While some legends go out with a bang, others leave this world as softly as a whisper.
Musical icon Dave "Baby" Cortez chose the latter, a passing that served as a stark contrast to the jubilant, soulful and often dance-worthy music he made throughout his life.
Cortez, perhaps best known for his 1959 Billboard Hot 100 #1 hit, "The Happy Organ," burst onto the music scene at the height of Detroit's doo-wop era. He was a songwriter, a pianist and a singer, a hitmaker of sorts. And yet, after a little over two decades in the spotlight he slowly but surely became a recluse.
From the '80s on, it was rare Cortez was seen in public, and rarer still that he gave an interview. He never officially quit the music business, but his actions spoke for him. As time wore on, he was spotted less and less frequently, and even his daughter, Taryn Sheffield, lost touch with the increasingly more reclusive songwriter.
“The music business wasn’t very kind to him,” Sheffield told Alex Williams in an interview for The New York Times, “and he was bitter.”
By the time she was informed of his passing in 2022, Sheffield had not seen nor heard from her father in 13 years. As it turns out, she'd only been contacted at all because BMI, the organization responsible for distributing the royalties from his music, needed to find next of kin in order to issue future payments.
At the time of his death in his New York City apartment, Cortez was 83 years-old. By that point, he had lost contact with his family, and thus there was no one available to claim his body. He was buried in an unmarked grave on Hart Island, located just off of the Bronx.
In 2012, Cortez granted a rare interview to the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM), and the video remains one of the few pieces of archival footage of the songwriter in existence. In it, he chronicles the moment he found out, "The Happy Organ," had become an overnight success. At the time, he was in the midst of touring the country with a number of other acts, including Jimmy Clanton, Freddy Cannon and Fabian.
"I was pretty much set, making a pretty good living, but the record came out during the tour," recounts Cortez. "The second week, I got a telegram and bam! So, you got a hit!"
"The Happy Organ" was groundbreaking in more ways than one. Not only was it the first instrumental song to reach the top spot on Billboard's Hot 100, but it also marked the first time an organ had been so heavily featured in a hit pop/rock single.
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