Gosanke: RCA Sannin Musume（RCA三人娘）

 

Happy Saturday folks! It's definitely feeling like winter out there although we're still about 11 days away from the official season opening day. Definitely had to bundle up.

Anyways, on to the business at hand. Although I hadn't been aware of it at the time, my first encounter with these gosanke（御三家）/sannin musume（三人娘）triads in Japanese popular music was most likely through reading that singer-songwriters EPO, Mariya Takeuchi（竹内まりや）and Taeko Ohnuki（大貫妙子）had been placed together in a grouping known as the RCA Sannin Musume (The Three Girls of RCA) via the liner notes in an EPO album years ago. Of course, RCA is the recording company where all three were affiliated with at the time in the early 1980s. According to EPO's J-Wiki article, the tag of the RCA Sannin Musume was created sometime in the mid-1980s although by that point, I believe that Ohnuki had already left the company, so in all likelihood, the term was probably something that someone in RCA had coined and it just got leaked out, unlike it being a media machine-created phrase as was the case with past trios such as the Ganso Sannin Musume（元祖三人娘）.

The above information could explain why I haven't been able to find any videos of EPO, Takeuchi and Ohnuki together or even a couple of them performing or chatting together, so I had to be a little creative with the display up on top. That isn't to say that none of the three had contact with each other; I know at least that Takeuchi was a backing vocal for one of EPO's tunes, and Ohnuki herself was backing Takeuchi up on the famous "Plastic Love" song. But it looks like that the RCA Sannin Musume was a form of retronym.

Since EPO was the last to debut with RCA in 1980, I'll go with that year.

EPO -- DOWNTOWN

Mariya Takeuchi -- Morning Glory

Taeko Ohnuki -- CARNAVAL