Robert “Bobby” Sharp (born November 26, 1924 in Topeka, Kansas, † January 28, 2013 in Alameda, California ) was an American musician (piano, vocals) and songwriter, who among other things, the song Unchain My Heart wrote.

Sharp spent his childhood in Lawrence (Kansas) before moving to Los Angeles, where he lived with his grandparents during the Great Depression , while his parents, Louis and Eva Sharp, aspired to a concert tenor or athlete career in New York. In 1936, at the age of twelve, he lived with his parents in New York City. Her apartment on Edgecombe Avenue on Harlem’s Sugar Hill was a meeting place for prominent figures of the Harlem Renaissance; These included Walter White, the founder of the civil rights organization NAACP, Roy Wilkins, longtime NAACP chairman, and Aaron Douglas, an African-American artist also from Topeka. In the immediate vicinity lived Duke Ellington .

In 1943 Sharp served in the US Army in the 372nd Infantry Regiment , which was stationed in New York and Fort Breckenridge (Kentucky). After his release from the army, he studied music at the Greenwich House Music School and then at the Manhattan School of Music harmony, music theory and piano. An important mentor at this stage was bandleader Sy Oliver , a friend of the Sharp family. In the following years, Sharp tried to sell his own songs on Broadway and Tin Pan Alley; a first success was 1956 Baby Girl of Mine , which he recorded with orchestral accompaniment for the label Wing and was later covered by Ruth Brown . The song Last Night in the Moonlight he recorded under his own name for the small label Destiny. ^In 1960 he signed a record deal with Epic Records.

In the 1950s and 1960s his songs were u. a. Recorded by Sarah Vaughan , Sammy Davis, Jr. and most of all by Ray Charles . This played in 1961, the first version of Sharp’s most famous song Unchain My Heart , the cover versions of Trini Lopez and Joe Cocker (1987) followed. Bobby Sharp had sold the copyright of the song for only $ 50 to the musician and composer Teddy Powell , who then insisted on his co-authorship. Sharp sold his share to Powell in 1963 for only $ 1,000. In 1987, Sharp renewed the exploitation rights to the song, shortly before Joe Cocker successfully covered it.