"Old people," said Barbara Molloy, "sometimes just kind of fall [between] the cracks."
The Chattanooga resident, for many years a singer and model and an early television personality, isn't quite ready to join them.
Molloy, 80, is sharing her vocal gift with the Chattanooga area again as a member of The Continentals, a singing group composed of residents of the Continental condominiums.
The area native said she last sang with a band in Huntsville, Ala., in 1970.
For most of the years since then, Molloy lived with her late husband, William, in Chattanooga and later in Bledsoe County.
"I'd kind of gotten down," she said of the months following the death of her husband in 2010. "We'd been married 60 years. It was a real blow. I got a lot of depression."
An invitation to join the singing group and her recent appearance in "Chattanooga Radio and Television," a book of photographs of the area's broadcasting history by television news anchor
David Carroll, perked her up, Molloy said.
"It's been a part of me since I came out of the womb," she said. "I guess they popped me out, and I began to sing. If not for music, what a dull place this would be."
Molloy, who sang on regional tours with the Glenn Miller Band, the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra and Billy Butterfield & His Orchestra in the 1950s and 1960s, said she takes just as much delight with The Continentals.
"It's a joy to get up and sing with this group," she said. "We just giggle and laugh and have a good time."
Molloy said she began her singing career as a child when she accompanied her uncle to downtown storefront Christian missions. He provided religious films, she said, and she sang gospel songs while he changed film reels.
She later sang on T. Perry Branum's gospel radio show on WDOD, then in the Red Bank High School swing band and eventually with a number of area bands.
In fact, Molloy said she met her husband at a gig one of the bands had at the former Patten Hotel.
"That was all done by God," she said. "I give him all the honor and glory for anything good."
In 1949, Molloy sang on the opening show of WVUN, the area's first FM radio station. And in the mid- to late-1950s, she was featured in the early years of television on all three area stations.
Along the way, she was an early "weather girl" for WDEF, where she "didn't know one state from another"; performed with Jim Nabors on WRCB before he became a celebrity and appeared regularly on "The Roy Morris Show"; and performed with Johnny Carson, later "The Tonight Show" host, when he came here to promote the beginning of WTVC.
Molloy said she also sang at Bibletown, then a winter Bible retreat for seniors in Boca Raton, Fla., and once appeared with singer, author and artist Joni Eareckson Tada -- all while being married and raising two children.
"I had a little career," she said. "I never really ever thought of being great. [But] it can get lost. [The appearance in David Carroll's book] brought so many nice memories back to mind."
Today, Malloy is glad for the continuing opportunity to sing -- to use some of the "sweetness God gives you."
"I had a lot of opportunities not a lot of little girls had," she said. "God had his hand on me then, and he still has his hand on me."