Ronny White, a debonair New York cabaret singer and pianist who brought a Cole Porter vision of yesteryear Manhattan elegance to life as a premier interpreter of the Great American Songbook, died on Aug. 19 in Fredon, a town in northern New Jersey. He was 88.
His friend and caretaker Ben Cassara said he died of bone cancer at a hospice facility.
Mr. Whyte’s performances conjured “a nighttime world of tinkling pianos, rustling gowns and tipsy people,” Stephen Holden wrote in a 1990 profile in The New York Times.
His repertoire of songs numbered in the thousands, including gems by the likes of George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern and Rodgers and Hart, as well as by personal favorites like Cy Coleman, Bart Howard and the team of Tommy Wolf and Fran Landesman.
He was also noted for lightening the mood with obscure Jazz Age novelty songs and comic numbers like the British duo Flanders and Swann’s “Have Some Madeira M’Dear.”
Over the decades, Mr. Whyte performed around the world. But his natural habitat was the intimate Manhattan cabaret: the Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel, Rainbow and Stars in Rockefeller Center, the St. Regis Room of the St. Regis Hotel and Bemelmans Bar in the Carlyle hotel, along with the adjacent Café Carlyle, the longtime home of the world’s most famous saloon singer, Bobby Short, Mr. Whyte’s friend and mentor.
A part-time actor as well as a suave musician, Mr. Whyte seemed perfectly cast in the role of an “upscale Manhattan version of Billy Joel’s ‘Piano Man,’” as Mr. Holden put it.
He “had a boyish, all-American quality about him,” James Gavin, the author of “Intimate Nights: The Golden Age of New York Cabaret” (1991), said in an interview. “But he also had a sexy quality, with a cat-got-the-canary naughty smirk.”
Despite his elegant air, Mr. Whyte spent years paying his dues, often toiling six hours a night, six days a week, in “that hard-boiled, Mafia-riddled, smoke-infused atmosphere of the old-time piano bars,” Mr. Gavin said.
When he hit his stride in the 1960s, Mr. Whyte told The Times in 1990, “there must have been 50 or 60 piano bars in New York.”
“In those days,” he added, “people stayed out later and drank more than they do now. At 4 in the morning, they’d still be there, stoned out of their minds, almost falling asleep.”
“It was a grind,” he said in a 2009 interview with The Buffalo News, “but it was great, because I was doing what I loved, learning.”
Ronny Whyte was born Ronald Gene Bangerter on May 12, 1937, in Seattle, the eldest of four children of Rodney Bangerter, a mechanic and gas station owner, and Claire (Hickson) Bangerter, who played piano and gave Ronald an early introduction to music.
“As soon as I could speak,” Mr. Whyte said in a 2018 interview with Cabaret Scenes magazine, “my mother had me singing.”
He spent the first six years of his life living in a log cabin his father built on the outskirts of Seattle. He later recalled petting deer on his way to the outhouse.
He started classical piano lessons when he was 8, and, although he grew up Mormon, he honed his skills playing organ at a local Baptist church. After graduating from Lincoln High School in Seattle in 1955, he enlisted in the Air Force and played in a military dance band.
Stationed in Maine, he devoured issues of The New Yorker and, on his weekends off, traveled to Manhattan to catch Broadway musicals and take in combos on 52nd Street, which at the time was a jazz hotbed.
(He eventually concluded that his surname lacked the sparkle for show business, so he adopted Whyte, a more exotic variant of his father’s middle name, White.)
He settled in the city after his discharge, turning down a scholarship offer from the Juilliard School to study acting, another passion, through the American Theater Wing, the nonprofit organization that sponsors the Tony Awards.
Over the years, Mr. Whyte performed in numerous summer stock productions, where his roles included Bobby in Sondheim’s “Company” and Joey in the Rodgers and Hart musical “Pal Joey.”
But music was his first love, and he drew inspiration early on from Mr. Short, whom he met on the Manhattan nightclub circuit.
“Bobby performed with enormous energy and panache and put himself together impeccably,” Mr. Whyte told Cabaret Scenes. “He taught me how to dress, how to build a following with a mailing list before email, and that if you’re performing at night, you must nap in the afternoon.”
Mr. Whyte was the longtime leader of Midday Jazz Midtown, a regular jazz showcase at St. Peter’s Church in Manhattan.
He released 20 albums, starting in 1967 with “The Songs and Piano of Ronny Whyte” and ending with “Whyte Witchcraft: Songs of Cy Coleman,” released in 2019. He was also a songwriter; his output included lyrics to Ettore Stratta’s 1980 instrumental “Forget the Woman,” a song that Tony Bennett included on his critically acclaimed 1986 comeback album, “The Art of Excellence.”
His survivors include a brother, Karl, and a sister, Susan Parise.
The decades passed; the audiences grew tamer, the hours saner. As the genteel Cole Porter era faded ever more into memory, Mr. Whyte remained both a holdover and a holdout against ever-shifting pop tastes — although he would occasionally sprinkle in a contemporary crowd-pleaser like “Rainbow Connection” or, yes, “Piano Man.”
He grew used to having audience members request “that Linda Ronstadt song,” in reference to her popular 1983 recording of the Gershwins’ “I’ve Got a Crush on You.”
Still, as Mr. Whyte put it to The Times in 1990, “There’s a whole generation for whom ‘Night and Day’ and ‘Dancing in the Dark’ are brand new.”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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