJC Music Scene
Even if you didn't grow up in the four-year span of the early '70s when "The Partridge Family" aired on ABC's Friday night lineup, you knew about the musical family that spawned board games, comic books and lunch boxes.
The crushes on Keith Partridge, with his perfectly feathered hair and puckered-lip smile, were million-fold, and by extension, the man who played him, David Cassidy, became the type of teen idol impossible to understand in today's fragmented media world.
Cassidy, who announced in February that he was living with dementia, died Tuesday in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., of organ failure . He was 67.
I never spoke with Cassidy - though, like millions of teenagers, adopted a massive crush on him during the endless syndication run of the show in the '80s - but my colleague Rodney Ho interviewed him more than a decade ago.
Cassidy's hits with The Partridge Family - "I Think I Love You," "Doesn't Somebody Want to Be Wanted," "I Woke Up in Love This Morning," among them - spotlighted his sweet voice and natural pop star delivery.
Veteran music scribe David Wild provided a particularly apt description of Cassidy in a Tuesday night tweet : "As a vocalist, he was a perfect mix of Brill Building pop & Broadway dazzle."
Here is how some other music stars mourned Cassidy on Twitter.
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