BIOGRAPHY AND DISCOGRAPHY

 

The most active of three sisters who briefly recorded together as The Harris Sisters in the mid-Nineteen Fifties and who were the brother of prolific songwriter, occasional singer and record producer Kent Harris.

Marcene “Dimples” Harris was born in 1935 in Oklahoma City, five years after Kent, and a year before the family moved to San Diego with younger sisters Beverly and Betty Jean coming along next.

As a child Dimples learned piano by simply watching the white daughter of the woman her mother worked for take private lessons and in 1951 became the first of the family to break into show business playing organ in a trio around Los Angeles.

Signed to the Regent subsidiary of Savoy Records that year they cut four songs, only two of which saw the light of day a year later, but showed Harris to have an engaging voice. It’d be another couple of years before Dimples got another record, this time on the small Trend Records label along with her brother on the flip side who performed under the name Ducky Drake for this release.

The following year Dimples formed a vocal group with Beverly and Betty Jean and were signed to Capitol and later Smash, touring extensively but with only two recording dates. Dimples on her own was busier, cutting sides for Crest, where her brother was recording, and then upon marrying bassist Harold “Hack” Jackson she began recording extensively with him in the 1960’s.

Betty married comedian Redd Foxx who had initially opened for the girls, while Beverly reputedly joined The Flares for awhile and occasionally substituted for Zola Taylor on stage during The Platters heyday, as both were managed by Buck Ram, though both these sisters eventually left music behind them.

Dimples however continued to record, sometimes under her married name Marcene Jackson, but mostly as Marcene Harris into the 1970’s when she became a very popular attraction in Las Vegas. She passed away of cancer in 1976, scoring no hits but enjoying a long and varied career as a performer.
 
 
DIMPLES HARRIS DISCOGRAPHY (Records Reviewed To Date On Spontaneous Lunacy):

CALL ME DADDY
(Regent 1045; March, 1952)
A low-key, almost demo-like, recording featuring just Harris on piano and some light percussion backing her and a male counterpart as they trade mildly flirtatious lines in an easy-going fashion that is simplistic but oddly endearing. (4)