Bob McGrath and Sesame Street’s Inner City

Fifty-three years ago, Bob McGrath, the actor and singer who died Sunday at 90, appeared on an episode of a brand-new children’s show called Sesame Street. The target audience for PBS’s experimental show, which cast irascible puppets opposite adults of surpassing gentleness, was the “4-year-old inner-city black youngster,” as The New York Times explained in 1979.

McGrath’s character was called Bob Johnson; he was a music teacher. His voice, honed at music school and with the University of Michigan glee club, had all of the earnestness and ease of Mr. Rogers—but ten times the refinement. He could also bring up the formality. His gorgeous version of “Good Morning Starshine,” from Hair!, which he performs with a Woodstock-style gang of Muppets, shows off his clean, trained, first-tenor voice—the hippie Bing Crosby.

On December 24, 1969, in the show’s debut season, he and Gordon (Matt Robinson) are shown whitewashing a giant lower-case letter “i.”