Navy in He returned to New York after his discharge and worked as a janitor's assistant. He attended a production at the American Negro Theatre ANT and was impressed by what he saw that he volunteered to work there as a stagehand. Afterward, he decided to become an actor. Harry studied drama at the Dramatic Workshop. While appearing in ANT productions, he impressed music agent Monte Kay, who offered him the chance to perform at a jazz club called Royal Roost.
Soon, he became popular in the club and bagged his first recording deal in In the early s, Harry dropped popular music from his repertoire to concentrate on folk music. He learned traditional folk songs worldwide and performed in New York City clubs like the Village Vanguard.
While making music and performing in nightclubs, Harry was also successful as an actor. Harry launched his film career in the s and earned rave reviews after starring beside Dorothy Dandridge in the film "Bright Road. He also enjoyed massive success while working with his longtime friend Sydney Poitier, with whom he starred in many films, including "Buck and the Preacher" and "Uptown Saturday Night.
After starring in "Carmen Jones," Harry became a star. He became a music sensation and released his breakthrough album, "Calypso" in The album was the first by any artist to sell a million copies. He is best known for his song, "The Banana Boat Song Day-O ," which proved to be a massive tune and held a special meaning to him. He revealed the song was about his dad, mom, uncles, and the men and women working in Jamaica's banana and cane fields.
Besides his incredible music and acting talent, Harry was also known for his social and political activism. He was good friends with civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. He became a strong voice for the movement and assisted financially.
Byrd was a sorority sister and class officer from a middle-class family in Washington, D. She and Harry differed in their views and perspectives of racial and political issues and had a courtship she described as a long argument over racial issues.
Byrd said Harry reminded her of a kid who would get into trouble without someone else watching and helping him. Hence, she kept him from becoming a delinquent. In June , the lovebirds tied the knot and welcomed their first child, Adrienne in They also welcomed a second daughter, Shari Belafonte, now a well-known actress, model, writer, and singer.
Belafonte also spent much of his early years in Jamaica, his mother's native country. There, he saw firsthand the oppression of Black people by the English authorities, which left a lasting impression on him.
Belafonte returned to New York City's Harlem neighborhood in to live with his mother. They struggled in poverty, and Belafonte was often cared for by others while his mother worked. Dropping out of high school, Belafonte enlisted in the U. Navy in Mesmerized by the performance, the young Navy vet volunteered to work for the AMT as a stagehand, eventually deciding to become an actor.
Along with appearing in AMT productions, he caught the eye of music agent Monte Kay, who offered Belafonte the opportunity to perform at a jazz club called the Royal Roost. Backed by such talented musicians as Charlie Parker and Miles Davis , Belafonte became a popular act at the club.
In he landed his first recording deal. By the early s, Belafonte had dropped popular music from his repertoire in favor of folk. He became an avid student of traditional folk songs from around the world and performed in such New York City clubs as the Village Vanguard.
During this time, Belafonte was finding success as an actor: Debuting on Broadway in , he won a Tony Award the following year for his work in John Murray Anderson's Almanac , in which he performed several of his own songs.
Belafonte also appeared in another well-received musical revue, 3 for Tonight , in Around this time, Belafonte launched his film career. He played a school principal opposite Dorothy Dandridge in his first movie, Bright Road The pair reunited the following year for Otto Preminger's Carmen Jones , a film adaptation of the Broadway musical itself an adaptation of the Georges Bizet opera Carmen , with Belafonte starring as Joe alongside the Oscar-nominated Dandridge.
Belafonte enjoyed some success through his collaborations with longtime friend Sidney Poitier , including 's Buck and the Preacher and 's Uptown Saturday Night. He also made numerous television appearances in the s and s, including a guest spot on The Muppet Show , on which he sang some of his most popular songs. You and Me. Belafonte returned to the big screen in the s, first playing himself in the Hollywood-insider flick The Player White Man's Burden , which co-starred John Travolta , was a commercial and critical disappointment, but Belafonte fared better in Robert Altman's Kansas City , playing against type as a heartless gangster.
From the beginning, it was a complicated relationship—compounded of affection, admiration, and rivalry. And then there was the fact that we were eligible for pretty much the same kind of parts. He was very fond of Harry. And Harry loved him. These were tough times for Belafonte and Poitier both; and they were better at concocting schemes to get rich quick than at making ends meet. Poitier still remembers a plan to bottle and sell an extract of conch, a shellfish that, in the Caribbean, anyway, was reputed to be an aphrodisiac.
