How Elvis saved Barry White

Barry White’s awakening from his bad ways and his eventual calling to the music business occurred on the evening of Wednesday 10th August 1960. A month off his 16th birthday, he was lying on his bunk in Los Angeles’s Juvenile Hall. Life was as low as it could get and he had been there for more than six months.

He had already done much soul-searching as to why and how he had ended up there. He had a strong desire to change his life but couldn’t work out how, as he explained: “My freedom had been taken and I asked myself how did I get here? I realised it wasn’t anyone but me who had put me here and that it was up to me to get myself out.” He had just gone to bed and sunk into the lower bunk of his shared room when along the corridor someone turned on a transistor radio and out of it came Elvis Presley singing the chart-topping ballad It’s Now or Never. The words of Elvis Presley sparked something off in his head: “I had heard it before but it was like hearing it for the first time. Just for me.” Barry actually believed that Presley was delivering a personal message straight to him that night: “It was like he was telling me, ‘Change your life, Barry, you’re thinking about going another way. It’s now or never.’ I understood that.”

Barry White sat bolt upright in his bunk and swore that he would change his life from that moment and turn his fortunes around. The he next morning on 11th August, he said: “Everything around me looked and felt just a little bit different.”

Extract from Chapter Eight of White Music, the Barry White story, available at Barnes & Noble from 12th April.