Lee Morris (3)

American songwriter who is most famous as the co-writer of the song "Blue Velvet". Born 12 March 12, 1912. Died October 18, 1978 (aged 66 years). Morris wrote "Blue Velvet" with Bernie Wayne in 1951. Morris co-founded music publisher Supreme Music Corp. with Charles Richmond (4) in 1949. Some of his copyrights credit more than one of his aliases, indicating his wife may have been one of the aliases or just that he used multiple aliases for one song. Morris was a graduate of Colby College (class of 1933), He was a history teacher in a junior high school in Boston, Massachusetts in the 1940s he began writing parody lyrics to pop songs for night club performers. Later he wrote entire shows and staged them in Boston, New York and Florida. In 1948 he had his first successful original song, "If I Only Had a Match," which was recorded by Al Jolson. He charted as a songwriter thirteen times between 1951 and 2012, eight of those versions of "Blue Velvet". The most popular version came in 1963 by Bobby Vinton: the song hitting #1 in the U.S. (overall and adult contemporary charts).