Here is a genuinely happy story that turns sad, and ends in an unmarked grave at NYC potters field nearby in The Bronx.
Dave "Baby" Cortez was the musician behind "The Happy Organ," The 1959 song became the first instrumental to top the Billboard Hot 100. Dave died quietly at his home in The Bronx on May 31, 2022, at age 83. Nobody noticed CC died a pauper until three years later.
He was born David Cortez Clowney in Detroit in 1938, where he'd worked as a doo-wop pianist before literally stumbling into and then plying "The Happy Organ" almost by accident.
Dave recorded the song with vocals but hated his own singing, then noticed a Hammond organ sitting unused in the studio corner and decided to try it instead. It became a No. 1 hit and launched a string of other charting singles.
But he walked away from the music industry in the early 1970s and became deeply reclusive — his own daughter, Taryn Sheffield, hadn't heard from him since 2009. When he died, there was no family available to claim his body, so he was buried in an unmarked grave in the potter's field on Hart Island, off the Bronx, where more than a million unclaimed New Yorkers are interred.
His daughter only learned he'd died when BMI called looking for his next of kin over songwriting royalties. The story only became public in July 2025, when the New York Times ran his obituary — three years after his actual death. Norton Records co-founder Miriam Linna, who'd coaxed him back into the studio briefly in 2011 for one last album, said she had no idea what he'd been doing in the decades before that, though she believed he'd spent some time playing church organ in Cincinnati.