Blossom Dearie, who died in New York on Saturday at age 82, will I hope justly go down with Sarah Vaughn, Ella Fitzgerald, Keely Smith, and Anita O’Day as one of the great vocalists of the twentieth century, an unlikely, untorchy stayer whose restaurant-row whisper could turn the hoariest of standards into something absolutely fresh and idiosyncratic and unique. Whitney Balliett once wrote that her voice could hardly reach the second floor of a doll house, but her emotional range hit highs and lows more extreme than the human ear was evolved to receive and transmit to the brain. Her “Down With Love,” an ironic reveille for anyone who’d ever been dumped, was a confetti parade of fizzy happiness, and who could ever rhyme Colorado and Nevada in the civic-minded geography lesson of “Rhode Island Is Famous for You” with such an infectiously perfect yet seemingly tossed off bounce of the voice? And who could ever read the Lorenz Hart’s lyrics of “Manhattan” again after listening to her rendition and not see them as less than a record of something painfully, ineffably melancholy? Her best-known album, May I Come In?, featured an orchestra, but what is most memorable about Blossom Dearie is the way she achieved her style without the orchestrated architecture of camp dramatics, without the lush Nelson Riddle–ish background keyed to the desired emotional effect. The generation following her had the Wall of Sound; a twinkling supper-club intimacy did her just fine.

It’s ironic then that many of us may forget that we first heard Blossom Dearie not on vinyl or CD but in the middle of H.R. Pufnstuf after an ad for Count Chocula. Starting with “Figure Eight,” on the original Multiplication Rock (1973), she contributed three installments to what would eventually become Schoolhouse Rock! I think the song she did with Bob Dorough, Jack Sheldon, and Essra Mohawk, “Mother Necessity” (“Mother Necessity, where would we be?”) is up there with “I’m Just a Bill” and “Conjunction Junction” in becoming something like mascots for the series, as instantly recognized and recalled as any three-chord Beatles riff. “Mother Necessity” was so nice a lesson that, as a kid, it never even hit you that were learning something. But my personal favorite was her 1975 “Unpack Your Adjectives”: It turned a letter from camp into an easy-to-remember grammar lesson and made mnemonics as appealing as Fruity Pebbles: “Friends asked us to describe/The people, places, and every last thing./So we unpacked our adjectives.”

The spoken word section of the commercial drove the message home: “You can make even adjectives out of the other parts of speech like verbs and nouns. All you have to do is tack on an ending like “-ic” or “-ish” or “-ary.” For example: This boy can grow up to be a huge man, but still have a boyish face. Boy is a noun, but the ending “-ish” makes it an adjective, boyish, that describes the huge man’s face. Get it?”

Got it! Blossom Dearie didn’t write the words, any more than she wrote that she was discontented with homes that are rented, or that comparatively speaking, no street beats Mott Street, in July. (The lyrics, by the way, were the first by George Newall, an agency exec at McCaffrey and McCall who, after creating the Hai Karate ad campaign, became the creative force behind Schoolhouse Rock!) But she gravitated toward smart, funny lyrics and an oak solid tune — “if the music is no good,” she once told the Christian Science Monitor, “I’m not interested in the song”—and if “Unpack Your Adjectives” is no “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” Blossom Dearie did her bit to help drag this educational Trojan Horse into dens across the country.