We’re very saddened to share the information of the loss of life of Harry Belafonte (1927-2023). Listed here are excerpts from an article by Chris Morris for Selection:
Singer, actor, producer and activist Harry Belafonte, who spawned a calypso craze within the U.S. along with his music and blazed new trails for African American performers, died Tuesday of congestive coronary heart failure at his Manhattan house. He was 96.
An award-winning Broadway performer and a flexible recording and live performance star of the ’50s, the lithe, good-looking Belafonte grew to become one of many first Black main males in Hollywood. He later branched into manufacturing work on theatrical movies and telepics.
As his profession stretched into the brand new millennium, his dedication to social causes by no means took a again seat to his skilled work. An intimate of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Belafonte was an essential voice within the ’60s civil rights motion, and he later launched into charitable actions on behalf of underdeveloped African nations. He was an outspoken opponent of South Africa’s apartheid insurance policies.
Among the many most honored performers of his period, Belafonte received two Grammy Awards (and the Recording Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000), a Tony and an Emmy. He additionally obtained the Movement Image Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award on the Governors Awards ceremony in 2014.
Harold George Belafonte Jr. was born in New York however was despatched to stay along with his grandmother in Jamaica at age 5, returning to attend highschool in New York. However Jamaica’s indigenous calypso and mento would provide essential materials for his early musical repertoire.
After serving within the warfare, Belafonte gravitated to the New York theatrical scene. An early mentor was the famed Black actor, singer and activist Paul Robeson. He studied appearing with Erwin Piscator and attended Broadway reveals — on a single ticket he would hand off at intermission — with one other struggling younger actor, Sidney Poitier. Like Poitier, he carried out at Harlem’s American Negro Theater.
[. . .] Satirically, whereas Belafonte was forged as a lead in Otto Preminger’s 1954 musical “Carmen Jones” — based mostly on Oscar Hammerstein II’s Broadway adaptation of Bizet’s opera “Carmen” — his singing voice was dubbed by opera singer LeVern Hutcherson. Belafonte would quickly explode in his personal proper as a pop singer.
He made his RCA Information debut in 1954 with “Mark Twain and Different People Favorites”; he had carried out the titular people music along with his guitarist Millard Thomas in his Tony-winning Broadway flip. The 1956 LP “Belafonte,” that includes an analogous people repertoire, spent six weeks at No. 1.
These collections have been a mere warm-up to “Calypso.” The 1956 album sparked a nationwide calypso craze, spent a staggering 31 weeks at No. 1 and stays one of many 4 longest-running chart-toppers in historical past. It spawned Belafonte’s signature hit, “Banana Boat Track (Day-O),” which topped the singles chart for 5 weeks. A parody of that ubiquitous quantity by Stan Freberg reached No. 25 in 1957. Director Tim Burton employed the tune to shiny impact in his 1988 comedy “Beetlejuice.”
Belafonte would lower 5 extra top-five albums — together with two stay units recorded at Carnegie Corridor — via 1961. His 1960 assortment “Swing Dat Hammer” obtained a Grammy as greatest ethnic or conventional people album; he scored the identical award for 1965’s “An Night With Belafonte/Makeba,” a collaboration with South African people artist Miriam Makeba.
He additionally equipped early employment for a future people icon: His 1962 album “Midnight Particular” featured harmonica work by Bob Dylan.
A frequent visitor on TV selection reveals, Belafonte grew to become the primary Black performer to garner an Emmy along with his 1959 particular “Tonight With Belafonte.”
[. . .] Carefully related to clergyman-activist King, Belafonte supplied monetary help to the civil rights chief and his household. He additionally funded the Freedom Riders and the Scholar Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and was a key determine within the group of the historic March on Washington of August 1963. [. . .]
In later years, Belafonte remained as outspoken as ever, and his views generally courted controversy. He was a foe of South African apartheid, opposed the U.S.’s Cuban embargo and denounced George W. Bush’s navy incursion into Iraq.
Belafonte was the son of a Jamaican housekeeper and a Martiniquan chef, spending the early and late components of his childhood in Harlem however the essential center interval in Jamaica. He enlisted within the Navy in 1944; throughout his service, he encountered the writing of W.E.B. DuBois, co-founder of the NAACP and a key affect.
He was accorded the Kennedy Middle Honor in 1989 and the Nationwide Medal of the Arts in 1994.
Belafonte revealed his memoir “My Track,” written with Michael Shnayerson, in 2011. Susanne Rostock’s biographical documentary “Sing Your Track” was launched in early 2012. [. . .]
For full article, see https://selection.com/2023/music/information/harry-belafonte-dead-dies-singer-1235593910/