Josh White Jr., who began his long career at age 4 performing alongside his father, the famed blues singer and guitarist Josh White, before carving out his own identity in the 1960s folk revival based in Greenwich Village, died on Dec. 28 at his home in Rochester, Mich., one day after announcing his retirement. He was 84.
His manager, Douglas Yeager, confirmed the death.
Josh White Sr. was among the country’s leading blues and folk musicians in the 1930s and ’40s, as well as a leading cultural figure in the civil rights movement of the time. He sang at President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s second inauguration and later joined Eleanor Roosevelt — a close friend and Josh Jr.’s godmother — on a good-will tour around Europe after World War II.
The elder Mr. White was a regular at Cafe Society, the racially integrated Greenwich Village music spot where Billie Holiday often performed. During a show there in 1945, a high, confident voice rose from the audience, singing along with him. The crowd cheered, and he brought his son onstage for the rest of the performance.
“Maybe you think he didn’t bring down the house,” he told United Press International in 1948, “but he sure did leave me in the cold.”
Josh White Jr. — known to his friends as Donnie, after his middle name, Donald — became a frequent collaborator with his father, touring with him around the country and appearing with him on radio and television.
Some of the best-known songs in the elder Mr. White’s repertoire, like “One Meatball,” became signature pieces in his son’s youthful oeuvre.
Josh White Sr. was blacklisted in the 1950s for refusing to identify members of the Communist Party before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
With his father unable to perform in the United States and effectively banished to Europe, the younger Mr. White turned to the stage and screen. He appeared frequently on and off Broadway, as well as in dozens of made-for-television dramas.
He went on his own in 1961, just in time for the folk revival that sprang from the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village and involved musicians like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Dave Van Ronk.
Though he developed his own following, he remained unabashedly his father’s son: His guitar playing stayed close to his father’s style, and in 1983 he created “Josh: The Man and His Music,” a one-man show staged in Lansing, Mich., about his father, who died in 1969.
Critics praised him, but they often scrutinized his performances and interviews for evidence of the son struggling under paternal weight — after all, they said, he still played “One Meatball.”
Mr. White responded forcefully.
“I still sing his songs because it’s my show and I can sing what I want,” he told The Montreal Gazette in 1985. “I play them for those who remember my father, and for those who never had the chance to hear his music.”
Joshua Donald White Jr. was born on Nov. 30, 1940, in Manhattan. His mother, Carol Carr White, was a gospel singer. The Whites lived in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem and counted numerous Black performers among their neighbors, including Marian Anderson and the tap-dancing brothers Gregory and Maurice Hines.
He attended the Professional Children’s School in Manhattan, where his classmates included the actors Elliott Gould and Christopher Walken and the composer Marvin Hamlisch. He and Mr. Hamlisch co-wrote “See Saw,” the first song Mr. White recorded under his own name, in 1956.
He married Jackie Harris in 1963. While he was on tour in 1971, a burglar broke into their Manhattan apartment and murdered her. Bereft, Mr. White largely stopped performing and moved with their two children, Josh III and Jason, to Wappingers Falls, N.Y., along the Hudson River.
He kept one regular gig: a longstanding commitment to the Raven Gallery, a Detroit folk venue, and in 1976 he moved to the area. In 1978, he married Sara Terteling.
She survives him, along with his son Josh III; his stepchildren, Eric, Elizabeth, Tricia and Kristen Terteling; his sisters, Beverly and Judith; 18 grandchildren; and 15 great-grandchildren. His son Jason died last year.
By the 1980s Mr. White was back to performing regularly — up to 200 gigs a year, mostly on college campuses. He often joined other grand old faces of the folk scene on tour, like Arlo Guthrie, Odetta and his close friend Pete Yarrow, who died on Tuesday.
And be became a fixture on the Detroit cultural scene, eminent enough that when Pope John Paul II visited the city in 1987, Mr. White acted as an official host during his public appearances.
His last public performance was in April 2024, at the Folk Americana Roots Hall of Fame in Boston. With his health slowing him down, Mr. Yeager, his manager, pushed him to retire. In a phone call on Dec. 27, he agreed.
“I guess everybody’s got to retire sometime,” Mr. Yeager recalled Mr. White saying. He died the next day.
