Harry Belafonte, alongside Ed Sullivan, indicators autographs for followers exterior CBS Studio 50 in New York Metropolis, circa 1955.
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Archive Photographs/Hulton Archive/Getty Photos
Harry Belafonte, alongside Ed Sullivan, indicators autographs for followers exterior CBS Studio 50 in New York Metropolis, circa 1955.
Archive Photographs/Hulton Archive/Getty Photos
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is the writer of the books Island Folks, Names of New York and a forthcoming guide on Harry Belafonte, a part of Penguin Press’ Significations sequence edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. This remembrance of the singer and Civil Rights icon, who died in April, relies on his analysis and interviews with the artist.
The village of Aboukir, within the inexperienced hills that line Jamaica’s north coast, is a scattering of humble properties. It is in St. Ann Parish, part of the island finest recognized for being the place Columbus first landed in Jamaica in 1494, and for a pair of native sons who grew to become world well-known a lot later. One in all these is Marcus Garvey, the jazz-age activist who grew up in St. Ann earlier than he went to New York and, as a founding father of the Common Negro Enchancment Affiliation, popularized the concept of the “African diaspora.” The opposite is Bob Marley, who was born and later laid to relaxation right here, in a hamlet that is now frequented by sandal-clad vacationers in thrall to the reggae legend’s music and reminiscence.
Aboukir, just a few hilltops over from Marley’s hometown, is not a spot that any vacationer comes. However the village has its personal declare to fame: It is the place a 3rd son of St. Ann’s hills who grew to become a world determine within the twentieth century, Harry Belafonte, spent a formative chunk of his boyhood.
Since Belafonte’s dying earlier this 12 months at 96, tributes to his monumental life have been dominated by his legacies in the USA. That is the nation the place he was born and left his deepest marks: by releasing an album of ersatz Caribbean people tunes, in 1956, that grew to become one of many first LPs by a solo artist to promote one million copies; by being the primary Black man to change into a intercourse image for mainstream America; through the use of his ensuing royalties and fame to bankroll Martin Luther King’s motion for Civil Rights; by appearing as an essential conduit, as an intimate of Robert Kennedy, between King’s motion and the federal authorities. And that was simply his heyday; his American story additionally consists of chapters, afterward, as a pathbreaking visitor host of The Tonight Present; because the producer of “We Are the World” and of Beat Road; as an elder radical and ethical scold who can also be well-recalled, by these of us who grew up within the Nineteen Seventies and ’80s, as a genial fixture on Sesame Road.
Nevertheless it’s unimaginable to know Belafonte’s bigger that means, as not merely an American determine however a diasporic and world one, with out understanding his Caribbean roots. The Jamaican village the place he stayed together with his grandmother as a boy, amidst St. Ann’s outdated plantations, was an out-of-the-way nook of a area to whose islands had been trafficked the vast majority of the ten million enslaved Africans who, between Columbus’s arrival and the 1800s, endured the Center Passage — but in addition a spot, like communities throughout this area “the place globalization started,” that is been formed for hundreds of years by cultural mixing, long-distance commerce and the worldly outlook of its folks.
A younger Belafonte in 1958.
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Belafonte was born in Manhattan in 1927, to a younger Jamaican immigrant who grew cautious, as she tried to make hire as a home within the Despair, of the difficulty her hot-tempered son was discovering on New York’s streets. She despatched him to her dwelling island for “safekeeping,” as he’d later describe it, on one of many banana boats that the boy’s father, touring between the West Indies and the States, labored on as a prepare dinner. The village the place his mum had grown up, and the place her personal mum nonetheless lived, was named by Jamaica’s outdated British house owners for the city in Egypt the place Horatio Nelson defeated Napoleon. However its moniker is pronounced “Ah-boo-ka” by locals who’re descended from these the British dropped at populate this nook of their empire: enslaved Africans, principally, but in addition Scottish overseers and laborers just like the forebears of Belafonte’s white grandmother.
