Jim Morrison, a man who sang, wrote and drank hard as lead singer of the Doors, has died peacefully at the age of 27. He died in the early morning of Saturday, July 3rd, but it was July 9th, two days after he had been buried in a Paris cemetery, before his manager let word out to the American press.

James Douglas Morrison was born in Melbourne, Florida, December 8th, 1943. It appears he began living about 22 years later, when he'd finally crossed the country, where he would enroll in the Theater Arts department at UCLA and, later, meet Ray Manzarek and form the Doors. In his official biography, Morrison filled in, under "Family": "Deceased." While his favorite singers actually were, as he also declared, Frank Sinatra and Elvis, and while his favorite food was meat, his family was only dead in one man's mind. Morrison never talked about his family. “I don't want to involve anyone unless they want it,” he said in his Rolling Stone interview with Jerry Hopkins in 1969. "I don't see any of them", brother, sister, and his parents, Rear Admiral and Mrs. George "Steve" Morrison.

The Morrisons raised Jim, Andy and Anne in Alexandria, Virginia, a Middle Atlantic port town, port for George Washington High School, alma mater in the late Fifties to Cass Elliot, Zal Yanovsky and Scott MacKenzie.

Slight little Jim Morrison slowly, surely moved onto the literary road, in an English class where he got pumped full of classics. Crawdaddy, in April 1969, published an exhaustively investigated article by Michael Horowitz, written in the style of an obituary, complete with nodding, fingers-stroking-chin recollections by Morrison's schoolmates, blues influences, and mother’s friend. The younger brother of one of Jim's classmates told Horowitz.

"My brother said Morrison was a genius, he knew all about the poets, he knew all about poetry and all about books. He knew more than the teacher even, like sometimes someone would ask a question and the teacher wouldn’t know the answer, and Morrison would just blurt it out. Without raising his hand or anything"