Alvin and the Chipmunks is a 5-time Grammy Award-winning, and 100-time American Music Award-winning animated music group created by Ross Bagdasarian, Sr. in 1958. The group consists of three singing animated chipmunks:

Alvin, the mischievous troublemaker, who quickly became the star of the group;

Simon, the tall, bespectacled intellectual;

Theodore, the chubby, impressionable sweetheart.

The trio is managed by their human father and confidant, David Seville. In reality, David Seville was Bagdasarian's stage name, and the Chipmunks themselves are named after the executives of their original record label, Liberty Records:

Alvin Bennett (the president),

Simon Waronker (the founder and owner), and

Theodore Keep (the chief engineer).

The Chipmunks act began with recordings first brought to life in Bagdasarian's 1950s novelty recordings under the name David Seville and the Chipmunks. For stage purposes, such as during an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, Bagdasarian lip-synched the words of "David Seville" in front of a small puppet theater, with puppets of the three Chipmunks also lip-synching. The puppets looked similar to the Chipmunk illustrations on the covers of some of the group's 45 RPM records. The characters were an unprecedented success, and the singing Chipmunks and their manager were given life in several animated cartoon shows, using redrawn, anthropomorphic chipmunks, and eventually motion pictures.

The voices of the group were all performed by Bagdasarian, who sped up the playback to create higher pitched, comical, squeaky voices. This oft-used process was also not entirely new to Bagdasarian, who had also used it for two previous novelty song projects, including "The Witch Doctor," but it was so unusual and well executed it earned the trio two Grammy Awards for engineering. Although the characters were fictional, they did release a long line of actual albums and singles, with "The Chipmunk Song" becoming a number-one hit single in the United States. Since Ross Bagdasarian, Sr.'s passing on January 16, 1972, their voices were performed by Ross Bagdasarian, Jr. and Janice Karman in all subsequent incarnations except for the 2007 CGI/live-action film adaptation, when they were voiced by Justin Long, Matthew Gray Gubler and Jesse McCartney respectively.

"The Witch Doctor"

main: Witch Doctor (song)

In early 1958, Bagdasarian released a novelty song, as David Seville, about being unlucky at love until he found a Witch Doctor who told him "What To Do" to woo his woman. The entire song was done by Bagdasarian in his normal voice, except for the "magic" words, done first in Bagdasarian's pitched-up, pre-Chipmunk voice, and then in a duet between his pitched-up voice and his normal voice. The words, of course, are nonsense: "Oo-ee, oo-ah-ah, ting-tang, walla-walla, bing-bang." The "Walla Walla" part of the song was just thrown in as a reference to Ross Bagdasarian's uncle who lived in Walla Walla, Washington. The song was a major hit, sitting at Number 1 in the Billboard Top 100, a predecessor to the Billboard Hot 100 chart which would be introduced that August, for three weeks during the spring, and the Witch Doctor's "magic words" were being sung by kids in many countries. Nothing in the song makes any reference to chipmunks but the song is now sometimes included on Chipmunk compilations, as if the Chipmunks themselves had provided the voice of the Witch Doctor (Bagdasarian did record a "Chipmunks" version of "Witch Doctor," which appeared on the second Chipmunks album, Sing Again with The Chipmunks, in 1960). It gained new attention, when it was sung by Homer Simpson in an episode of The Simpsons in 2006. A followup song was recorded by Bagdasarian titled "The Bird on My Head" with Bagdasarian, again as Seville, singing a duet with his own sped-up voice as the bird. It also reached the Top 40, peaking at #34.