In 1975, there was no escaping the hit song “Love Will Keep Us Together” – not that anyone was trying to. The catchy pop tune was No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and played frequently on the radio.

“Love Will Keep Us Together” was recorded by the duo The Captain and Tennille, made up of Montgomery native and Auburn alumnus Toni Tennille and keyboardist Daryl Dragon. The song won a Grammy for Record of the Year and it was the top-selling single of 1975.

It was a last-minute addition to the duo’s first album of the same name.

In her book “Toni Tennille: A Memoir,” Tennille wrote that the first time she heard her voice on the radio she was singing this song.

“I remember when I first heard it on KHJ – the biggest top-40 radio station in Los Angeles – while driving down Ventura Boulevard,” she wrote. “When I heard my own voice coming through the speakers, I nearly drove the car off the road. I was so excited that I had to pull over into a service station to compose myself!”

Montgomery roots

Tennille was born Cathryn Antoinette Tennille in Montgomery on May 8, 1940, to Frank and Cathryn Tennille. The family lived on Felder Avenue at one point and Tennille graduated from Sidney Lanier High School, according to her memoire.

Her father owned a furniture store and served in the Alabama Legislature from 1951-1954. Her mother was host of a local TV show, Tennille told The Montgomery Advertiser in 2016. “My mother had her own live TV show called ‘The Guest Room’ doing interviews in the late 1950s on WSFA,” she said. “She used her maiden name, Cathryn Wright, and was born for the camera.”

Tennille got her talent for music from her father.

“My first mentor in music was my father,” Tennille said in a 2016 interview with blogger Richard Skipper. “He was a big band singer in the late 1930s. He sang with Bob Crosby and His Bobcats. Daddy had to leave show business that he loved so much and go back home to Alabama and take over the family business.”

Frank was also a founding member of the Auburn Knights orchestra in 1930, playing banjo and contributing vocals. Toni would later join the orchestra as a vocalist when she was a student in the late 1950s.

Fame in California

Tennille spent only two years at Auburn, leaving school in 1960 to move with her family to Los Angeles.

In 1971, she met Daryl Dragon, who would become her musical partner and husband. Dragon had been touring as keyboardist for the Beach Boys and was on a break when he met Tennille, according to the “Billboard Book of Number One Hits.”

“It wasn’t love at first sight,” she said when interviewed for the book. “I don’t believe in that. There was some kind of really strong vibration because I knew when I looked at him, in some way he would be important in my life.”

The couple had been performing at the Smokehouse in Encino when they made a demo that landed them a contract with A&M Records, the same company where The Carpenters were signed.

They were one song short for the debut album when a producer played a song for them that changed their lives. The producer had them to Neil Sedaka’s recording of “Love Will Keep Us Together” and “Toni Tennille fell off her chair,” Sedaka says in the book “We Found Love, Song By Song.”

The knew immediately this was the song for their album.

The success of the album led to newfound fame and the couple hosted the TV variety show, “The Captain and Tennille,” for one season in 1976. The duo went on the have many more hits, including “Muskrat Love,” “Lonely Night (Angel Face)”, “Shop Around” and “Do That To Me One More Time.”

They were married for 39 years before divorcing in 2016.