Rant #4,006: I Do the Rock

This has been a particularly hard week for notable people from the entertainment field who have passed away.

Shelley Fabares ... Dolly Parton ... I am sure I am missing someone ...

But now we have two other notables.

Actor/Singer Tim Curry left us the other day.

He is best known for his work in "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" and "Clue" films, but he also had a very short-term singing career.

The one song of his that I fondly remember is "I Do the Rock, which made the Billboard Hot 100 Singles Chart in 1979 at its lower rungs, and that was pretty much that for him as a singer.

I always liked that song, and his deadpan vocals made the song memorable.

He had been in ill health for quite a long time.

And then we have Jaye P. Morgan.

Let me focus on her.

It is very difficult to describe Jaye P. Morgan to anyone who doesn't recognize the name, but she really had several different careers all rolled up into one.

During the early 1950s to the early 1960s, Morgan placed 20 singles on Billboard's Top Singles Chart, or whatever it was called back then.

She was basically a Big Band singer in the era when that phenomenon had already died out, but she was still pretty successful as a vocalist during the early rock and roll era, with "That's All I Want From You" hitting #3 in 1954.

She had a couple of other pretty big hits, but by 1960s, that was pretty much that.

Morgan--born Mary Margaret Morgan in 1931--kind of faded from view, but she continued to record and act during the entirety of the 1960s and early 1970s, and appeared on many of the variety shows and game shows of the era.

One memorable appearance that I remember was her guest starring role on "My Three Sons" where she played a washed-up singer (!!!) who wanted to resurrect her career.

Yes, life imitating art!

Don Grady played Robbie Douglas on the show, and not only was he an actor, he was an actual musician with singles out under his own name and with a band called The Yellow Balloon--which had a hit with a song with that same name.

Anyway, Morgan's character saw Robbie's fictional band perform, "Good Man To Have Around the House"--which Grady, in real life, actually released under his own name and that of the "Windupwatchband" during that period--and her character decided that if you can't beat them, join them, and ended the show with the rocking "Gonna Getcha" and she found a new audience with the kids.

But nothing really happened after that.

She continued to appear on a lot of TV shows, but her career kind of stalled ...

Until "The Gong Show" became a brief phenomenon on the airwaves.

Starting out as a somewhat legitimate talent showcase but morphing into something very, very different from that, Morgan was one of the judges, and she was as wild as the show's creator and host Chuck Barris--

Even more so.

On the show featuring Gene, Gene the Dancing Machine and acts where sexual innuendo was their stock in trade, Morgan went with that flow, and there was one episode where she got so into what was going on that she stripped off her blouse--network censors were onto the show as it grew in popularity, and the scene was censored--

And she was suspended from the show for a short period.

She became a very hot commodity again, and while her singing career was still in limbo, she once again became a name and a guest on every variety show of the era.

When "The Gong Show" went off the air, she kind of faded from view, too, and honestly, I did not even know that she was still with us until the announcement of her passing on Wednesday.

Yes, both Curry and Morgan are not in the same class as Dolly Parton was--they are somewhere in the same neighborhood as Shelley Fabares--but they each made their indelible marks on our consciousness--

And their performances live on on YouTube and the like.

Yes, this has been a tough week for celebrity passings, but all of their legacies are stoked in cement for all to enjoy.