He was famous for one song, the “Banana Boat Song,” which was a hit everywhere in 1956 but a number one hit in one country: Germany. With this, Harry Belafonte declared a genre, calypso. And at the same time he explained the world.
He was born Harold George Bellananfanti Jr. on March 1, 1927 in Harlem, the son of a Martinique sailor and a Jamaican laborer. He moved to Jamaica with his mother and two older brothers when he was eight years old, but served in the US Navy during World War II. After the war he became enthusiastic about music and theatre. He saw the black freedom fighter Paul Robeson in a play – then took part in the “Dramatic Workshop” of the New School For Social Research, which the German theater maker Erwin Piscator led. Piscator was a legend and his faculty at the time included Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis and Walter Matthau. American post-war cinema.
Belafonte’s sympathies were divided: in 1950 he got a recording contract, rejected commercial songs and pursued his passion for the folk songs of the West Indies and jazz. The Club Village Vanguard – where Barbra Streisand later had her first gigs – in Manhattan hired him. As an actor, he landed a role in the 1955 film Carmen Jones, Otto Preminger’s version of George Bizet’s Carmen. In 1957 he released “Island In The Sun”, another calypso hit. But neither acting nor music consistently pursued Belafonte.
He became the Ambassador for Human Rights.
As early as the 1950s, he supported a scholarship for Africans who could use it to study in the USA – one of the scholarship holders was the Kenyan Barack Obama Sr., the father of the future president. With Martin Luther King, Belafonte organized the 1963 March on Washington, Charlton Heston in the front row. He conferred with John F. Kennedy. Harry Belafonte was world famous and he used the show stage to fight for his causes. He was friends with Joachim Fuchsberger, whom he met on his television show. And he was a friendly, an interested, a reliable man. In his autobiography, moderator Peter Urban recalls that Belafonte wanted to continue a conversation the next day in the 1980s.
The later project “USA For Africa” was an initiative of Belafonte, who turned to Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie and Quincy Jones with the plan for a benefit song. They were convinced: “We Are The World” came out of it in 1985. Bob Dylan sang along – Belafonte had encouraged him as a young singer in the early sixties in Greenwich Village.
Only rarely did Belafonte appear in films. He starred with Sidney Poitier in his 1971 film Buck And The Preacher, and again in 1974 alongside Poitier and Bill Cosby in Uptown Saturday Night. He always found Poitier better than himself. And took no more roles. Ironically, the erratic director Robert Altman brought him back in 1992 for The Player and then shot Pret-A-Porter (1994) and Kanas City (1996) with him. Spike Lee hired him in 2018 for BlacKkKlansman, Harry Belafonte’s final appearance in a film.
Most of all, Belafonte loved the anthology of black music from the 17th century, which he compiled from 1954: The Long Road To Freedom was released on five CDs in 2002. It could have been 50 or 500 CDs.
But Harry Belafonte was a man of measure and mean, an artist of kindness and reason. The man everyone loved died yesterday at the age of 96 in Manhattan, the place of citizenship.