To Absent Friends - David White

Danny and the Juniors

David White, second from left

1939-2019

Okay, another obituary hits the news that may only be of interest to me, but it is enough to merit an Absent Friends citation.  Before I read the obituary in the paper, or rather in the e-paper, this morning, I had no idea who David White was, but I sure had heard him enough over the years.

Turns out that as a teenager, White and three of his buddies, Danny Rapp, Frank Maffei, and Joe Terranova, started singing doo-wop style on the street corners of their Philadelphia neighborhood.  They called themselves the Juvenaires.  Another teen aged Philly singer, Frank Madera, heard them through his bedroom window, collaborated with White to write a song called "Do The Bop", made a demo recording of it and took it to a powerful Philly disc jockey named Dick Clark.  Clark suggested that they rework the lyrics and change the title to "At The Hop", and make Rapp the lead singer.  The group then changed its name to Danny and the Juniors.  Clark then put them on a little TV show of his called American Bandstand in 1957.  "At The Hop" then rocketed to Number One on the Billboard charts and stayed there for nine weeks.

White and Madera then wrote a follow up called "Rock and Roll Is Here To Stay", another hit, although it never reached the heights of "At The Hop".  Both songs have become near anthems of their era, and often appear on soundtracks of movies depicting those times, such as George Lukas' "American Graffiti".

Like many groups of those days, Danny and the Juniors eventually broke up and fizzled out.  White continued to write songs, some of them hits, like Lesley Gore's "You Don't Own Me" and Len Barry's  "1-2-3", but from the tone of the news obit, it seemed to have been a fairly hard scrabble life for Mr. White, living largely on royalties from his two greatest hits.  An attempt to revive Danny and the Juniors in the early 1980's ended when Rapp died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1983.

Let us say RIP to David White by listening to his greatest hit.