Whatever happened to Baby Cortez
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All on Thu Jul 10 16:42:11 2025
Dave ‘Baby’ Cortez, Hitmaker Who Seemed to Vanish, Is Dead at 83
His “The Happy Organ” reached No. 1 in 1959, but his pop stardom was short-lived, and his death in 2022, with an anonymous burial, remains a
source of mystery.
By Alex Williams
July 10, 2025
Updated 3:41 p.m. ET
It’s not that Dave “Baby” Cortez was forgotten. A keyboardist, singer
and songwriter, he emerged from the thriving Detroit doo-wop scene of
the 1950s to score two Top 10 hits, one of which, “The Happy Organ,” an aural Tilt-a-Whirl of an instrumental, soared to No. 1 in March 1959 and
sold more than a million copies.
But he rarely granted interviews, particularly after largely abandoning
the business, with a trace of bitterness, in the early 1970s. The few
available online biographies provide almost no details of his life
beyond his recording history and chart success.
Taryn Sheffield, his daughter, said in an interview that she had not
heard from him since 2009. “He’s been a recluse for many, many years,” she said.
At times, he appeared to serve as a church organist in Cincinnati, said
Miriam Linna, a founder of Norton Records, an independent New York label
that in 2011 persuaded Mr. Cortez to record his first album since 1972.
At other times, he appeared to be living in the Bronx, doing who knows what.
It was only in recent weeks that Ms. Linna learned that he had been dead
for three years.
According to city records, Mr. Cortez — whose real name was David Cortez Clowney — died on May 31, 2022, at his home on Westchester Avenue in the Bronx. He was 83. His body lies in Plot 434 on Hart Island, the potter’s field off the coast of the Bronx, where some one million bodies are
buried in unmarked graves.
It was an ignominious end for an artist whose career was curious enough
to begin with.
Mr. Cortez was born on Aug. 13, 1938, in Detroit, one of two sons of
David and Lillian Mae Clowney. His father played piano and encouraged
David to follow suit.
His musical abilities flourished while he was a student at Northwestern
High School in Highland Park, Mich. When he was about 16, he joined a well-regarded local doo-wop vocal group, the Five Pearls (later simply
the Pearls), as second tenor and pianist.
The group made some waves with songs like “Please Let Me Know,” “Shadows of Love” (written by in part by Mr. Cortez) and “Bells of Love.” They eventually relocated to New York City, where Mr. Cortez also spent a
brief period with another vocal group, the Valentines.
But he had greater ambitions. “Armed with a pocketful of songs, a
self-taught mastery of the piano, an infectious voice and a lively wit,
Dave started making the rounds of Tin Pan Alley publishers, playing his
own tunes,” according to the liner notes of “The Happy Organ,” his RCA Victor album from 1959.
He formed the David Clowney Band and released the vampy instrumental “Movin’ and Groovin’” (1956) and the soulful “Soft Lights” (1957). He
adopted his stage name in 1958, the same year he stumbled across the
song that would define his career.
At the outset, the recording session for “The Happy Organ,” held in a basement studio at 1650 Broadway in Midtown Manhattan in the fall of
1958, seemed anything but promising.
“I made the track first,” Mr. Cortez said in a rare interview, with the National Association of Music Merchants, and “it was supposed to be a vocal.” But, he added, “I didn’t like the vocal, ’cause I’m not a great
singer.”
Then he spied a hulking shape under a plastic cover in the corner of the studio. “Usually in the studio, they have the Hammond organ covered up,”
he recalled. “People weren’t using it then, except in gospel. I said, ‘Can I try that over there?’”
“They played the track back a couple of times, and I started playing
with this melody,” he said. “I guess God gave me this melody.”
“A lot of people called it ‘Shortnin’ Bread,’ other people called it this or that,” he added. “But it worked.”
The result was an exuberant, if not exactly polished, tune with circus
calliope overtones.
“The end of the take was rough,” Mr. Cortez was quoted as saying in a
brief biography of him on a European music site, Tim’s This Is My Story. “It went on and on and was full of wrong notes,” which, he added, was “one reason why it was faded out on the record after 1:58.”
Despite its modest prospects, “The Happy Organ” took off, and it is now hailed as the first instrumental to top the Billboard Hot 100. It also
opened the floodgates. Other instrumental chart-toppers soon followed, including “Sleep Walk” by Santo & Johnny and “The Theme From ‘A Summer Place’” by Percy Faith and His Orchestra.
To some music aficionados, the song helped liberate the organ from its Sunday-processional connotations and establish it as a viable rock
instrument — witness later hits like “Green Onions” by Booker T. and the M.G.’s, “96 Tears” by ? & the Mysterians and “Light My Fire” by the Doors.
And “The Happy Organ” lived on as a cover tune as well, recorded by
artists as diverse as the surf band the Ventures, the Jamaican reggae
band the Soul Vendors and the longtime Yankee Stadium organist Eddie Layton.
Mr. Cortez managed to avoid one-hit-wonder status when another organ instrumental of his, “Rinky Dink,” climbed to No. 10 in 1962. He
eventually steered toward soul and funk, and in 1972 released “Soul Vibration.” It would be his last album for nearly 40 years.
His last hit, a minor one, came in 1973, with “Someone Has Taken Your Place,” a gospel-tinged vocal number that peaked at No. 45 on the
Billboard R&B chart.
By the 1980s, Mr. Cortez was working a day job and living in the Jamaica section of Queens, according to the site Allmusic. He was also batting
away journalists’ efforts to ask him about his career. “The music
business wasn’t very kind to him,” Ms. Sheffield said, “and he was bitter.”
He appeared lost to music history when, in 2009, Ms. Linna, of Norton
Records, put out feelers to find him. (The label, which she founded with
her husband, Billy Miller, describes its mission as “to discover,
uncover and recover great unlauded music.”)
Ms. Linna heard nothing until she was shopping in a Brooklyn hardware
store one day and Mr. Cortez called her on her mobile phone. “I hear
you’re looking for me,” he said.
“I flipped out,” she recalled. “He was very, very nice and fun.”
And, to her surprise, he was willing to take another stab at recording.
Two years later, Norton released the album “Dave ‘Baby’ Cortez With Lonnie Youngblood and His Bloodhounds.” (Mr. Youngblood, a renowned saxophonist, had recorded with Jimi Hendrix.) That same year, Mr. Cortez performed a joyous set at the label’s 25th-anniversary concert in Brooklyn.
After that, not much — at least until Ms. Linna mentioned Mr. Cortez on
her biweekly music radio show, “Crashing the Party,” in June. After
hearing that episode, Liam Waldon, a 15-year-old doo-wop historian in Australia, decided to track down Mr. Cortez himself — “for an interview,
or just to talk to him,” he wrote in an email. “He seemed like a cool guy.”
After a bit of online sleuthing, Liam discovered that Mr. Cortez had
died and that his body remained unclaimed. He alerted Ms. Linna.
Ms. Sheffield had learned of his death in 2022 only after BMI, the music
rights organization, contacted her in looking for his next of kin.
Efforts to locate his body were fruitless, she said. She declined to
provide information about other survivors.
As for her lack of communication with her father, Ms. Sheffield said
that there was no bad blood between them. Life just got in the way.
“I’m 60 years old and I’ve got 10 grandchildren,” she said. “I really don’t have the time to move back.”
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