[ Music and Art ] [ Main Menu ]
11624
From: shadow, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Heroic Civil Rights Activist & Singer Harry Belafonte dies
|
RIP, amazing Brother... May you reap all the beauty and power you have sown here as you sing in Heaven, and smile as you watch us enact into victory the rights and freedoms for All that you gave so much of yourself toward -- despite all efforts to silence us... ;) *** As an actor and singer, Belafonte broke major barriers for Black performers in the Fifties before becoming a prominent figure in the fight for civil rights BY JASON HELLER APRIL 25, 2023 The legendary singer, actor, and civil rights activist died Tuesday, April 25, Rolling Stone confirmed. He was 96. Belafonte died at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, with longtime spokesman, Ken Sunshine, saying the cause was congestive heart failure. Belafonte rose to prominence in the Fifties when his interpretation of calypso music popularized the sounds of the Caribbean for an American mainstream audience. His many hits include “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” and “Jamaica Farewell.” He appeared in numerous films as an actor, notably with Dorothy Dandridge or his prefame friend Sidney Poitier. Carmen Jones from 1954 and Island in the Sun from 1957 thrust him into superstardom, breaking barriers as a Black idol and sex symbol, even as his musical career peaked with the million-selling albums Calypso in 1956 and Jump Up Calypso in 1961. His career dipped in the Sixties thanks to the onrush of rock & roll, and he ramped up his involvement in the civil rights movement, becoming part of Martin Luther King Jr.’s inner circle. His commitment to social justice never wavered, including his opposition to the apartheid and support of famine relief in Africa. This culminated in his instrumental role in conceiving the star-studded 1985 charity project USA for Africa. Born in 1927 in Harlem, Harold Bellanfanti was the son of immigrants from Jamaica. His first creative love was the theater. He and Poitier got into acting together, which spun off into Belafonte’s music career. Before he became known, he was once backed by a band including Charlie Parker and Miles Davis; a switch to Caribbean music followed as Belafonte became entranced by the folk music of his parents’ homeland. His first major single, 1953’s “Matilda,” was a stew of styles, including calypso and the Jamaican folk form mento. He struck gold with that formula in 1956 with his biggest hit, “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song),” a jaunty yet haunting ode to dock workers on the night shift. It appeared, along with the hit “Jamaica Farewell,” on his 1956 album Calypso, which spent a staggering 31 consecutive weeks at the top of the Billboard Top Pop Albums chart. He continued to have hits into the Sixties, including the lively “Jump in the Line (Shake, Señora)” from 1961, but the arrival of the likes of The Beatles and Bob Dylan marked a downshift in Belafonte’s generation of performers. Ironically, Belafonte’s 1962 album Midnight Special gave a young Dylan his first professional recording credit as a musician and harmonica player on the album’s title track. Still, he was an entertainment icon–and his increasingly vocal stance regarding civil rights was a risky move. “I was at the height of my success. Hit records and movies, and being rewarded by millions of people coming in attendance to the audiences that I played around the world,” he remembered in 2016. “The machinery of oppression was always at work trying to discredit me, make me a communist, make me unpatriotic, etc., etc., etc. And it takes a lot of courage to stand up in the face of that onslaught, that reactive moment and not bend to the wind.” Belafonte walked it like he talked it. For instance, in a tale he recounts in his 2011 memoir My Song, he and Poitier drove from New York to Mississippi in 1964 with $50,000 in cash to bail out jailed volunteers who were arrested trying to register Black voters–and the duo dodged Ku Klux Klan bullets in the process. Less dramatically but no less profoundly, he and fellow pop star Petula Clark bucked would-be censors in 1968 when they appeared on an NBC special together–and Clark touched Belafonte’s arm while they sang, a gesture of interracial intimacy that the show’s producer found offensive and wanted removed. The duo refused, and the uncut segment aired. Television and film roles continued for Belafonte, including a trilogy of crime comedies with Boll Cosby in the Seventies, beginning with 1974’s Uptown Saturday Night. His profile was raised in the Eighties by USA for Africa and its resultant single, “We Are the World,” on which he sings alongside Dylan, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Ray Charles, and a host of fellow music legends. Belafonte received an unexpected bump in 1988 when Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice prominently and memorably featured two of his classic hits, “Day-O” and “Jump in the Line.” And in 1996, Belafonte won a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actor for his turn in Robert Altman’s Kansas City. In 2011, an HBO documentary about Belafonte titled Sing Your Song premiered, which helped cement his legacy. “If you look at the history of my life, it’s all movement,” he said that year. “I was attached to a history and a way of life that was quite eventful.” He never stopped being eventful. In recent years he ruffled feathers by praising Hugo Chavez and calling George W. Bush a terrorist, and his position on Colin Kaepernick’s protests left no doubt as to where he stood: “To mute the slave has always been to the best interest of the slave owner,” he said. “And I think that when a Black voice is raised in protest to oppression, those who are comfortable with our oppression are the first to criticize us for daring to speak out against it. I think that it’s a noble thing that he’s done.” Since the Fifties and surely forever, Belafonte has