This gives his work a tense and singular dynamism. 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.
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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. He is lithe and balletic, slinking easily about the stage, like a stalk of tall grass bending in the breeze. There is video of Belafonte performing his song “Matilda” in 1966, at a benefit for Martin Luther King, Jr. It’s a beautiful, manifold collection, and reiterates Belafonte’s standing as one of America’s most vital and insurrectionary folk singers. This week, Sony Legacy is releasing “The Legacy of Harry Belafonte: When the Colors Come Together,” a new anthology of his work. On March 1st, Belafonte will turn ninety. 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!’ ” The first mockup he saw featured his body with “a big bunch of bananas superimposed on my head. Belafonte had bickered with RCA over the cover. 5 on the charts, and “Calypso” became the first full-length record of any sort to sell a million copies. “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. 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.” One of the writing credits for Belafonte’s iteration goes to Irving Burgie, or Lord Burgess, a Brooklyn-born songwriter of Barbadian descent. 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). Incredibly, in 1957, five more artists made it onto the U.S. “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.
“Me wan’ go home” is perhaps as universal a plea for freedom as we’ve got. It is an infinitely applicable refrain, no matter what your metaphorical banana might be, or which cocktail seizes your imagination come quitting time. “Daylight come and me wan’ go home,” his chorus chants. Tally Man, tally me banana,” Belafonte implores. 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. 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. 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. His voice bounces and echoes as it moves closer.
The instrumentation is spare and creeping. 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. 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.
A new anthology of the work of Harry Belafonte, pictured here in the nineteen-forties or fifties, reiterates his standing in American music.
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