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Jaye P. Morgan (born Mary Margaret Morgan, December 3, 1931) is a retired popular American singer and game show panelist.
Morgan was born in Mancos, Colorado, but her family moved to California by the time she was in high school. In the late 1940s, at Verdugo Hills High School in Tujunga, Los Angeles, California, she served as class treasurer (and got the nickname "Jaye P." after the banker J. P. Morgan) and sang at school assemblies, accompanied by her brother on guitar.
In 1951, a year after graduation from Verdugo Hills, she made a recording of the song "Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries" which made it to the Top Ten. Soon after, she received an RCA Victor recording contract and she had five hits in one year, including "That's All I Want from You," her biggest hit, which reached #3 on the charts. Other notable hits included "The Longest Walk" and "Pepper Hot Baby".
From 1954 to 1955, she was a vocalist on the television show "Stop the Music." In 1956 she had her own television show, named for her, and guested on a number of other variety shows as well. She was a charter member of the Robert Q. Lewis "gang" on Lewis's popular weekday show on CBS, and was featured on a special episode of The Jackie Gleason Show in which Lewis's entire company substituted for the vacationing Gleason.
After a period in the 1960s when she did very little in the entertainment field, confining herself to a small number of night club appearances, she returned to the public eye in the 1970s, mainly as an actress. She played herself on a 1973 episode (The Songwriter) of the sitcom The Odd Couple.
Morgan also guest starred on The Muppet Show (episode 218) in which she and Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem sang "That Old Black Magic."
It was during the 1970s when she gained a new generation of fans as a witty but cheerfully caustic panelist on the game/variety shows The Gong Show and Rhyme and Reason in the late 1970s, and in the 1980 "behind-the-scenes" movie version of The Gong Show. She was also right at home on the raunchy Playboy Channel game show Everything Goes.
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