READY OR NOT, HERE HE COMES:

The Arkansas-born, Texas-raised Dorough began working in music in the army, serving as a composer, arranger and player in the Special Services Army Band between 1943 and '45, before getting a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of North Texas. In the late '40s, Dorough made his way to New York, working there as a pianist and singer.

He released his debut album, Devil May Care, in 1956 on Gus Wildi's Bethlehem label, also home to Nina Simone's first album. Devil May Care was a document of loungey bebop, with Dorough's windy, charming and idiosyncratically accented singing of buoyant lyrics that hinted at his success to come. "In a dream / the strangest and oddest things / appear / and what insane insane and silly things / we do," he sang on "I Had the Craziest Dream."

Not long after the release of Devil May Care, the legendary Miles Davis recorded his own interpretation of its title track, which would go on to become a jazz standard.

Dorough collaborated with Davis on the serrated holiday song "Blue Xmas (To Whom It May Concern)" and later sang on "Nothing Like You," the closing track of Davis' 1967 album Sorcerer. As critic Ben Ratliff wrote in notes accompanying a vinyl reissue of Sorcerer last fall: "The trumpeter Leron Thomas recently told me that he thinks of it as Miles's version of a Looney Tunes move: 'That's All, Folks.' "

Then, in 1971, with the jazz money running thin, Dorough was asked by his boss at the advertising company where he had a day job to set the multiplication tables to music; his boss cited his children's ability to remember Hendrix and Rolling Stones lyrics, but not their school lessons.

"I got the idea that three is a magic number," Dorough told NPR's Rachel Martin in 2013. "Then I looked in the magic book and sure enough, three is one of the magic numbers." That concept became the song "Three Is a Magic Number" and the project would become the Grammy-nominated Multiplication Rock. 

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