OF THE PEOPLE:

"Schoolhouse Rock!," and Bob Dorough as its musical director, presented these animated gems as just another Saturday morning cartoon, and we ate it up. The music was irresistible, bypassing the brain and heading straight for the heart. It expressed a casual mastery, a deep sense of connection, and -- to borrow a modern phrase -- "baked-in diversity."

"Verb: That's What's Happenin'" gives us not only an insanely catchy song, but a black superhero. The cartoon aired on September 22, 1973, a scant six years after the Black Panther debuted in the Fantastic Four comic book series. Zachary Sanders sang it, but Bob Dorough wrote it.

Blossom Dearie, Dorough's friend and collaborator since the mid-'50s, sang his delicate and melancholy "Figure Eight." Again, Bob looked for the meaning behind the number: "Place it on its side," he wrote, "and it's a symbol meaning infinity."

Before all that, though, Bob Dorough was a solid jazz player who managed a rare vocal on a Miles Davis record. His singing was vulnerable and idiosyncratic, expressed with a charming Southern drawl -- definitely not what was considered popular at the time, especially in the mid-1950s, when Dorough released his first solo album, Devil May Care (his own website describes one performance as having "the soft-spoken tones of a hip elf"). [...]

As one astute YouTube commenter (it can happen) pointed out, Bob Dorough's singing was demotic: "of or relating to the ordinary, everyday, current form of language [or] everyday people." He spoke to us, about some extraordinary things, as if we not only could understand, but wanted to.

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