Roger Whittaker Dies

Roger Whittaker is a British-Kenyan singer, songwriter, and musician known for his folk and pop music, distinctive baritone voice, and impressive whistling skills. He was born Roger Henry Brough Whittaker on March 22, 1936, in Nairobi, Kenya, which was then a British colony. He spent his early years in Kenya and developed a love for music and the outdoors during his upbringing.

His English parents, Vi (née Snowden) and Edward Whittaker were from Staffordshire, where they owned and operated a grocery shop. His father was injured in a motorcycle accident and the family moved to a farm near Thika, Kenya, because of its warmer climate. His grandfather sang in various clubs and his father played the violin. Whittaker learned to play the guitar on an instrument made for him during World War II by an Italian prisoner of war from the North African campaign. Roger attended Prince of Wales School in Nairobi, where he completed his high school education.

Upon completing he was called up for national service and spent two years in the Kenya Regiment fighting the Mau Mau^[1] in the Aberdare Forest. He later received a scholarship to study zoology and marine biology at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

While in South Africa, he began to perform in local clubs and gained recognition for his musical talents. Roger Whittaker’s music career took off when he moved to the United Kingdom in the early 1960s. He signed a recording contract with Fontana Records.

They released his first professional single, “The Charge of the Light Brigade”, in 1962. (On the labels of the Fontana singles, he is billed as “Rog Whittaker”.) That summer, Whittaker performed in Portrush, Northern Ireland. He achieved a breakthrough when he was signed to appear on an Ulster Television^[2] show called This and That. His second single was a cover version of “Steel Men”, released in June 1962.

In 1966, Whittaker switched from Fontana to EMI’s Columbia label and was billed as Roger Whittaker from this point forward. In 1967, Roger released the single “If I Were a Rich Man” (IMP 200.015), a cover of a show tune from the 1964 Fiddler on the Roof musical. Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock wrote it and Whittaker delivers it well.

His next single was his self-composed “Durham Town (The Leavin’)”, which in 1969, became Whittaker’s first UK Top 20 hit in the UK Singles Chart (in the US it was on RCA). He released the uptempo “New World in the Morning” in 1970, where it became a Top 20 hit in Billboard magazine’s Easy Listening chart.

That same year, his downbeat theme song “No Blade of Grass”, written for the film adaptation of the same name that was sung during both the opening and ending titles, became his first film credit. In 1975, EMI released “The Last Farewell”, a track from Whittaker’s 1971 New World in the Morning album. It became his biggest hit and a signature song, selling more than 11 million copies worldwide.

The record would go largely unnoticed until 1975, when, as Whittaker often recalled, the wife of a program director for an Atlanta radio station happened to hear the song while traveling through Canada. She suggested her husband play the record on his station, and the song caught on with listeners.

“The Last Farewell,” perhaps best remembered for its opening line “There’s a ship lies rigged and ready in the harbor” or its sweet, earworm chorus “For you are beautiful, I have loved you dearly/More dearly than the spoken word can tell,” reached the Top 20 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart by June of that year and went on to #1 on the Adult Contemporary chart.

Whittaker will undoubtedly be remembered by many American TV viewers of the 1970s and early ’80s for his ubiquitous TV commercials touting greatest hit collections and cover songs such as “Imagine,” “Annie’s Song” and “Feelings,” released on labels K-tel Records and TeeVee Records. The spots occasionally included Whittaker’s whistling, a popular feature among his many fans.