Some years in the past, whereas on a visit to Jamaica, I tracked down a few of Belafonte’s maternal cousins in Aboukir, and wrote him a letter about assembly his kin there. He replied warmly and, after arranging to fulfill for lunch close to his dwelling on Manhattan’s Higher West Facet, mirrored over a plate of clams on how his Caribbean id had aided his success in Eisenhower’s America. Harry and his finest buddy Sidney Poitier — Poitier grew up within the Bahamas; the pair met as younger stagehands in Harlem — had been capable of break taboos, in Hollywood and past, unthinkable to Black contemporaries who had been much less foreign-seeming than Poitier or darker-skinned than Belafonte. Harry’s white followers who embraced his sunny songs of the islands, he agreed, had been far more capable of think about welcoming into their properties the “Caribbean gentleman” whose picture they each cultivated — unique and charming, correct and secure — than Black American entertainers who, descended from Dixie’s slaves, carried extra threatening baggage. Additionally, there was this: “When me and Sidney had been arising, folks took the best way we carried ourselves as proud, imperial. However that is each f***ing Jamaican I do know! And a variety of them are a ache within the ass!”
Imperial bearing and all, Belafonte’s brilliance as a performer was as a translator of folks histories, and the lives of working folks, into the idiom of pop. In Jamaica, the place Marcus Garvey’s devotees included Belafonte’s mom, Garvey had addressed slavery’s legacies by advocating for “Africa for the Africans, at dwelling and overseas.” Bob Marley would confront the identical historical past’s scars, a few generations later, by espousing a faith — Rastafari — constructed from Garvey’s concepts. Belafonte, who got here of age on the century’s heady midpoint, collected tales. He did not write his personal songs; he mediated others’. For this, some purists gave him flack. Nevertheless it was as a mediator of tradition and enactor of songs — carried by his beautiful voice, lent the glamour of his individual — that he introduced the tales of his folks to the world, and adjusted it.
After I tromped by St. Ann’s hills to search out his kin, I used to be engaged on a guide concerning the Caribbean’s unheralded roles in shaping fashionable world tradition. It was a challenge whose goals Harry cherished, and that he supported not merely by granting me interviews, however by taking my immediate to think about how his island roots had formed his will to succeed — and his wider resonance. “Folks from the Caribbean didn’t reply to America’s oppressions in the identical means that Black People did,” he instructed me. “We had been continuously in a state of rebel, continuously in a state of pondering means above that which we got.” That immigrant’s dedication, little doubt, aided his rise. And nothing so formed his affect as his performance-cum-translation of those islands the place ethnic mixing and interesting historical past’s weight have lengthy been information of life, and whose folks have lengthy had a means of punching above their weight.
Belafonte bought his begin in present enterprise, after a stint within the Navy throughout World Conflict II, whereas working as a janitor in Harlem. There, he occurred into the American Negro Theater and, decided to change into an actor, enrolled in The New College downtown; with the assistance of the G.I. Invoice, he studied with friends like Tony Curtis and Marlon Brando. His first forays into music got here singing jazz. Nevertheless it was the burgeoning people scene, in Greenwich Village within the early ’50s, that gave him his metier.
Already an ardent leftist, Belafonte was entranced by how main figures of the “people revival” — Woody Guthrie and Josh White, Pete Seeger and The Weavers — turned songs of working folks into an ally of battle. Crucially, he and his supervisor Jack Rollins additionally noticed from the beginning how Belafonte — charismatic and strikingly lovely; unencumbered by a guitar and wearing tight black pants — may take people music up off its stool, so to talk, and make the presentation of dusty outdated songs an event for dynamic fashionable theater. From the primary time he tried out this new act on the Village Vanguard, it was clear it will work. In 1953, he was forged on Broadway in John Murray Anderson’s Almanac, and stole the present by belting people songs –– “Mark Twain,” “Maintain ’em Joe” — that gained him a Tony. “He was an actor,” wrote a critic for Metronome, “enjoying the very best position he was ever to get: the position of a singer.”
