Sixty-one years ago, in 1956, Harry Belafonte recorded a version of the Jamaican folk song “Day-O,” for his third studio album, “Calypso.” It opens with a distant and eager rumbling—as if something dark and hulking were approaching from a remote horizon. Belafonte—who was born in Harlem in 1927, but lived with his grandmother in a wooden house on stilts in Aboukir, a mountain village in Jamaica, for a good chunk of his childhood—bellows the title in a clipped island pitch. The instrumentation is spare and creeping. His voice bounces and echoes as it moves closer. It sounds like a call to prayer.
The song was written sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, though to suggest that “Day-O” was formally composed in any sort of premeditated way might be overstating things. It’s a call-and-response work song, likely concocted spontaneously by overnight dockworkers cramming bunches of bananas onto ships, hot-footing it away from loose spiders, and fantasizing about rum. By 1890, the sugar trade in Jamaica had been toppled by an assortment of wars, acts of God, and political upheavals, and bananas had become the country’s primary export. “Come Mr. Tally Man, tally me banana,” Belafonte implores. “Daylight come and me wan’ go home,” his chorus chants. It is an infinitely applicable refrain, no matter what your metaphorical banana might be, or which cocktail seizes your imagination come quitting time. “Me wan’ go home” is perhaps as universal a plea for freedom as we’ve got.
“Day-O” is so suffused with joy and pathos—that age-old human mishmash—that almost anybody with an actively beating heart sounds awesome singing it. Incredibly, in 1957, five more artists made it onto the U.S. Top Forty with their versions; these range from rich and enveloping (the jazz singer Sarah Vaughn) to unsettlingly polite (the folk-pop band The Tarriers). One of the writing credits for Belafonte’s iteration goes to Irving Burgie, or Lord Burgess, a Brooklyn-born songwriter of Barbadian descent. Belafonte’s friend and collaborator, the novelist Bill Attaway, introduced Belafonte to Burgess, whom Attaway had called “the black Alan Lomax—a walking library of songs from the islands.” The trio camped out in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where Belafonte was performing a string of shows, and fiddled around with “Day-O,” which was known at the time as “The Banana Boat Song,” or “Hill and Gully Rider.”
“None of us had any idea, when we recorded it, that it would be spun off as a single,” Belafonte admits, in his 2011 autobiography, “My Song.” “Day-O” went to No. 5 on the charts, and “Calypso” became the first full-length record of any sort to sell a million copies. Belafonte had bickered with RCA over the cover. The first mockup he saw featured his body with “a big bunch of bananas superimposed on my head. I looked like Carmen Miranda in drag, only in bare feet, with a big toothy grin, as if I were saying, ‘Come to dee islands!’ ”
On March 1st, Belafonte will turn ninety. This week, Sony Legacy is releasing “The Legacy of Harry Belafonte: When the Colors Come Together,” a new anthology of his work. It’s a beautiful, manifold collection, and reiterates Belafonte’s standing as one of America’s most vital and insurrectionary folk singers. There is video of Belafonte performing his song “Matilda” in 1966, at a benefit for Martin Luther King, Jr. He is lithe and balletic, slinking easily about the stage, like a stalk of tall grass bending in the breeze. When it comes time for the chorus to sing, he flaps his hands at them in a gesture I have now observed hundreds of times but still cannot figure out how to describe: it is as if his hand is attached to strings being tugged on from above. Belafonte came of age as a vocalist in an era in which tone and modulation were paramount, watched as those foundations were successfully subverted, and then grew expert at drawing from both customs. This gives his work a tense and singular dynamism.
Prior to “Calypso,” Belafonte worked as a stage actor and a jazz singer, but in the early nineteen-fifties he became gripped by vernacular music, and particularly by the idea that a folk song could be an engine of actual social change. In “My Song,” he tells a story about seeing the folk singers Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly perform at the Village Vanguard, and being so remade by the experience that he arranged for a pilgrimage to the Library of Congress, in Washington, to listen to the thousands of field recordings that Alan Lomax had collected and archived there. “I just couldn’t stand the thought of going back to those mushy pop standards,” Belafonte writes. Though he had grown up in deep poverty, he fretted over his bona fides and his racially mixed origins. (His maternal grandmother was “the white daughter of a Scottish father who’d come to Jamaica to oversee a plantation for an absentee owner,” while his paternal grandfather was “a white Dutch Jew who’d drifted over to the islands after chasing gold and diamonds, with no luck at all.”) “I wasn’t even a full-fledged Jamaican, or a black from Harlem with full Afro-American roots,” he worried. “All of this mattered, deeply, in the burgeoning folk music of the early 1950s, because authenticity was what the songs were about, and an inauthentic singer, which was what I appeared to be, had no right to sing them.”
Belafonte was strikingly prescient about the ways in which taste could and would be politicized, and especially about how treacherous it is to confuse consumption with action. This seems, to me, to be an unspoken but profound hindrance to all popular rebellions: if a person reads the right authors, and buys the right records, and vouches for those preferences loudly and repeatedly, it can feel like all the necessary work has been done to align oneself with the proper causes. “If you liked Harry Belafonte, you were making a political statement, and that felt good, the way it felt good to listen to Paul Robeson, and listen to what he had to say. If you were a white Belafonte fan, you felt even better. You were connecting with your better angels, reaching across the racial divide,” Belafonte writes. Or: what should be a beginning is often mistaken for an end.
