This week we’re going off on a slight tangent and featuring songs that my parents liked. Many of us will remember them from our childhoods, not necessarily music we chose to listen to but rather songs we unwittingly heard around the house. Maybe we liked them, maybe we didn’t.
Our first classic song of the day that my parents liked is that schmaltzy nautical ballad, “The Last Farewell” by Roger Whittaker. This was one of my father’s favorite tunes when I was in high school, and it’s really not all that bad. Plus, there’s an interesting story behind the song.
Back in the early ’70s, British folk singer Roger Whittaker, who’d had some recording success in England, hosted a radio program in the UK where he’d sing songs of the day backed by an orchestra. As a bit of a promotional stunt, Whittaker asked his listeners to submit poems or lyrics and he’d turn them into songs and play them on his program. “We got a million replies,” he later recalled, “and I did one each week for 26 weeks.”
One of those poems submitted to Mr. Whittaker was written by a silversmith from Birmingham named Ron A. Webster. As promised, Mr. Whittaker set the words to music and the radio show’s conductor, Zack Lawrence, created a majestic orchestral arrangement. The result was the song we know as “The Last Farewell,” a ballad about a man getting ready to sail into battle and longing for his island love. Mr. Whitaker performed it on his radio show and even recorded it for his 1971 album, New World in the Morning. And that was pretty much the end of the story, until…
Four years later, in 1975, the wife of a program director for an Atlanta radio station heard the song while traveling through Canada. She brought a copy back to Atlanta and urged her husband to play it on the radio, which he did. Listeners liked what they heard and started inundating the station with calls asking more about the song and its singer. Before long, “The Last Farewell” started showing up on the U.S. charts, ultimately rising to #19 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #1 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart. It also hit the top ten in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, and the UK. It ended up selling more than 11 million copies worldwide and making Mr. Whittaker a household name among the more mature set—and a lot of money, at least some of which came from album sales via commercials on late-night TV programs.
I’ll say this about “The Last Farewell,” that chorus is really catchy. That little melodic and harmonic turn on “For you are beautiful” pulls a few strings, to be sure. The chords, one per syllable, go ii – iii – IV – V – I, which creates a nice little tension and release.
Roger Whittaker was born in Nairobi, Kenya, to English parents. He moved to England in 1959 to study education at University College of North Wales but soon started singing in local pubs. He signed to Fontana Records in 1962 and racked up a number of UK hits, including “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” “Steel Men,” “Durham Town (The Leavin’),” “No Blade of Grass,” “Where the Angels Tread,” and “The Finnish Whistler.” After “The Last Farewell” hit worldwide, he had particular long-lived success in Germany, of all places, ultimately releasing 25 German albums.
Whitaker married his wife Natalie in 1964 and, after living in Ireland for a time, they moved to France in 2012. They stayed married until his death last fall, on September 13, 2023.
Even if your parents didn’t play the bejeezus out of “The Last Farewell” on the stereo console in your living room, you may remember it from watching cable TV back in the day. That’s because the song’s royal-sounding French horn introduction was used on station ID spots for Chicago superstation WGN from the mid-70s through the early ’80s. Yeah, you remember it.