To search out materials and develop his repertoire, Belafonte visited the Library of Congress, as he recounted in his great 2011 memoir, My Track. He additionally met the good Jamaican folklorist and singer Louise Bennett on the Village Vanguard. “Miss Lou’s” 1954 recording of “Day Dah Gentle,” a favourite of Jamaican stevedores who loaded banana boats at evening to keep away from the solar’s warmth, singing of how morning’s arrival would ship them dwelling, beat Belafonte’s model to the punch by two years. After which, due to his buddy and collaborator Invoice Attaway, he met a fellow New Yorker with West Indian roots who grew to become the important co-creator of his Caribbean songbook. Irving Burgie, of Barbadian descent however raised in Brooklyn, dubbed himself Lord Burgess on the Vanguard. He shared Belafonte’s affinity, as a gifted lyricist and composer, for turning the folks sounds of the Antilles into northern pop.
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In Belafonte’s onstage patter in his heyday, he favored to speak about how he’d discovered “Jamaica Farewell” from sailors leaving Kingston’s docks. He did not: “Jamaica Farewell” was penned by Burgie in 1955 (albeit with a melody borrowed from the outdated Jamaican mento tune “Iron Bar,” as Burgie was later pressured to confess in courtroom). The same story lies behind the music that grew to become his signature. The lyrics and melody of “Day-O (The Banana Boat Track)” had been borrowed from the folks model recorded by Miss Lou and others, except one odd change: The place the outdated work-song referenced banana “fingers” — as bunches of the fruit are logically referred to as — Belafonte’s model invoked one other appendage (“Six foot, seven foot, eight foot bunch!”). And it wasn’t Bennett however Burgie who copyrighted these lyrics, and bought wealthy off the publishing. (Burgie went on to co-write different Belafonte favorites like “Island within the Solar,” in addition to Barbados’ nationwide anthem.)
Extra advanced nonetheless was Belafonte’s relationship with the island — Trinidad — the place calypso was born, and whose music bore solely a glancing relation to the sounds on his album Calypso, whose success prompted ideas {that a} “calypso craze” would supplant U.S. teenagers’ love for rock and roll (“Warning: Calypso Subsequent New Beat; R.I.P. for R’n’R?” trumpeted Selection in 1957). Belafonte corrected reporters who referred to as him the “King of Calypso”: That was a title reserved for victors in Trinidad’s annual Calypso Monarch competitors, throughout the island’s well-known yearly carnival. (Some on the island referred to as him a phony; others had been grateful for the eye he introduced them.) However he befriended just a few greats of the shape, amongst them Lord Melody, the calypsonian whose “Mama Look a Boo Boo” he reworked into an American hit. Harry additionally helped Melody tour the U.S., as he later would singers like South Africa’s Miriam Makeba and Nana Mouskouri from Greece, key figures within the inchoate style of “world music” whose rise he did a lot to foster.
None of this could have occurred if it weren’t for his breakthrough album. Calypso spent no fewer than 31 weeks atop the charts, after knocking Elvis Presley from that perch in September 1956. Earlier than Calypso, the 33 1/3 lengthy play format had been dominated by Broadway forged recordings equivalent to Oklahoma and South Pacific. The idea of immersing listeners in a international world over the course of two 20-minute sides wasn’t completely new: Within the early ’50s, “exotica” and sound results data had been vastly in style, and RCA Victor’s head on the time, George Marek, had helped create the label’s top-selling “temper music” sequence. Different RCA executives felt the concept would by no means fly with white listeners, however Marek was satisfied by Belafonte’s imaginative and prescient for a full document of Caribbean people songs, lushly organized and recorded by RCA’s high engineers. He could be greater than vindicated by the success of an album that, as Belafonte later put it, “proved that People had been extra prepared than had been assumed to listen to the voices of others or the tradition of different folks.”
Belafonte and Sidney Poitier collectively in London in 1972.
