Dave Stamper

David Stamper (November 10, 1883 – September 18, 1963) was an American songwriter of the Tin Pan Alley and vaudeville eras, a contributor to twenty-one editions of the Ziegfeld Follies, writer for the Fox Film Corporation, and composer of more than one thousand songs, in spite of never learning to read or write traditional music notation. He may have written "Shine On Harvest Moon", a claim supported by vaudeville performer and writer Eddie Cantor. He was also a charter member of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers or ASCAP. Stamper was born in New York City on November 10, 1883, and took up piano at age ten. At seventeen, he left school and became a pianist at a Coney Island dance hall for two years before becoming a "song-plugger" for publisher F. A. Mills. Stamper was twenty when he met singer Nora Bayes and her husband Jack Norworth becoming her accompanist and touring widely for the next four years. After Stamper left Bayes' employment, he resumed working as a song-plugger and vaudeville pianist. In 1910 he met Gene Buck, an artist who painted cover images for sheet music. The two started collaborating, with Buck providing lyrics for Stamper's melodies. Their first published songs were In the Cool of the Evening, Daddy Has a Sweetheart (and Mother Is Her Name) and Some Boy.Stamper's first marriage to Gertrude Springer ended in divorce after the birth of 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. The marriage ended within two years. On August 16, 1928 he married Agnes White, a Follies performer who was in Stamper and Buck's musical Take The Air (1927). The couple were married for 40 years and produced one daughter, Susan Stamper, a dancer. One of their grandchildren is singer/songwriter Happy Rhodes.Stamper did not learn to read or write traditional musical notation, creating his own numerical notation.He died in Poughkeepsie, New York, on September 18, 1963.