In , Belafonte was performing in an A. Still, a job was a job. Christopher medal. In , Belafonte, with two friends, opened a hamburger joint in the Village, called the Sage; it lasted all of eight months, but it did provide him with rehearsal space to work after hours on his new act—as a folksinger. And this was a musical genre that somehow resonated with his political sensibilities.
He wanted what he believed to be a part of his work. The whole history of black people was in the texture of folksinging. The larger cultural milieu was changing in auspicious ways, too. And when that photo hit, in this national publication, it was as if a barrier had been broken. Before long, he found himself booked at the upper echelon of night clubs and hotels across the country, and under contract as a recording artist at RCA. These were years that mixed exhilaration with humiliation: the bigger he got, the harder it was for him to ignore the petty indignities of Jim Crow.
The exhilarating part was, for instance, being booked to play the swanky Thunderbird Hotel, in Las Vegas. In , enjoying his first real taste of affluence, Belafonte moved from Washington Heights into a white neighborhood in Elmhurst, Queens.
There are Niggeroes moving into the neighborhood. Indeed, Belafonte went on to become perhaps the most frequently heard singer on the show. Belafonte was receiving his greatest popular exposure so far, but he was also—and not for the last time, either—experiencing the bitterness of being shunned by his own people.
I had to live for a long time with the pain of rejection from people who were in the same camp. Even Paul Robeson, Jr. They crucified him—and the black community knew it, the white liberal community knew it. It stained an awful lot of hands. Not all the critics were impressed, but for many black viewers, in particular, the performances were electrifying, and remain so. Margurite, who had done graduate work at the Sorbonne and the University of Heidelberg and was soon to earn a Ph. She came from a family that was striving to be in the upper echelon of black society, which then moves you into the middle echelon of white society.
For Dad, it was about changing all of society. Robinson, who had been dating Marlon Brando, had the distinction of being the only white dancer in the Katherine Dunham Company. Though she was of Russian-Jewish ancestry, she knew a lot more about African and African-American folk culture than Belafonte did: she had attended the Little Red School House, in the Village, and was involved with the N.
In short, she was a thoroughly modern bohemian. Margurite, soon after giving birth to Shari, in , discovered a cache of love letters that Julie Robinson had written to her husband. The Belafontes separated soon thereafter. Rollins went on to become a high-profile agent and producer, but he remains bitter. Alas, news of his revised marital status leaked out shortly before the new film was released.
In fact, a bill was introduced in the South Carolina legislature proposing to fine any theatre that showed the film. It has to play havoc with him inside. Elvis and Sinatra were big in , yet Belafonte—the King of Calypso, as he was touted—outsold both of them.
Belafonte had plenty of help, to be sure. The Belafonte craze swept the country. A lot of people who never thought of themselves as singers could sing it. In fact, to purists the problem with Belafonte was that he was too much of a singer, and not a calypsonian at all. In Trinidad, where calypsonians had long since formed something like a trade guild, a king of calypso was determined during an annual carnival known as the Calypso War: the calypsonian who most inventively insults his competitors wins the title.
So Trinidadian calypso, which was traditionally extemporized, and which zestfully blended political protest and personal invective, was thus a far different creature from what usually passed under that name in the United States.
Belafonte is unapologetic. Now I came along and I modified the dialect, I put it into a rhythm that was more closely identified with the American scene. If, instead, I came in and sang this stuff with a thick Jamaican accent, it would have been like listening to Italian opera. He recalls a press conference where a Trinidadian journalist berated him for styling himself King of Calypso when he had never been to Trinidad and had no contact with its traditions.
You sing about our sexual power, and our gift of drinking, and rape, and all the things we do to which I have, and want, no particular claim. What I have sought to do with my art is take my understanding of the region and put it before people in a positive way. But then Belafonte was never going to get any benedictions from the keepers of the Volksgeist. It depended on what they thought the bank account was. Harry fills that need remarkably. Although he is brown-skinned and unmistakably Negro, he is acceptable in terms of white standards of beauty.
Brown up Tab Hunter and you could hardly tell him from Harry Belafonte. The status of bridge Negro did not sit very well with Belafonte, who wanted to be adored as much as the next man, but whose political sensibilities were in rebellion against the terms of that adoration.
The one who broke the chain was Sidney, who agreed to do it. But a pattern was established. Over the next decade, his friend Poitier made seventeen major motion pictures; Belafonte made exactly none. For one thing, the scripts he was offered appalled him. He mentions a couple of movies that he turned down. This, of course, was the film that established Poitier as a significant presence in postwar cinema: noble, selfless, saintly.
When I saw it, at thirteen, I was moved to tears. It was the perfect civil-rights vehicle for its moment.
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