World Music Legends

Today, as during his salad days during the first quake of late 20th century pop culture, Harry Belafonte’s name, face, voice and talent loom huge among international crossover stars. He’s the folk singer as superstar, a cultural icon whose 1956 album, Calypso (RCA), topped the charts for a remarkable 31 weeks at the peak of the Eisenhower administration.

Born March 1, 1927 in New York City’s Harlem, Belafonte went to live with his mother in her native Jamaica at age eight. He returned to the United States five years later, but dropped out of school at 15. He eventually joined the Navy, got married and discovered the theater. That led to singing engagements and, by 1949, his first recording. But it was Calypso, following two other top 5 albums released in 1956 that provided the breakthrough. The first long-playing album ever to sell a million copies, Calypso included “Day-O,” “Jamaica Farewell,” “Brown Skin Girl” and “Man Smart (Woman Smarter),” songs that established Belafonte as the first American artist (black or otherwise) to widely disseminate Caribbean island forms. Initially Belafonte attracted urbane and liberal listeners, but he quickly went beyond that crowd, reaching people deep in the heart of the heartland.

Belafonte was, and still is, a gifted singer, whose strong suits are interpretation, delivery, conviction and ultimate sunniness; he believes himself a teacher, and seems to have been a prophet, too. His intent and integrity have been scrutinized and assailed, but his efforts—especially as they superseded commercial activity to serve as vocal, moral and financial support of Martin Luther King’s civil rights initiatives, the USA for Africa’s “We Are the World,” UNICEF and his friend Nelson Mandela’s negotiated revolution in South Africa—bear all tests, including time. If Belafonte’s music in the ’50s bore arrangements and production touches that in hindsight sound designed to soften, “beautify,” of simply sell, it had undeniable melodic hooks, sly humor in its verses, and a point of view it spent no energy to disguise.

“Paul Robeson, my mentor, once said to me, ‘Harry, get them to sing your song, and they’ll want to know who you are.’” That’s how Belafonte to this day introduces “The Banana Boat Song,” a.k.a. “Day-O.” After four decades, “Day-O” has won the warmth and dignity Belafonte finds in it, and whether you’re sitting in a banana boat, in a theater seat or on your bed starting at the TV, you almost have to (that’s okay, you’re urged to) sing along.

            He’s been criticized over the decades as being a carpetbagger, one who re-packaged ethnic sounds to make them palatable to American tastes—particularly white tastes. But, he says, “I reject the concept of ‘purity.’ Early in my career what annoyed me was not that I was considered inauthentic, but that I was being called so by others who didn’t know anything of the authenticity of which they spoke. First of all, I was singing original songs that took off from calypso, but certainly weren’t meant to be calypso. I didn’t want to be, or claim to be, a calypso singer—there were others who did that, and I didn’t want to take anything away from them.

“The most important thing to me about ‘The Banana Boat Song’ is that before America heard it, Americans had no notion of the rich culture of the Caribbean,” Belafonte continued. “There were these cultural assumptions then about people from the Caribbean: that they were all rum drinking, sex-crazed and lazy, not they were tillers of the land, harvesters of bananas for landlords of the plantations. I thought, let me sing about a new definition of these people.”

            Belafonte has continued to contribute his vision to the American cultural landscape for the past half-century. In addition to his best-selling recordings, he has acted in several important films and, in the early 1960s, he became the first black television producer.

“I’ve gone against the grain and I’ve come up roses,” he said. “I’ve been involved with the greatest struggles of our time, the fight for our civil rights in the U.S., and the fight to free South Africa, which I was able to bring attention to in the U.S. by bringing out great South African artists like Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba and the others. Over my life, I’m pleased to find the moral point of view in all these cases prevailed. My anxiety about them was, at first, quite intense, but now look: Nelson Mandela is the icon of 20th century, and Dr. King has a national holiday in his honor. Everyone, today, is into world-beat music. I had a privileged place in the process. The rewards have been substantial, make no mistake.”