Born on This Day in 1945, One Half of the Husband-and-Wife Duo Behind One of Country Music’s Most Unforgettable No. 1 Hits

Some country music songs become hits by tapping into a deep, universal well of emotion. And others endure because they’re just so…well, strange. “Tennessee Bird Walk”, by husband-and-wife duo Jack Blanchard & Misty Morgan, is an example of the latter. The song imagines a world where everything you know about birds is wrong. At some point, stripped of wings and bird baths, our avian neighbors begin walking “southward in their dirty underwear.”

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“Tennessee Bird Walk” topped the country charts for two weeks while also crossing over into pop territory, peaking at number 23 on the Top 40. Today, we’re looking at the life and career of Misty Morgan, born Mary Donahue on this day (May 23) in 1945 in Buffalo, New York.

In an interesting twist of fate, Donahue was born at the same Buffalo hospital where her future husband, Jack Blanchard, had entered the world almost exactly three years earlier, on May 8, 1942.

Additionally, both spent part of their childhoods in Ohio, with Donahue’s family moving to the southern part of the state when she was young. Her career began playing keyboard in pop groups around Cincinnati before she found steady work as a lounge singer and piano-bar entertainer. Donahue experimented with the stage names  “Jacqueline Hyde” and “Maryann Mail” before settling on Misty Morgan.

Misty Morgan Was the First Woman in Country Music to Do This

Eventually, her line of work took her to Florida, where Jack Blanchard was working as a comedian and musician at the King of Hearts Club in Miami. He was also producing songs for Starday Records when he met Misty Morgan in 1963. They married four years later, in 1967.

The duo wasn’t choosy about genre, with Morgan often hooking up various electronic devices to her keyboard in order to achieve their desired sound. However, her husky alto and storytelling abilities made country music a natural landing place, and Jack and Misty debuted on the country charts with “Big Black Bird (Spirit of Our Love)” in 1969.

Success arrived next year with “Tennessee Bird Walk”, an utterly nonsensical, just plain fun track penned by Blanchard. According to Music Row, Jack Blanchard & Misty Morgan brought to mind “Sonny & Cher lost in a poppyfield in South Carolina,” according to Music Row.

The couple produced all their singles through their own company, Jack and Misty Productions, making Misty Morgan the first woman in country music to co-produce a No. 1 hit.

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“Tennessee Bird Walk” wasn’t their last taste of chart success. They followed with the No. 5 country hit “Humphrey the Camel” (1970), and “Somewhere in Virginia in the Rain”, which peaked at No. 15 in 1972.

Diagnosed with cancer in late 2020, Misty Morgan died in Florida on January 1, 2021. She was 75 years old.

Featured image courtesy of Jack Blanchard/Facebook