White recorded 20 studio albums during the course of his career, but multiple versions and compilations were released worldwide that were certified gold , 41 of which also attained platinum status. White had 20 gold and 10 platinum singles, with worldwide record sales in excess of million records, and is one of the best-selling music artists of all time.
White, and his mother was Sadie Marie Carter. Unbeknownst to his mother, his father was already married to another woman, so she gave him her last name. However, upon seeing her last name of Carter on his son's birth certificate, Melvin scratched Carter out and wrote his own last name of White. White grew up listening to his mother's classical music collection and first took to the piano, emulating what he heard on the records.
White has often been credited with playing piano, at age 11, on Jesse Belvin 's hit single, " Goodnight My Love ". He believed the story was an exaggeration by journalists. While White and Belvin lived in the same neighborhood, Belvin was 12 years older than White. White attended Jacob A. Riis High School, an all-boys academy in southeast Los Angeles. Then as a teenager, that completely changed. My mother cried because she knew her baby boy had become a man.
I spoke to my mother, and I scared both of us. He skipped class to walk to Capitol Records headquarters in Hollywood and stood across the street from the office staring for hours. Seeing the liveliness of the area it inspired him to work in Hollywood, in the entertainment industry, despite not knowing how to read or write music. After his release from jail, White left gang life and began a musical career at the beginning of the s in singing groups.
He also recorded several singles under his own name in the early s, backed by vocal groups The Atlantics for the Rampart and Faro labels and The Majestics for the Linda and Jordan labels. It became a big hit in the UK. In , White got his big break producing a girl group he had discovered called Love Unlimited.
