Denny Doherty (November 29, 1940 – January 19, 2007) was a Canadian singer. He was a founding member of the 1960s musical group the Mamas and the Papas for which he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998.
Dennis Gerrard Stephen Doherty was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the son of an ironworker and a "housewife and mystic" as he once described his mother. He made his first public appearance at the age of 15 singing the Pat Boone hit Love Letters in the Sand at amateur night at the local skating rink. By the late 1950s he had shifted allegiance to the burgeoning folk song movement and had gained a recording contract with the New York company Columbia, with his group the Halifax Three.
Next, Doherty joined forces with husband and wife John and Michelle Phillips, as the New Journeymen. Michelle recalled that "it was so incredible to sing with somebody who had such a beautiful voice because John and I were just little croakers". Early in 1965, Cass Elliott brought her equally vital vocal talent to the group and the Mamas and the Papas were formed. As John Phillips wrote in the song Creeque Alley, his New York musician friends such as Roger McGuinn (of the Byrds) and Barry McGuire (singer of the hit Eve of Destruction) had already headed west ("McGuinn and McGuire just a-gettin' higher in LA"); the Mamas and the Papas decided to follow suit.
In Los Angeles, the Mamas and the Papas linked up with the producer Lou Adler. Under his guidance, the Mamas and the Papas had six Top 20 hits in America in two years, beginning with California Dreamin' on which Doherty's pure tenor and jazz flautist Bud Shank perfectly conveyed John Phillips's paean to the west coast. This was followed by Monday, Monday, I Saw Her Again, the vaudeville-styled Words of Love, the lush 1950s ballad Dedicated to the One I Love, and Creeque Alley. Monday, Monday, perhaps the finest moment of Doherty's recording career, won a Grammy award as Best Contemporary Group Performance of 1966. The group enjoyed similar success in Britain where California Dreamin' became a hit all over again after it was used in a commercial in 1997. Although John Phillips was the group's principal songwriter, Doherty co-wrote I Saw Her Again and Got a Feeling.
In the summer of 1968, however, the group collapsed as a result of the prodigious drug intake and the complicated inter-personal relationships of its members. As music historian Barney Hoskyns put it: "An affair began between Michelle and Denny for whom Cass lusted." Mama Cass launched herself on a solo career, while Michelle Phillips moved into acting and John and Denny each recorded solo albums. Denny's Waiting For a Song was the last album Cass sang on before her death in London in 1974. In 1975 Doherty made his acting debut in Man on the Moon, a Broadway show created by Phillips and Andy Warhol.
Despite the dissolution of the group, there remained a public demand for the Mamas and the Papas. There was a brief reunion to record an album in 1971, but the Mamas and Papas did not appear again on stage until 1982 when Doherty and John Phillips toured with two new members, Elaine "Spanky" McFarlane (from the 1960s group Spanky and Our Gang) and the Phillips's daughter, McKenzie. In later line-ups of the group Doherty was replaced by Scott McKenzie, whose John Phillips-composed San Francisco (Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair) had been a hippie anthem. The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998.
Doherty had returned to Canada in 1978 and played a variety of roles in TV dramas and films including Elvis Presley's father in Elvis Meets Nixon. From 1993 to 2001, he played the part of the Harbour Master, as well as the voice-overs of the characters, in Theodore Tugboat, a CBC Television children's show chronicling the "lives" of vessels in a busy harbour loosely based upon Halifax Harbour. He also memorialised the Mamas and the Papas in an autobiographical stage show, Dream a Little Dream, co-written with Paul Ledoux.
Doherty died on January 19, 2007, at his home in Mississauga, Ontario. The cause was not immediately known, but he had suffered from kidney failure following surgery for an abdominal aortic aneurysm. His funeral service was held at St Stephen's Roman Catholic Church in Halifax. He was interred at the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Lower Sackville, Nova Scotia.