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By the point Calypso hit, Belafonte was additionally a film star: He’d wooed Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones, and would quickly woo Joan Fontaine, extra controversially, in Island within the Solar. However he was reluctant to just accept roles that did not, to his thoughts, match his beliefs. A number of the movies he turned down, as he by no means uninterested in reminding Sidney Poitier, abetted Sidney’s rise: For Harry, projecting genial dignity in public was one factor; it was one other to play an unthreatening Negro who’d been invited to dinner by white people as a result of he would not upset them. He cherished recalling the outlaws with whom he got here up in Harlem, and the later movie work he loved finest — from Uptown Saturday Evening to Robert Altman’s Kansas Metropolis — discovered him enjoying gangsters. Again in Jamaica, his best-loved film was a western he made with Poitier: In 1972’s Buck and the Preacher, he performed a tobacco-spitting huckster who joins forces with a stoic wagon grasp, in 1860s Kansas, to outwit a posse of white bounty hunters threatening a gaggle of just-emancipated slaves crossing the frontier to freedom.
Belafonte did not obtain pop stardom, or arguably even his degree of import to the Civil Rights period, by singing “We Shall Overcome.” He did so by performing people songs from the West Indies — and likewise “Danny Boy” and “Hava Nageela.” His fondness for the latter materials dated from his cherished publicity, as a New Yorker, to each Irish bards and the Jewish comics and cantors who helped him, he as soon as instructed an interviewer, “[come] to know the Jew by the tradition of the Jew.” After his return to Harlem from Jamaica in his teenagers, the resonance he discovered within the performs of Sean O’Casey and the tales of Shalom Aleichem, he stated, “made me see how related these folks had been to my world — and the way related I used to be to theirs.” He cherished to joke that, when he affected an Irish brogue to carry out O’Casey’s traces, he was simply adapting a Jamaican lilt to different means. And his built-in repertoire mirrored a dedication to succeed in past the protest music, to hunt “one other strategy to transfer my picture and my trigger by the ranks of the human household,” as he put it in My Track. What higher strategy to unsettle prejudice, and ask discomfiting questions of people that had denied Black humanity, than by lending his voice to the wonder in their very own?
In Harry’s old-school politics, the “human household” mattered. However till the tip, his worldview was formed by having traveled between Harlem and Jamaica, and sensing that one thing profound joined their folks. He remained, till his life’s finish, deeply engaged with the politics and folks of Africa — the place one in every of his earliest achievements, after he was requested by John Kennedy to assist launch the Peace Corps, concerned organizing an airlift from Kenya that included the daddy of 1 Barack Obama. That non-public tie did not cease Belafonte from criticizing the average insurance policies of America’s first Black president — a politician who grew to become a totemic determine to American liberals in methods it is arduous to think about taking place if Belafonte, many years earlier and evincing the same mien and beauty, hadn’t finished so first.
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Ever the unconventional, Belafonte was recognized in his latter years as a lot for his politics as his music. Among the many tasks of which he was proudest, from that final chapter, was The Lengthy Street to Freedom — a musical endeavor which had its begin when Belafonte satisfied George Marek at RCA to again an bold field set he conceived again within the ’50s. The gathering, which Belafonte started recording in 1961 and labored on for a decade, aimed to recount the bigger saga of Black folks in America from the arrival of its first slaves till the twentieth century. Subtitled An Anthology of Black Music, it featured Belafonte and mates like Bessie Jones and Brownie McGee, with Nigerian drummers and hovering choirs, performing 80 songs from throughout the Americas and Africa.
After RCA and Marek misplaced backing for the challenge, it was shelved for many years. When it lastly was launched, it was on CD reasonably than the deliberate 5 vinyl LPs, and debuted on the inauspicious date of Sept. 11, 2001. But when describing The Lengthy Street to Freedom to a journalist the next 12 months, Belafonte sounded not an oz. much less dedicated. He insisted, as he had finished for many years, on the centrality of Black tradition to American historical past, and on connecting Black People to a bigger diaspora whose foremost exponents have typically hailed from the Caribbean.
“Take a look at the fantastic thing about this music, hear to those voices,” he stated. “And if you happen to like what you hear, in case you are moved by what you hear, would not that make you need to know extra about how this music got here to be?”
Sarah Knight and Nicolette Khan contributed analysis assist to this story.
