When I was a teenager there was a man whose voice I fell in love with. I hadn’t experienced fine dining, but if I had to compare his gentle and silken baritone voice to something at the time, the closest thing would have been my grandmother’s chocolate and graham cracker ice-box cake. What that dessert did for my palate, his voice did for my ears and my imagination. Listening to him sing and whistle took me from the dark, dangerous, and threatening, to lands of peacefulness and bliss, beauty and mystery.

Roger grew up in Colonial British Kenya where his parents owned a grocery store in Nairobi. With a grandfather who was a club singer, and a father who played violin, music was a part of Roger’s DNA. He learned to sing, and as a boy, sang with the choir at the Nairobi cathedral, he learned to play guitar, and he learned to whistle.

Lots of us learn to whistle, you say. Of course we do. Some of us get to be so good that we can imitate birds. Some of us can whistle tunes. But rare indeed is the whistler whose skill is a concert quality instrument. While his whistling might not have had the same range and color as a flute, he was able to do things that few instrumentalists could achieve.

Despite his successful music career, Whittaker was a disappointment to his father, and his parents never attended a single concert. Whittaker’s father had wished for his son to complete medical school and be a physician, and no amount of success as a musician could mend the rift which continued until Roger’s father lost his life when the store was robbed in 1989.

Whittaker’s first big hit was Durham Town (the Leavin’) which made it into the UK top 20 in 1969. This was probably the first song I heard from Roger, and you can hear me playing it from time to time at open mics. With Durham Town referencing the loss of a mother, and the loss of my own mother a couple of years ago, and especially with the common thread of unresolved rifts and being a disappointment to parents, this song has become more important to me recently.

But I’ve been on a healing journey, and part of that as a Quaker, as a woman who has become much more introspective, recognizing the choices I didn’t have in my youth, and how precious our time is, I think another of his songs needs to become part of my repertoire. So I’ll leave you with this as I bid farewell to my first crush and one of my favorite musicians.