Harry Belafonte, Legendary Entertainer and Activist, Dead at 96

HARRY BELAFONTE, 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 spokesperson, 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 pre-fame 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 ’n’ 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 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.

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Belafonte was born in 1927 in working-class Harlem, New York, and spent eight years of his childhood in his impoverished parents’ native Jamaica. He returned to New York for high school but struggled with dyslexia and dropped out in his early teens. He took odd jobs working in markets and the city’s garment district, and then signed up to the US navy aged 17 in March 1944, working as a munitions loader at a base in New Jersey.

After the war ended, he worked as a janitor’s assistant, but aspired to become an actor after watching plays at New York’s American Negro Theatre (along with fellow aspiring actor Sidney Poitier). He took acting classes – where his classmates included Marlon Brando and Walter Matthau – paid for by singing folk, pop and jazz numbers at New York club gigs, where he was backed by groups whose members included Miles Davis and Charlie Parker.

He released his debut album in 1954, a collection of traditional folk songs. His second album, Belafonte, was the first No 1 in the new US Billboard album chart in March 1956, but its success was outdone by his third album the following year, Calypso, featuring songs from his Jamaican heritage. It brought the feelgood calypso style to many Americans for the first time, and became the first album to sell more than a million copies in the US.

The lead track was Day-O (The Banana Boat Song), a signature song for Belafonte – it spent 18 weeks in the UK singles chart, including three weeks at No 2. His version of Mary’s Boy Child was a UK chart-topper later that year, while Island in the Sun reached No 3. He released 30 studio albums, plus collaborative albums with Nana Mouskouri, Lena Horne, and Miriam Makeba. The latter release won him one of his two Grammy awards; he was later awarded a lifetime achievement Grammy and the Academy’s president’s merit award.

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Bob Dylan’s first recording – playing harmonica – was on Belafonte’s 1962 album, Midnight Special. The previous year, Belafonte had been hired by Frank Sinatra to perform at John F Kennedy’s presidential inauguration.

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.”

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