Dave Stamper

Dave Stamper, born in New York City on November 10, 1883, was an American composer, lyricist, and Broadway performer whose career spanned the Tin Pan Alley, vaudeville, and revue eras. He contributed to twenty-one editions of the Ziegfeld Follies, composed more than one thousand songs, and worked as a staff composer for Fox Film Corporation. Despite never learning to read or write traditional music notation, Stamper developed his own numerical system to record his compositions. He died in Poughkeepsie, New York, on September 18, 1963.

Stamper began his musical life at age ten when he took up piano. At seventeen he left school and spent two years as a pianist at a Coney Island dance hall before becoming a song-plugger for publisher F. A. Mills. At twenty he met singer Nora Bayes and her husband Jack Norworth, subsequently serving as Bayes's accompanist and touring with her for four years. After leaving that position he returned to song-plugging and vaudeville piano work. In 1910 he met Gene Buck, an artist who painted sheet music covers, and the two began collaborating, with Buck supplying lyrics to Stamper's melodies. Their first published songs together were In the Cool of the Evening, Daddy Has a Sweetheart (and Mother Is Her Name), and Some Boy.

In 1912 Stamper began writing for the Ziegfeld Follies, contributing Just You and I, The Moon, Without You, and Everybody Sometime Must Love Somebody to the Follies of 1913. He received "additional music" credit for the 1914 and 1915 editions before writing the majority of the music for the Follies of 1916, where he received equal billing with Louis A. Hirsch, Jerome Kern, and Irving Berlin. He co-wrote the music for the Follies of 1917 with Raymond Hubbell, and by the Follies of 1918 was described as "an old hand" in his collaboration with Hirsch. Beginning with the 1918 edition, Stamper also wrote all the music for the Ziegfeld Midnight Frolic with Buck, a series that continued through 1921, including the Ziegfeld Midnight Frolic of 1919. The Follies of 1919 saw Stamper expand his role to include writing lyrics and comic sketches, a year in which he also contributed to the Ziegfeld Nine O'Clock Review, performed on the roof of the New Amsterdam Theatre. He remained the principal songwriter for the Follies through the 1925 edition, including a summer edition in 1923, and returned for the Follies of 1931, the final edition produced by Florenz Ziegfeld himself.

Before his Ziegfeld work consumed most of his professional life, Stamper placed songs in the plays When Claudia Smiles (1914) and Broadway and Buttermilk (1916). He and Buck then traveled to London to write songs for Zig Zag!, which ran for 648 performances at the London Hippodrome. Stamper returned to London in 1918 to write songs for Box O' Tricks with Frederick Chapelle, which ran for 625 performances. During the first London trip, Buck befriended a man who proved to be a German spy. Two consequences of that episode were fellow passenger Eddie Rickenbacker's decision to enlist as a pilot and Stamper's having to demonstrate to British police and a judge that his pages of numbers constituted sheet music rather than a code.

In 1927, Buck hired Stamper to compose the music for Take the Air, and Stamper also worked with the Shubert organization on the play Lovely Lady that same year before returning to Ziegfeld for the 1931 Follies. His final Broadway credits were the revue Provincetown Follies in 1935, which ran for 63 performances, and the musical Orchids Preferred in 1937, which closed within a week.

In 1928 Fox Film Corporation signed Stamper as a staff composer, a position he held until 1930. For the 1929 film Married in Hollywood, often identified as the first filmed operetta, he contributed Dance Away the Night and Peasant Love Song. The 1929 film Words and Music featured three of his songs written with lyricist Harlan Thompson: The Hunting Song, Take a Little Tip, and Too Wonderful for Words. In 1930 he contributed to the singing-cowboy film One Mad Kiss, supplying Only One and The Gay Heart, both written with Clare Kummer, and Once in a While, written with Kummer and Cecil Arnold. He also contributed to the Bela Lugosi film Such Men Are Dangerous that same year.

Stamper claimed authorship of Shine On, Harvest Moon, a song officially credited to his former employers Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth. His claim was supported by vaudeville comedian Eddie Cantor in his 1934 book Ziegfeld, The Great Glorifier and by music historian David Ewen in All the Years of American Popular Music. Because Stamper was working as a pianist rather than a songwriter when the song appeared, and because his inability to use conventional notation meant he could not submit the song for copyright or produce sheet music, he had no documentary means of substantiating his claim. Bayes and Norworth at one point compelled Stamper to wear stage makeup to appear Japanese, apparently to prevent reporters from interviewing him.

Stamper was a charter member of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. His caricature hung on the wall at Sardi's restaurant. The song The Shakespearian Rag, written by Stamper and Buck, was quoted by T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land. Ring Lardner and George S. Kaufman referenced Stamper by name in their play June Moon. Actor John Hyams portrayed Stamper in the 1936 film The Great Ziegfeld, which won the Academy Award for Best Motion Picture.

Stamper was married three times. His first marriage, to Gertrude Springer, ended in divorce and produced two children, Maurice and Regina Stamper. On July 16, 1926, he married vaudeville and revue comedienne Edna Leedom, who had performed in the Follies of 1923, 1924, and 1925; that marriage ended within two years. On August 16, 1928, he married Agnes White, a Follies performer who had appeared in Take the Air. The couple remained married for forty years and had one daughter, Susan Stamper, a dancer. One of their grandchildren is singer-songwriter Happy Rhodes.