Early Life
He was born into a poor but supportive Jamaican family in Kingston. His father was a dockworker, his mother a housewife. White first began to learn music by listening to the radio and singing Nat King Cole songs. He was also inspired by the American singer and civil rights activist, Paul Robeson. He was a founding member of the Jamaica Folk Singers, sang with the Jamaica Amateur Operatic Society and trained at the Jamaican School of Music. In a passing visit to Jamaica, Evelyn Rothwell (wife of conductor Sir John Barbirolli) heard him sing and suggested that he go to study in London. Instead, his father bought him a one-way ticket to New York, because "the flight was cheaper". He won a scholarship and continued his studies with celebrated bass Giorgio Tozzi at the Juilliard School.
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Famous quotes related to early life:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)