David Stamper 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.
22 Facts About Dave Stamper
1.
2.
Dave Stamper was a charter member of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers or ASCAP.
3.
Dave Stamper was born in New York City on November 10,1883, and took up piano at age ten.
4.
Dave 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.
5.
Dave Stamper did not learn to read or write traditional musical notation, creating his own numerical notation.
6.
Dave Stamper died in Poughkeepsie, New York, on September 18,1963.
7.
In 1912 Dave Stamper began writing songs for the Ziegfeld Follies of 1913, contributing Just You and I and The Moon, Without You and Everybody Sometime Must Love Somebody.
8.
Dave Stamper is credited as "additional music" for the Follies of 1914 and 1915, but he wrote the majority of the music for the Follies of 1916.
9.
The music of the Follies of 1917 was written by Stamper and Raymond Hubbell and he was described as "an old hand" for his work with Louis A Hirsch by the Follies of 1918.
10.
The Follies of 1919 found Dave Stamper branching out into writing lyrics as well as writing comic sketches.
11.
Dave Stamper continued as principal songwriter for the Follies of 1920 through 1925, with an additional summer edition in 1923.
12.
Dave Stamper returned for the Follies of 1931, the last edition produced by Florenz Ziegfeld himself.
13.
Dave Stamper returned to London in 1918 to write songs for another review Box O' Tricks with Frederick Chapelle, which ran for 625 performances.
14.
Two results of this event were fellow passenger Eddie Rickenbacker deciding to enlist to fly, and Dave Stamper having to prove to British police and a Judge that his pages covered with numbers were sheet music rather than a code.
15.
Dave Stamper was fully occupied with work for Ziegfeld until 1927, when Gene Buck hired Dave Stamper to write the music for Take The Air.
16.
Dave Stamper worked for the Schubert organization on Lovely Lady before returning to Ziegfeld for the 1931 Follies.
17.
Dave Stamper finished out his work on Broadway with Provincetown Follies which only ran for 63 performances and Orchids Preferred which closed in a week.
18.
In 1928, Dave Stamper was signed by Fox Film Corporation as a staff composer, remaining there until 1930.
19.
Dave Stamper contributed Dance Away the Night and Peasant Love Song to the film Married in Hollywood often called the first filmed operetta.
20.
Dave Stamper claimed to have written "Shine On, Harvest Moon", while the writers of record were his former employers Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth.
21.
Dave Stamper's claim was supported by vaudeville comic Eddie Cantor in his 1934 book Ziegfeld, The Great Glorifier and David Ewen's All the Years of American Popular Music.
22.
Dave Stamper was working as a pianist rather than as a songwriter at the time the song appeared but never learned how to read or write using traditional music notation thus he would have not been able submit the song for copyright, or produce sheet music to prove his claim.