been known as the King of Calypso. He opened the eyes and ears of America at large to the music of Jamaica, paving the way for the subsequent influx of reggae. And his influence has popped up in the least expected places. “I can’t sing like Harry Belafonte, but I love him,” Tom Waits declared in 2004. “If I told you all I’m doin’ is trying to sound like Harry Belafonte, you wouldn’t get it.” In an interview following the New York premiere of Sing Your Song in 2011, Belafonte, then 84, spoke with chilling prescience about the coming sociopolitical storm, from Black Lives Matter to the Trump presidency: “This constituency in Africa, parts of the Middle East and here in the United States: we want the oppression to stop. I feel that what was done in the years of the Civil Rights movement, the sacrifices made by those students . . . really shaped a future for this country that we have momentarily lost.” When asked if he held out hope for the future, he smiled and said, “I have to think it’s winnable. Otherwise, I may as well go home, smoke a spliff and call it a day.” More somberly, in 2016 he assessed the state of the current resistance against racism and injustice, saying, “Well, the same things needed now are the same things needed before. Movements don’t die because struggle doesn’t die.” |
11630
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Heroic Civil Rights Activist & Singer Harry Belafonte dies
URL: https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/04/28/belafontes-early-songs-were-audacious-and-sexual/
|
April 28, 2023 Belafonte’s Early Songs Were Audacious… and Sexual by Martha Rosenberg The great, late musician Harry Belafonte is being remembered as a civil rights leader, movie actor and a best friend of the late great actor Sidney Poitier—all true. He is also acknowledged as serving as an avatar of Caribbean culture with such hits as “Day O,” (The Banana Boat Song) “Island in the Sun,” and “Jamaica Farewell”—also true. But few reporters have reached back into the breadth of his 1950s recordings for RCA Victor (“RCA Victory” as one young reporter termed it) which were shocking at the time for their audacity, sexuality and versatility. Belafonte was not only one of the first black singers to exude sexuality—with his good looks and his notorious shirts cut down to the navel—but also one of the first to sing about it! Consider the lyrics from his tune, “Man Smart (Woman Smarter)” which suggest a sexual freedom not often admitted in the 1950s (and even cut in some versions.) I was treatin’ a girl independently She was makin’ baby for me When de baby born and I went to see Eyes was blue It was not by me. And how about the song “Tongue Tie Baby” in which Belafonte promises marriage to a woman just to consummate a passionate encounter. [The mission failed] How to make the fruit fall off the tree If I want a chance to integrate me situation I got to talk some other talk for she Right away marriage talk was coming out me mouth She smiled the conquest is no long in doubt But before she reach insanity, With the last chance whisper she telling me And speaking of marriage, early Belafonte songs did not have very progressive views. In the song Angelique-O, he sings that “Mama’s got to take you back,” because Angelique-O was a poor housekeeper. ( “You never learned how to make a stew/your biscuits Lord I can hardly chew.”) In the song, Cordelia Brown, Belafonte confesses that he’s “yearned this long for your [Cordelia’s] caress” but since her “head’s so red” [not in keeping with local beauty standards], “I think I will marry Maybelle instead.” Ouch. And what are we to make of the arguably racist song, “Brown Skin Girl,” who is told in the song to “stay home and mind baby?” Versatility in Song Choices and Voice In his early recordings, Belafonte’s voice was amazingly versatile. While it gallops with light-hearted tunes like “Scratch” and “Monkey” (“My girl came over to have a drink/I came downstairs and what do you think?/The monkey had run and he let her in/ He poured her a glass of me favorite gin,”) it is reverential on tunes like “Love, Love Alone,” about the English monarch King Edward’s throne abdication and the Hebrew dance hit “Hava Nagila.” (What influenced his choice of material one wonders?) Belafonte’s musical soloists on early recordings on woodwinds and horns and his backup singers were remarkable and culturally true but mostly took a backseat to their famous lead singer. (Nor did Belafonte’s fun and satirical Calypso songs, occlude his apparently strong faith showcased on an entire album of spirituals and his Christmas-timed “Mary’s Boy Child,” which is still a treasured holiday favorite.) Many enjoyed Belafonte’s entertaining movie appearances and appreciated his civil rights work. But Belafonte’s early musical work was unprecedented in creativity and audacity and should not be forgotten. Martha Rosenberg is an investigative health reporter. She is the author of Born With A Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks and Hacks Pimp The Public Health (Prometheus). |
11632
From: shadow, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Heroic Civil Rights Activist & Singer Harry Belafonte dies
|
Yep, there’ve always been & will always be humans who are powerfully driven in many progressive/humanitarian ways yet are, at the same time, products/reflections of Their Evolutionary Times in others… ;) For me his positive Civil Rights progressive audacities far outweigh the personal, more backward & historically prevalent attitudes toward women that show up in a few of his songs… ;) |
Responses:
[11644]
11644
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Heroic Civil Rights Activist & Singer Harry Belafonte dies
|
