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Quick Facts
Best Known For
Jack White is best known for singing and playing guitar with Meg White in the band the White Stripes.
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Play NowJack White. (2013). The Biography Channel website. Retrieved 12:41, May 23, 2013, from http://www.biography.com/people/jack-white-20631851.
Jack White. [Internet]. 2013. The Biography Channel website. Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/jack-white-20631851 [Accessed 23 May 2013].
"Jack White." 2013. The Biography Channel website. May 23 2013, 12:41 http://www.biography.com/people/jack-white-20631851.
"Jack White," The Biography Channel website, 2013, http://www.biography.com/people/jack-white-20631851 [accessed May 23, 2013].
"Jack White," The Biography Channel website, http://www.biography.com/people/jack-white-20631851 (accessed May 23, 2013).
Jack White [Internet]. The Biography Channel website; 2013 [cited 2013 May 23] Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/jack-white-20631851.
Jack White, http://www.biography.com/people/jack-white-20631851 (last visited May 23, 2013).
Jack White. The Biography Channel website. 2013. Available at: http://www.biography.com/people/jack-white-20631851. Accessed May 23, 2013.
Synopsis
Jack White is a singer, drummer and guitarist who was part of the influential early 2000s rock duo the White Stripes.
Early Life
Musician. Jack White was born John Anthony Gillis on July 9, 1975 in Detroit, Michigan, the youngest of ten children born into a large, working-class Catholic family. His parents, maintenance man Gorman Gillis and secretary Teresa Gillis, both worked for the local Archdiocese of Detroit. The church played a huge role in shaping White's worldview during his formative years. "I feel strongly connected to God," he later told an interviewer. "My roots are Catholic by default. I can take elements from Buddhism or other religions and see the similarities and differences in those, and learn from those, but at the end of the day, I don't care as much about man's interpretation of religion. What I care about is what God tells me directly." That intense spiritual connection led a teenaged White, who long served as an alter boy, to consider going to seminary to pursue a life in the priesthood. "I was thinking at 14," he recalled, "that possibly I might have had the calling to be a priest. Blues singers and people who are singing on stage have the same feelings and emotions that someone who is called to be a priest might have."
Fortunately for fans of rock and roll, White eventually chose not to join the clergy but to pursue his other true calling — music — instead. He learned to play his first instrument, the drums, as a first-grader, and soon picked up the guitar and piano as well. A fan of the blues and 1960s-era R&B and rock and roll, White began making his first lo-fi recordings of his own compositions before starting high school.
In 1990, Jack White began working as an upholsterer's apprentice, training for a life in the furniture trade. A career in upholstery was not to be, but White did record a demo album with one of his coworkers under the moniker, The Upholsterers. Shortly after, he earned his first paid musical gig, playing the drums for a locally popular Detroit cowpunk band called Goober & the Peas.
The White Stripes
Not long after, Jack White — still known, at that time, as Jack Gillis — began dating a girl named Meg White, a bartender at a local barbecue joint called Memphis Smoke. They married on September 21, 1996, when both were just 21 years old; in an unconventional move, Jack Gillis took his bride's surname rather than vice versa, becoming Jack White. The couple moved in with Jack's parents, living in the same home he had grown up in, in a working-class neighborhood of southwestern Detroit. Jack White continued working in the upholstery shop by day while playing music at nights and on the weekends.
Though she had zero musical experience, Meg White began attempting to accompany her husband on the drums while he played his guitar. "Jack had a set of drums upstairs, so I began playing with him," she remembered. "It was childlike because I had no idea what I was doing." However, something about the childish simplicity of White's percussion struck both of them as powerfully resonant in a humorous and nostalgic way.
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