Harry Belafonte

Harry Belafonte ( BEL-ə-FON-tee; born Harold George Bellanfanti Jr.; March 1, 1927 – April 25, 2023) was an American singer, actor, and civil rights activist who popularized calypso music with international audiences in the 1950s and 1960s. Belafonte's career breakthrough album Calypso (1956) was the first million-selling LP by a single artist.

Belafonte was best known for his recordings of "Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)", "Jump in the Line (Shake, Senora)", "Jamaica Farewell", and "Mary's Boy Child". He recorded and performed in many genres, including blues, folk, gospel, show tunes, and American standards. He also starred in films such as Carmen Jones (1954), Island in the Sun (1957), Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), Buck and the Preacher (1972), and Uptown Saturday Night (1974). He made his final feature film appearance in Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman (2018).

Harry Belafonte considered the actor, singer, and activist Paul Robeson to be a mentor. Belafonte was also a close confidant of Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and acted as the American Civil Liberties Union celebrity ambassador for juvenile justice issues. He was also a vocal critic of the policies of the George W. Bush and first Donald Trump administrations.

Belafonte won three Grammy Awards, including a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and a Tony Award. In 1989, he received the Kennedy Center Honors. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1994. In 2014, he received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the academy's 6th Annual Governors Awards and in 2022 was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the Early Influence category. He is one of the few performers to have received an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony (EGOT), although he won the Oscar in a non-competitive category.

Early life

Belafonte was born Harold George Bellanfanti Jr. on March 1, 1927, at Lying-in Hospital in Harlem, New York City, the son of Jamaican-born parents Harold George Bellanfanti Sr. (1900–1990), who worked as a chef, and Melvine Love (1906–1988), a housekeeper. There are disputed claims of his father's place of birth, which is also stated as Martinique. Belafonte also had a younger brother named Dennis.

His mother was the child of a Scottish Jamaican mother and an Afro-Jamaican father, and his father was the child of an Afro-Jamaican mother and a Dutch-Jewish father of Sephardic Jewish descent. Belafonte was raised Catholic and attended parochial school at St. Charles Borromeo.

From 1932 to 1940, Belafonte lived with one of his grandmothers in her native country of Jamaica, where he attended Wolmer's Schools. Upon returning to New York City, he had a brief, unsuccessful stay at George Washington High School. It was later reported that undiagnosed dyslexia and blindness in one eye contributed to his academic difficulties. After dropping out of high school, he joined the U.S. Navy and served during World War II. In the 1940s, he worked as a janitor's assistant, during which a tenant gave him, as a gratuity, two tickets to see the American Negro Theater. He fell in love with the art form and befriended Sidney Poitier, who was also financially struggling. They regularly purchased a single seat to local plays, trading places in between acts, after informing the other about the progression of the play.

At the end of the 1940s, Belafonte took classes in acting at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School in New York City with German director Erwin Piscator alongside Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis, Walter Matthau, Bea Arthur, and Poitier, while performing with the American Negro Theater. He subsequently received a Tony Award for his participation in the Broadway revue John Murray Anderson's Almanac (1954). He also starred in the 1955 Broadway revue 3 for Tonight with Gower Champion.

Musical career

Early years (1949–1955)

Belafonte started his career in music as a club singer in New York to pay for his acting classes. The first time he appeared in front of an audience, he was backed by the Charlie Parker band, which included Charlie Parker, Max Roach, and Miles Davis, among others. He launched his recording career as a pop singer on the Roost label in 1949, but quickly developed a keen interest in folk music, learning material through the Library of Congress' American folk songs archives. Along with guitarist and friend Millard Thomas, Belafonte soon made his debut at the jazz club The Village Vanguard. In 1953, he signed a contract with RCA Victor, recording exclusively for the label until 1974. Belafonte also performed during the Rat Pack era in Las Vegas. Belafonte's first widely released single, which went on to become his "signature" audience participation song in virtually all his live performances, was "Matilda", recorded April 27, 1953. Between 1953 and 1954, he was a cast member of the Broadway musical revue and sketch comedy show John Murray Anderson's Almanac where he sang "Mark Twain", of which he was also the songwriter.

Rise to fame (1956–1958)

Following his success in the film Carmen Jones (1954), Belafonte had his breakthrough album with Calypso (1956), which became the first LP in the world to sell more than one million copies in a year. He stated that it was the first million-selling album ever in England. The album is number four on Billboard's "Top 100 Album" list for having spent 31 weeks at number 1, 58 weeks in the top ten, and 99 weeks on the U.S. chart. The album introduced American audiences to calypso music, which had originated in Trinidad and Tobago in the early 19th century, and Belafonte was dubbed the "King of Calypso", a title he wore with reservations since he had no claims to any Calypso Monarch titles.

One of the songs included in the album is "Banana Boat Song", listed as "Day-O" on the Calypso LP, which reached number five on the pop chart and featured its signature lyric "Day-O".

Many of the compositions recorded for Calypso, including "Banana Boat Song" and "Jamaica Farewell", gave songwriting credit to Irving Burgie.

In the United Kingdom, "Banana Boat Song" was released in March 1957 and spent ten weeks in the top 10 of the UK singles chart, reaching a peak of number two, and in August, "Island in the Sun" reached number three, spending 14 weeks in the top 10. In November, "Mary's Boy Child" reached number one in the UK, where it spent seven weeks.

Middle career (1959–1970)

While primarily known for calypso, Belafonte recorded in many different genres, including blues, folk, gospel, show tunes, and American standards. His second-most popular hit, which came immediately after "The Banana Boat Song", was the comedic tune "Mama Look at Bubu", also known as "Mama Look a Boo-Boo", originally recorded by Lord Melody in 1955, in which he sings humorously about misbehaving and disrespectful children. It reached number 11 on the pop chart.

In 1959, Belafonte starred in Tonight With Belafonte, a nationally televised special that featured Odetta, who sang "Water Boy" and performed a duet with Belafonte of "There's a Hole in My Bucket" that hit the national charts in 1961. Belafonte was the first Jamaican American to win an Emmy, for Revlon Revue: Tonight with Belafonte (1959). Two live albums, both recorded at Carnegie Hall in 1959 and 1960, enjoyed critical and commercial success. From his 1959 album, "Hava Nagila" became part of his regular routine and one of his signature songs. He was one of many entertainers recruited by Frank Sinatra to perform at the inaugural gala of President John F. Kennedy in 1961, which included Ella Fitzgerald and Mahalia Jackson, among others. Later that year, RCA Victor released another calypso album, Jump Up Calypso, which went on to become another million seller. During the 1960s he introduced several artists to U.S. audiences, most notably South African singer Miriam Makeba and Greek singer Nana Mouskouri. His album Midnight Special (1962) included Bob Dylan as harmonica player.

As the Beatles and other stars from Britain began to dominate the U.S. pop charts, Belafonte's commercial success diminished; 1964's Belafonte at The Greek Theatre was his last album to appear in Billboard's Top 40. His last hit single, "A Strange Song", was released in 1967 and peaked at number 5 on the adult contemporary music charts. Belafonte received Grammy Awards for the albums Swing Dat Hammer (1960) and An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba (1965), the latter of which dealt with the political plight of black South Africans under apartheid. He earned six Gold Records.

During the 1960s, Belafonte appeared on TV specials alongside artists such as Julie Andrews, Petula Clark, Lena Horne, and Nana Mouskouri. In 1967, Belafonte was the first non-classical artist to perform at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC) in Upstate New York, soon to be followed by concerts there by the Doors, the 5th Dimension, the Who, and Janis Joplin.