Memphis deejay Jack Parnell, a golden voice of rock 'n' roll radio, has died at age 84

Jack Parnell, a Memphis rock 'n' roll deejay and longtime voice artist whose resonant pipes thrilled listeners and inspired generations of broadcast professionals, was remembered Friday as a pop-culture hero in the era when the Baby Boom was addicted to the sonic boom of Top Forty radio, TV dance parties and inescapable commercial jingles.

Parnell's voice — a golden, persuasive baritone that was ideal for radio, a magnet for listeners and the envy of his peers — was his calling card and chief selling point in a career that basically lasted his entire adult life. "The best advertising is word of mouth…YOUR words and JACK PARNELL's mouth!" proclaims the banner on Parnell's website, promoting the voiceover talent business that followed his radio days.

"He had his face up on billboards, and if you were a kid back then, everybody knew who Jack Parnell was," said Parnell's son, actor Chris Parnell, a former "Saturday Night Live" cast member who has followed in his father's footsteps — or voiceprint — as a voice performer on such projects as"Rick and Morty," "Archer," "Hotel Transylvania" and "Family Guy."

“He had the most recognizable voice I ever heard in my life,” said longtime Memphis radio personality Ron Olson, who said he idolized Parnell when the disc jockey was part of the WHBQ-AM 56 stable of stars that included Elvis pal George Klein.

“It was pure sugar" Olson said of Parnell's voice. "It had resonance and clarity and crispness and authority.”

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Parnell, 84, who had been in poor health in recent months, died Wednesday at his Germantown home. He never had officially retired, continuing as long as possible to produce and record advertisements, training-film narration and other types of work in his home studio, which was the successor to Wilkerson Parnell Sound Studio, which he and another former "Q" deejay, Skip Wilkerson, founded in 1973.

“God needed somebody to make announcements, that’s why He called him home,” said Olson, currently the weekday morning-shift deejay on WRVR-FM 104.5 (“The River”).

According to the Tennessee Radio Hall of Fame, which inducted Parnell in 2015, Parnell in 1956 was the first person to play Carl Perkins' Memphis-made Sun record, "Blue Suede Shoes," on the air. Parnell was working in Gibson and Madison counties at the time, but within two years he was at WHBQ, where deejay "Daddy-O" Dewey Phillips had ignited the rock 'n' roll big bang in 1954 with the first public broadcast of Elvis Presley's debut single, "That's All Right."

Parnell was recruited to Memphis by WHBQ radio and TV personality Wink Martindale (who found greater fame years later as the host of such nationally televised game shows as "Tic-Tac-Dough"). He arrived at a time when WHBQ dominated the youth market in the region, and he helped the station maintain and expand its appeal. In the early 1960s, Parnell's smiling face beamed from billboards on Memphis streets, next to ad copy that proclaimed: "91% of Memphis hears WHBQ - Jack Parnell."

Parnell worked the lucrative morning "drive-time" slot at WHBQ from 1958 to 1971 — an era when such stars as Jerry Lee Lewis and Neil Diamond would drop by the studio, to promote their records and concerts. As rock and pop fractured into FM "hard rock" and other strains, Parnell relocated to WMC-AM 790 for a few years before moving fulltime into voice work and production. His voice went coast to coast, as he and his colleagues worked on spots for national as well as local brands.

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"You probably hear his voice as often as any you hear on the radio," reported The Commercial Appeal, in a 1982 story about Parnell's voiceover work. According to the story, Wilkerson Parnell Sound Studio clients included AutoZone, McDonald's, Jack Pirtle's Chicken and Bud Davis Cadillac.

In a defoliant commercial, according to the story, Parnell provided the voice of a cotton stalk. Explained Parnell: "I ended up saying something like, 'Here I am stark naked in the middle of a cotton patch, nothing but stalks and bolls.'"

When Parnell needed children's voices, he sometimes recruited his kids, Chris and Cindy. "He was a big influence on me," said Chris Parnell, whose mellifluous articulation carries a distinctive Parnell stamp.

"Influence" is a word that recurs when people discuss Parnell. “He was a big influence on my life,” said Dave Brown, 76, the Memphis radio and television personality who is perhaps best remembered for his lengthy stints as “Action News 5” meteorologist and local professional wrestling announcer. “Jack was my hero on WHBQ, I listened to him every morning. His voice, it was magic.”

Brown said he was  a 5th-grade student in Trenton, Tennessee, when he first discovered the Parnell voice on stations in Milan and Humboldt. While still a teenager, Brown began working on radio, and befriended Parnell, who convinced him not to leave Tennessee for journalism school at the University of Missouri. “He said, ‘You’re coming to Memphis State. You can still study journalism and you’re going to work for us,” at WHBQ.

Olson said that when he was “11 or 12” and obsessed with radio, his father, Walter Olson, “out of nowhere tells me Jack Parnell is coming to our house.” He said both men where ham radio enthusiasts, and Parnell was going to visit, to check out Walter Olsen’s set-up.

“I kept going to the living room, pulling the curtains back, anticipating his arrival,” Olson said. “And finally up drives the coolest, meanest, most fun, most sporty Mustang I ever saw in my life. I could hear the engine rumbling in the driveway. So I’m starstruck.

"I see him and I see the car and I say to myself, ‘That’s what I want to do for a living. That, right there.’ My dad was a great guy, but he wasn’t a disc jockey on WHBQ. We drove a tan Plymouth.”’

In addition to his children, Chris Parnell, of Los Angeles, and Cindy Parnell Howard, of Memphis, Parnell leaves his wife, Shirley Parnell, and three grandchildren.

Services will be at 1 p.m. Wednesday at Memorial Park Funeral Home, 5668 Poplar Ave., with burial to follow. Visitation is at noon.

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Jack Parnell, Memphis disc jockey and voice artist, dies at age 84