Danny White

Danny White (July 6, 1931 – January 5, 1996) was an influential R&B singer and bandleader who worked in the New Orleans area. Early years Joseph Daniel White was born at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, Louisiana, the youngest of seven children. He grew up in the Hollygrove neighborhood and the Seventh Ward. "There was always lots of music around," he explained. "I sang in church and for plays at school. It was really my teachers who thought I had a good voice and encouraged me." White had his professional debut as a twenty-year-old Marine while stationed at Camp Pendleton in California. He recounted his first appearance fronting a band, "We used to go to this club called the Offshore Lounge to listen to music. It was a nice place, we'd see people like Al Hibbler there. Well, they had a house band and one night the vocalist didn't show. People started asking the band to do requests but they said they couldn't do them without the singer. I got up and said I could do the requests, and I ended up singing the rest of the night." After the show, the owner approached White with an offer of a full-time job. "I told him I couldn't (accept) because I was a Marine." White and the owner reached an agreement in which White sang on weekends for $10 a night. White returned to New Orleans after he was discharged from the service. "I went back to school on the GI Bill", he said. He also frequented music clubs like Hayes' Chicken Shack, the Shadowland Club, and the Dew Drop Inn. "I got to know a lot of musicians, so me and a guy called Jack decided to start a small band that worked weekends. One of the first places we played was Dupree's Lounge on North Claiborne and St. Bernard Avenue." One busy Saturday night a white man in a Cadillac came to Dupree's and offered White and Jack's band a job at his Golden Cadillac Club on Poland Avenue. The club had previously been a Country and Western venue that the owner wanted to reopen as a R&B club. "He offered to pay us a lot more money than what we were making at Dupree's", White said. "We agreed to work for him and it was our band that actually opened the place up. That was in 1955." The band's appearances on Friday and Saturday nights brought in big white audiences, enough that the club was expanded from 700 to 1000 capacity. After a few months the band broke up when Jack wanted to go back to playing black clubs. White hired new musicians, putting together a six-piece band called the Cavaliers after the cigarettes he smoked.