Who was Roger Whittaker?

The legend arrived in Britain in September 1959 after leaving Nairobi, where he had been born in 1936 to English parents.

Edward and Vi Whittaker, Roger’s parents, were from Staffordshire, England, and they had a grocery store there.

His family relocated to a farm outside Thika, Kenya, because of its warmer climate after his father was hurt in a motorcycle accident.

While his father played the violin, his granddad performed in several places. Guitar lessons were provided for Roger.

After completing his primary school, Whittaker was accepted to Prince of Wales School (now Nairobi School).

After graduating from high school, he was enlisted for national duty and served in the Kenya Regiment for two years in the Aberdare Forest, battling the Mau Mau.

After being demobilized in 1956, he chose to pursue a career in medicine. He enrolled in the South African University of Cape Town.

But he quit after 18 months and, in a move modeled after his mother, entered the civil service education division as a teacher.

Roger Whittaker Career

In September 1959, Roger Whittaker relocated to Britain in order to advance his teaching career. He sang in local bars and had songs issued on Flexi discs that came with the campus newspaper, the Bangor University Rag, throughout the following three years of his studies at University College of North Wales, where he majored in zoology, biochemistry, and marine biology and received a Bachelor of Science degree.

He soon obtained a record deal with Fontana Records, who in 1962 issued “The Charge of the Light Brigade” as his debut professional song. (He is referred to as “Rog Whittaker” on the labels of the Fontana singles.

Roger Whittaker gave a performance in Portrush, Northern Ireland, in the summer of 1962. He made a breakthrough when he was hired to appear on the This and That program on Ulster Television.

A cover of “Steel Men” that he released as his second single in June 1962.

Whittaker went from EMI’s Fontana label to Columbia in 1966, and from that point on, he was referred to as Roger Whittaker. He released “Durham Town (The Leavin’)” as his fourth song for the label, and it went on to become Whittaker’s first UK Top 20 hit in the UK Singles Chart in 1969.

The upbeat “New World in the Morning” was released by Whittaker’s US record company, RCA Victor, in 1970, and it quickly rose to the Top 20 of Billboard magazine’s Easy Listening chart. His first film credit occurred the same year when he wrote the depressing theme song “No Blade of Grass” for the movie adaption of the same name, which was performed during the opening and closing credits.

When Whittaker recorded the song “Where the Angels Tread” (nglamarken) to the melody of Evert Taube in 1972, he developed an interest in the Nordic nations at the beginning of the 1970s. He sang at the 1974 Finnish Eurovision qualifying competition.

His performance of “The Finnish Whistler” rose to fame in Finland as the theme song for the renowned Patakakkonen cookery show on the Yle television network.

The song “The Last Farewell” from his 1971 album New World in the Morning was published by EMI in 1975. With over 11 million copies sold globally, it became both his biggest success and his defining song.

The song “Call My Name,” written by Roger Roger Whittaker, was performed by Eleanor Keenan and advanced to the final of the UK Eurovision competition, A Song For Europe, where it finished third.

The song was self-recorded by Roger Whittaker, and it reached the top 40 in a number of European nations. With “I Love You Because,” which reached “the lower reaches of the country chart” in late 1983, he made a name for himself in the genre.

Whittaker enjoyed success in Germany during the 1970s and 1980s thanks to songs in the German language that Nick Munro created. Whittaker phonetically sung the songs because he couldn’t speak German.

In the 1970s, he made an appearance on German television and frequently appeared on the UK program Top of the Pops. Some commentators initially had negative opinions of Whittaker’s songs in the German language and mocked them as “meaningless folk music”.

Despite this, Roger Whittaker managed to gain a sizable fan following in Germany, where he thought he had the most devoted followers, releasing 25 albums there. He said, “The previous few decades have been fantastic… I get along well with the German fans.

Roger Whittaker indicated on his website in March 2006 that his 2007 Germany tour would be his last and that he would only play “occasional concerts” from then on.

He was seen singing and doing an interview in German on Danish television in November 2008. He is now more proficient in German.

Roger Whittaker repeated that he had stopped touring in 2013, but added that he had composed 18 new songs for an album and that he could still whistle extremely well in a 2014 interview.

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Roger Whittaker’s Wife And Children

Roger and Natalie O’Brien wed in August of the same year they first met In 1964. Since 1989, she has served as Whittaker’s manager.

They have five children. Two sons and three daughters (Emily, Lauren, Jessica, Guy, and Alexander) .