Lowrey Lynn Ready was born on December 3, 1944, in Dallas, Texas. His parents were Robert and Myrtle Ready. When he was still a young child, Lynn started taking singing and dancing lessons and quickly began winning amateur contests in the Dallas and Ft. Worth areas. Lynn always went by his middle name in his professional work, even as a child performer. As his local fame increased, he sang on local radio and TV shows, even as young as three years old. Later, he learned to play the piano and the steel guitar and became quite proficient with them.
Lynn’s first professional, as opposed to amateur, performance was in February of 1957 on a local TV show produced in Dallas. The show was called The Curt Massey Show. Not long after performing on this show, Lynn attended a regional audition for replacement Mouseketeers for the third season of The Mickey Mouse Club. Lynn was hired for this position and became the only Mouseketeer whose family wasn’t already living in California when he was brought on board the show.
Lynn moved with his family, which included his older brother, Jack, to Canoga Park, California after Lynn was hired to be on The Mickey Mouse Club. As with the other third season replacement cast members, Lynn was offered a one year contract with the Disney Company, with four options to extend or change it. Much to the disappointment of Lynn and his family, who had uprooted themselves and moved halfway across the country for this, the show was cancelled shortly after Lynn was hired, and his entire career as a Mouseketeer only lasted six months. Lynn then found himself an unemployed young teenager, wondering what his next career move, if any, should be.
Like most of the other third season replacement Mouseketeers, Lynn was placed on the secondary Blue Team. He did not get to appear in the opening roll call segment or the closing Alma Mater segment, as those segments had already been filmed before he was hired to be on the show. This was true of the other third season replacement cast members, as well. The show was also reduced from an hour-long show to a half-hour show in the third season, which meant the cast members no longer had a daily presence on the show. Two of the daily shows each week were devoted to cartoons, serials, and either a newsreel or an encyclopedia special. Because of this, Lynn’s opportunities for performing on the show were more limited than the original cast members were. Yet, this did not mean that he didn’t get to perform on the show at all.
Lynn appeared in several production numbers on the show. He even received his own feature spot doing the jazz dance that was his signature talent on the Mousehaturntoentertain segment of the show. The music and choreography Lynn used in this number were quite different from the usual style of those things on the show, and reflected Lynn’s performances before he was hired to be a Mouseketeer. Lynn also got a solo song written by Jimmy Dodd called Everything is Fun. In the couples dancing segments, he was paired with Cheryl Holdridge, who he seemed to enjoy dancing with very much, unlike her previous partner, Dennis Day.
Lynn also got the opportunity to be in a Mickey Mouse Club serial called The New Adventures of Spin and Marty. Along with fellow Mouseketeer Don Agrati and another actor who was not a Mickey Mouse Club cast member, Lynn sang a song for the Triple R “show within a show” segment of the Mickey Mouse Club. Besides these things, his primary role on The Mickey Mouse Club was to sit in the background and look interested at what the other kids were doing. Lynn did the same kind of background acting on an episode of Disneyland called The Fourth Anniversary Show, where his primary role was to sit in the background and watch Mouseketeer Darlene sing.
After Lynn left the show, he attended Canoga Park High School. There, he played football and graduated in 1962. While attending high school, Lynn also added the drums, ukulele, xylophone, and harmonica to the list of musical instruments he could play, and he also took up hunting as a hobby. He was cast in a bit part in the movie version of the Broadway musical Bye, Bye, Birdie when he was attending Valley Junior College. After that, he was cast in a recurring role as a frat brother of Rickey Nelson on the TV show Ozzie and Harriet. He also had small, uncredited parts in the movies My Fair Lady and The Collector. After this, Lynn began to focus his career away from acting and more on music.
Lynn loved music, and had appeared as a backup musician and singer on an album released when he was in high school. He signed a contract with Motown Records, and is credited as a sideman on several records from that company. While Lynn doesn’t appear to have released any records under his own name, he is credited on many albums from the 1960s and 1970s, usually as a rhythm guitarist.
Lynn provided a photo and some updates to Keith Keller’s book in 1975, and took part with thirty other Mouseketeers in 1980 in the TV Mickey Mouse Club 25th Anniversary special. Lynn does not appear to have done any more work with the Mouseketeers after this. In fact, he lead a private life after the 1980 TV special, and did not release a lot of information about himself. So, while Lynn was a well-known, respected, and sought-after session musician in the 1960s and 1970s, his life after that is not well documented. This seems to have been by design by him, as he valued his privacy, and desired a normal life doing what he loved. According to Lynn’s family, he crossed over to the other side of cancer in February of 2018.
