Dave ‘Baby’ Cortez, Hitmaker Who Seemed to Vanish, Is Dead at 83

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Music|Dave ‘Baby’ Cortez, Hitmaker Who Seemed to Vanish, Is Dead at 83

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/arts/music/dave-baby-cortez-dead.html

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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.

In a black-and-white photo, he sits at an organ and smiles. He is elegantly dressed and has processed hair.
Dave “Baby” Cortez in 1959, the year his instrumental “The Happy Organ” reached No. 1 on the Billboard singles chart.Credit...ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty Images

Alex Williams

July 10, 2025Updated 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.


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