David Stamper (November 10, 1883 – September 18, 1963) was an American songwriter of the Tin Pan Alley and vaudeville eras, a contributor to twenty-one editions of the Ziegfeld Follies, writer for the Fox Film Corporation, and composer of more than one thousand songs, in spite of never learning to read or write traditional music notation.

[citation needed] Stamper was twenty when he met singer Nora Bayes and her husband Jack Norworth becoming her accompanist and touring widely for the next four years.

On August 16, 1928 he married Agnes White,[citation needed] a Follies performer who was in Stamper and Buck's musical Take The Air (1927).

In addition to his 1918 Follies work, he wrote all the music for Ziegfeld Midnight Frolic with Gene Buck,[12] a series that also had editions in 1919, 1920 and 1921.

[20] Stamper returned to London in 1918 to write songs for another review Box O' Tricks with Frederick Chapelle,[21] which ran for 625 performances.

[22] Two results of this event were fellow passenger Eddie Rickenbacker deciding to enlist to fly, and Dave Stamper having to prove to British police and a Judge that his pages covered with numbers were sheet music rather than a code.

[31] Stamper claimed[7] to have written "Shine On, Harvest Moon", while the writers of record were his former employers Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth.

Stamper's claim was supported by vaudeville comic Eddie Cantor in his 1934 book Ziegfeld, The Great Glorifier[32] and David Ewen's All the Years of American Popular Music.

Bayes and Norworth compelled Stamper at one point to wear stage make-up to appear Japanese,[34] apparently to keep him from being interviewed by reporters.

[37] His songwriting partner Gene Buck was played by William Demarest, best known as "Uncle Charley" on the TV show My Three Sons.