Eventually, Belafonte would become integral to the civil-rights movement of the nineteen-sixties, both as an adviser and confidante of King’s and a financial patron, helping to fund voter-registration drives, Freedom Rides, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and more. Over the next fifty years, his activism would extend beyond domestic concerns: he has advocated for famine relief in Africa (he was an organizer of the recording sessions for “We Are the World,” in 1985), H.I.V./AIDS prevention and treatment, the abolition of nuclear weapons, education, the end of apartheid, and more. Most recently, he served as a co-chair of the Women’s March on Washington, held the day after Donald Trump’s Inauguration.
“Calypso,” which topped the Billboard chart for thirty-one weeks, in 1956, is a curious and seductive record. The genre it was named after originated in Trinidad and Tobago, at some point in the early part of the twentieth century (use of the word to refer to a style of music was first recorded in 1930), though its beginnings are varied, ancient, and complex, and point toward West Africa, the French Antilles, and the seventeenth-century Caribbean slave trade. Musically, calypso is playful and colloquial, and rooted in a three-beat rhythm (two long beats, followed by a short beat); it directly inspirited Jamaican mento, which eventually produced ska.
In the annals of pop-music history, 1956 is generally thought of as the birth year of rock and roll (as a popular format, at least), but “Calypso” outsold both self-titled LPs that the twenty-one-year-old Elvis Presley released that year. It seems strange to recall this now, but, for a time, rock and roll and calypso were in an odd footrace for cultural ubiquity. In 1957, John S. Wilson, a critic for the Times, even suggested that calypso was acquiring the edge: “Reports from the epidemic areas of popular music suggest that Elvis Presley and rock ‘n’ roll are giving way before the onslaughts of Harry Belafonte and Calypso,” Wilson writes. “The contrast could not be more extreme.” Calypso, of course, was an old and adapted tradition, whereas rock and roll was a new amalgamation, wilder and more explicitly homegrown. There are also, as Wilson points out, categorical differences between the two genres, both musically and in terms of presentation: “Mr. Belafonte’s consciously precise and rounded diction is the direct opposite of Mr. Presley’s mumbled and swallowed syllables,” Wilson writes.
Belafonte’s next record, “An Evening with Belafonte,” was a collection of beloved folk songs culled from a parade of global traditions—“Hava Nageela,” “Danny Boy,” “When The Saints Go Marching In.” While he never shunned or disparaged calypso (and would eventually return to it, in 1961, with the album “Jump Up Calypso” and the effervescent and clamorous single “Jump in the Line”), Belafonte seemed plainly eager to peacock stylistically, flaunting his uncommon range. In 1958, he released “Belafonte Sings the Blues,” which is my favorite of his records, though it is, by most accounts, a middling entry in his discography. It’s not technically a collection of blues—in his liner notes, the critic Nat Hentoff admits as much, then suggests that “the feeling and the wryly unconquerable spirit of the blues pervade all the numbers,” which, while purists may disagree, seems more fundamental to the spirit of the enterprise than any chord progression—but there is a looseness and an uncooked quality to Belafonte’s voice here that feels both unprecedented and unrepeated.
Belafonte’s performance of “Losing Hand”—a song written by Charles Calhoun for Ray Charles, who had a hit with it, in 1953—is, for me, a calamitous combination of the sly and the wounded. “I gambled on your love, baby, and got a losing hand,” Belafonte sings. He sounds like someone who has come to realize that he is completely screwed—toppled by bad love, and floundering. His predicament has nearly become amusing to him; he has been bested, but still regards his attacker with woeful, wanting eyes. “I know you don’t care, but I love you just the same,” he shrugs.
In “My Song,” Belafonte has lessons for subsequent generations—advice for all the young dissidents taking up the movement—and it feels particularly timely to revisit them now. He writes, frequently, of M.L.K., who believed that anger was a necessary ingredient for change. “And I subscribe to that completely,” Belafonte writes. “I was angry when I met him. Anger had helped protect me. Martin understood my anger and saw its value. But our cause showed me how to redirect it and to make it productive.”
These days, when people talk about the lack of a musical center in contemporary protest movements, it’s usually framed as a subtle critique of modern artists, who tend to sing boldly of self-empowerment and self-growth, but rarely of collective betterment. Even folk music, the genre most typically equated with facilitating social revolution, seems to have turned inward, gotten more contemplative, more confessional. Some of our musical aimlessness is attributable to the ways that audiences have changed, too—the privatization of the listening experience and the fracturing of the monoculture has spawned a million tiny, private islands of taste. Belafonte suggests that he found his power “in songs of protest, and sorrow, and hope”—that they enabled his activism. The music he loved (the field hollers and chain-gang songs of the prewar South; the work laments of Jamaica) stressed the mutual or shared experience. Anger can be crippling when it festers in isolation. Belafonte figured out how to push anger outward by bringing others close.
