BALLADEER WITH AN INTERNATIONAL FOLLOWING
Roger Whittaker, a British singer whose easy-listening ballads and folk songs caught the sentiments of perfect summer days and last farewells, touching the hearts of mainly older fans across Europe and America for four decades, died on Sept. 12 in a hospital near Toulouse, in the south of France. He was 87.
His longtime publicist Howard Elson said the cause was “complications following a long illness.” Whittaker had retired to the region.
Born to British parents in Nairobi, Kenya, Whittaker grew up there with the infectious rhythms of East African music in his bloodstream. His grandfather had been a club singer in England, and his father, a Staffordshire grocer who played the violin, had been disabled in a motorcycle crash and moved his family to Kenya for the warm climate.
Roger learned to play the guitar at 7 and developed a rich baritone in school choirs, where he sometimes sang in Swahili. At 18, he was drafted into the British colonial Kenya Regiment, and for two years he fought Mau Mau rebels in the struggle that led to Kenyan independence. He then studied medicine in South Africa and science in Wales, intending to become a teacher.
But music intervened. He had played club dates to pay for college, and he also recorded songs on flexible discs distributed with the campus newspaper, The Bangor University Rag. A record company liked them and in 1962 released his first professional singles, including “Steel Men,” his cover of a Jimmy Dean hit about bridge builders.
“Steel Men” leaped onto the British charts, the opening wedge in a career of international tours and record albums that celebrated ethnic and working-class pride, the passing seasons and family gatherings at Christmas.
Tours took him repeatedly to Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia, Belgium, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States, a concert grind that often exceeded 100 gigs a year and outlasted the millennium. He learned to fly small planes and sometimes used them on his tours.
He wrote much of the music he performed, made a documentary film about Kenya, wrote an autobiography, appeared frequently on television and radio and sold a reported 60 million albums worldwide. One of them, “‘The Last Farewell’ and Other Hits,” recorded in 1971 and forgotten, became a sensation later, reaching No. 1 on the pop charts in 11 countries and eventually selling 11 million copies.
“‘The Last Farewell’ is an ersatz show tune about a British man-of-war, love, heartache and heroism,” Henry Edwards wrote in The New York Times in 1975. “Released four years ago, the tune was discovered by an Atlanta disc jockey while idly going through a pile of discarded LPs. He liked the song, played it on the air, and soon Atlanta was liking it too. That affection soon spread to Nashville, Tennessee, then to the entire country-music market, then to the pop audience at large.” It became Whittaker’s signature song.