May 5, 2023 Harry Belafonte: the Artist Who Taught Me About Social Justice by Farrah Hassen Photograph Source: Los Angeles Times – CC BY 4.0 Some know the late Harry Belafonte for his genre-jumping music and silky baritone voice, epitomized in his classic 1956 album Calypso. Others swoon over his performances in films like the 1954 musical Carmen Jones. In activist circles, he’s revered for supporting his good friend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the civil rights movement, funding voter registration drives in Mississippi, and financing the Freedom Riders and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), among many other examples. I knew him for something else besides: He was my first boss after college. In 2005, I worked for Harry Belafonte as his executive assistant in New York. We connected through my mentor-professor Saul Landau, the late writer and filmmaker who befriended “Mr. B” (as he liked to be called) through their travels to Cuba. I was just beginning my career, knowing only that I was drawn to social justice and the arts. There was no better person to learn about either than from Mr. B — and in no better place than where he once strategized with Dr. King and others in the civil rights movement. From the moment I started, I took calls and messages for Mr. B not just from those in the music and film industry, but also lawyers, policy advocates, social movement leaders, and poets engaged in ongoing struggles against injustice. They sought his advice and endorsement, while he focused on empowering the next generation of artists and activists. Even as countless shiny awards lined his office walls, he never rested on his laurels. I saw his humanity — and he challenged my notions of “celebrity.” During one of my first days on the job, for instance, I dreaded informing him that his friend of 60 years, iconic actor and activist Ossie Davis, had passed away. Very few of us are expected to issue immediate comments to the press after receiving devastating news. Yet amidst his sadness, I remember Mr. B’s strength as he spoke in honor of his friend to the media throughout that long day. As I now look back at his early life, I have an even greater appreciation for what he overcame. Born to Jamaican immigrants in Harlem in 1927, Mr. B’s early years were heavily influenced by poverty. In his 2011 memoir, My Song, he chronicled his mother struggling to put food on the table as a domestic worker. His father was a cook aboard United Fruit Company ships and wasn’t always present. Belafonte’s 1956 song “Day-O (Banana Boat Song)” pays tribute to both the toils of his parents and the workers in the banana fields of Jamaica. After serving in the Navy, Belafonte worked odd jobs to make ends meet in a country still ruled by segregation. His mother’s refrain to fight injustice wherever he saw it laid the foundation for his life and career trajectory. Because of her, he recalled in his memoir, he was an “activist who’d become an artist.” Against all odds Belafonte rose to stardom, becoming the first Black man to win a Tony, the first Black man to win an Emmy, and the first artist to record an album that sold 1 million copies. And time and again, Mr. B showed that an artist can be more than an entertainer. He supported the movement against apartheid in South Africa and the campaign to free Nelson Mandela. He organized the all-star charity record “We Are the World” that raised millions for famine relief in Africa. He served as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador for 36 years, advocating for health care, HIV/AIDS treatment, and free education access for all. I will always treasure the lessons I learned from Mr. B. He set an example by staying true to his convictions, building community and bridges across cultures, and remaining tenacious while battling economic and racial inequality. Rest in power, Mr. B. The work continues, guided by your life’s inspiring song. Farrah Hassen, J.D., is a writer, policy analyst, and adjunct professor in the Department of Political Science at Cal Poly Pomona. |
Responses:
None
11631
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Heroic Civil Rights Activist & Singer Harry Belafonte dies
URL: https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/04/28/roaming-charges-89/
|
+ I interviewed the great Harry Belafonte three times, twice about Cuba and once about his relationship with the Native American activist and poet John Trudell. I intend on writing about Belafonte in the weeks to come, but for today here’s the story of how Bob Dylan made his first recorded performance on Belafonte’s 1962 record, The Midnight Special, as a last minute substitute for Sonny Terry, whose plane had been grounded in Memphis by a thunderstorm. Belafonte described the strange encounter with the young Dylan in a 2010 interview with MOJO magazine: My guitarist Millard Thomas, said, ‘Well, there’s this kid I see all the time down in the Village, and he does that whole Sonny thing. He sleeps and dreams it.’ So I said, ‘We don’t have a choice I guess. Go find him.’ And this skinny kid appeared and he had a paper sack with him full of harmonicas in different keys. I played the song for him and he pulled one out of the bag, dipped it in water, and played through a single take, and it was great. I loved it. I asked him if wanted to try another take and he said, ‘No.’ I asked him if he wanted to hear it back and he said, ‘No.’ He just headed for the door and threw the harmonica in the trashcan on his way out. I remember thinking. Does he have that much disdain for what I’m doing? But I found out later that he bought his harps at the Woolworth drugstore. They were cheap ones and once he’d gotten them wet and really played through them as hard as he did, they were finished. It wasn’t until decades later, when he wrote that book [Chronicles: Volume One], that I read what he really felt about me, and I tell you, I got very, very choked up. I had admired him all along, and no matter what he did or said, I was just a stone, stone fan. |
Responses:
None
11626
From: pamela, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Heroic Civil Rights Activist & Singer Harry Belafonte dies
|
👍🦋❗🪔I saw his obit. couple days ago. One of my favorites for sure. |
Responses:
None
[ Music and Art ] [ Main Menu ]