
Portrait of Harry Belafonte, singing (1954). Carl Van Vechten – Van Vechten Collection at Library of Congress
In the South of my childhood, there were African-American musicians but we did not honor them with that title; it seemed they only inhabited an underworld of dark, smoky nightclubs or performed for white patrons as smiling members of local jug bands.
When I heard Belafonte’s “Day-O” from his first 1956 album, I knew right away that this was a voice that would not be confined to those familiar, and discredited, settings.
How I learned that is laughable in memory as so many adolescent memories are. I was a sophomore in college when a would-be boyfriend (who went on to work in the South and write notably about the lives of black children) invited me to leave the campus for the weekend and drive with him to a remote New England woods where he’d rented a cabin.
This was an adventure I’d never contemplated but, being always up for adventure, I agreed. What I expected, or what Jonathan expected, was shrouded for both of us by the embarrassment of discussing expectations and feelings.
It was a long cold drive into a dark forest which might have contained the witch’s cabin from “Hansel and Gretel” and the dark, long-empty cabin had a feeling of the witch’s house for me with its smell of dark and mold. I don’t remember any of the practical details—we must have stopped for groceries somewhere—but I do remember my shame when the landlord dropped by and I saw, or thought I saw, in his eyes the relish of what he assumed was to be an amorous weekend.
Neither Jonathan nor I was prepared for that implication; unusually childish for our age (this was a period of artificially prolonged childhood, often into our late twenties, especially for girls, which explains something about all those early marriages and neglect of career choices), we were friendly but no more than that.
The big bed—there was only one—meant that we were going to have to sleep together, in the literal meaning of that phrase, and around bedtime, perhaps to soothe our mutual awkwardness, we put the Harry Belafonte record on and jumped up and down on the bed to “Day-O.”
The big voice, that unbreakable optimism, seemed to lead us away from cabin and bed into the future as the Civil Rights movement was gaining power. Today I associate certain phrases of that iconic song with the Movement:
Daylight come and we want to go home…
Six foot, seven foot, eight foot bunch…
Hide the deadly black tarantula…”
The tarantula hidden in the beautiful Caribbean bananas was the racism of our country, sometimes acknowledged, always belittled as irrelevant and outdated. “After all, they’ve come so far,” with slavery as the starting point. So far, but then it seemed no further: when my mother’s African American cook asked my mother for help enrolling her bright son at Harvard, my mother, that good old-time liberal, was shocked and never even imagined helping. “After all, they’ve come so far”—but not as far as Harvard.
College ended, I married and we moved to Boston and then to New York where a new consciousness about race relationships was emerging and I became aware that Belafonte was not “just” a singer but also a potent voice opposing apartheid and supporting the careers of other African-American performers with the proceeds from his sold-out concerts: Odetta, the Mitchell Trio, and the South African singer, Miriam Makeba (1932-2008).
Meeting her in New York electrified me: here was a dark-skinned woman so beautiful and so talented that she was an immediate success. For me, these two were the first professional dark-skinned people I’d ever met. The role of popular performers in reshaping political opinions, especially for young people, has never been fully recognized.
Belafonte’s two concerts at Carnegie Hall in 1959 and 1960 put him at the top of musical performers in that world. Makeba never claimed that kind of success, although she was recognized, performed, and made recordings, and Belafonte did everything he could to help her. But recognition for women, dark or fair-skinned, was still a sometime thing, and Makeba’s death was not noticed to the degree that Belafonte’s was. Her effect on me, an ignorant young white woman, was more profound than his because she was of my gender.
“Women’s Focus,” Carol Boss’ exemplary Saturday noontime program on KUNM, was based yesterday on her interview with Leonard Bernstein’s older daughter to publicize her memoir, Famous Father’s Girl. A good deal of the interview was devoted to celebrating the Young People’s Orchestra series, live and on records in the fifties, sixties and seventies. It was credited with creating a large group of young Classical Music enthusiasts who now fill the seats at concert halls all across the country.
Old white man music of an elevated variety, but none of it ever had the effect on me of Belafonte’s full-throated “Day-O.”
Jonathan and I drove back on Sunday from that cabin in the woods and never mentioned it again. But in its strange way, it was the beginning of our enlightenment.
I must save this post to read when I have more time, but am glad to see your giving HB attention. He was a fine activist for so long. And a wonderful performer. Back in the ’60’s, I saw him in a concert he gave in the main city auditorium in Columbia, SC — to an integrated audience — now both of those things were a feat. So glad to have had that gift of his talent and self. He was absolutely gorgeous, physically, and perfect as a performer and musician. I was so pleased to hear Amy Goodman give 2 hours of her Democracy Now Show (radio, for me, and yes, in Lex., KY — on the UK student radio station WRFL) to Harry Belafonte.