In July 1988 The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution (which were still separate newspapers with one Features department) sent me to Pittsburgh to interview Harry Belafonte.
He was the co-chairperson of Atlanta’s brand-new National Black Arts Festival, celebrating its first gathering that month.
His hit record, “Calypso,” came out the year after I was born, and was the earliest album I can remember listening to (on my parents’ console). Meeting him in person was like seeing my childhood soundtrack come to life.
Except for his crackly voice, a few gray hairs and few lines around his eyes, he looked exactly the same. This is the story I wrote for the July 31, 1988, newspaper.
Belafonte died Tuesday, April 25, at his home in New York. He was 96.
— Bo Emerson
PITTSBURGH - Harry Belafonte, the man time forgot.
He is onstage at Heinz Hall, an ornate French Court-style auditorium trimmed with crystal and gilt, and this 61-year-old statesman of rhythm is making his predominantly white and middle-aged audience look mighty antique.
Observing the jaunty singer in his sparkling white shirt and dark silk jacket, one finds it hard to believe that it was 1956 when America went island crazy, urged on by the “Day-o!” of “The Banana Boat Song,” the lilt of “Jamaica Farewell” and other tunes from his hugely successful album “Calypso.” The intervening 32 years have been kind to Harry Belafonte, less kind to his audience. Like that portrait of Dorian Gray, his fans have grown old while Mr. Belafonte remains youthful, in some perpetual limbo limbo.
The ladies with stiff hair and pearls, the gentlemen in serious suits wait, chin-in-hand, to be entertained. Mr. Belafonte comes on with an ensemble powered by three muscular drummers; his vocals are accented with whiplash licks from electric guitar, bass and synthesizer. The air crackles. The listeners nod politely, in time to the music. After four songs they are, in spite of themselves, singing along.
“That’s the way I like them best,” says a laughing Mr. Belafonte later. “Give me your silent, your quiet, your huddled masses. I will make them dance.”
Like that rejuvenated audience, Mr. Belafonte’s career seems to be bubbling to a boil these days. He is touring in support of his 1987 album, “Paradise in Gazankulu,” performing about 170 dates this year, including an engagement Friday at Chastain Park. He’s in the midst of producing an ABC-TV miniseries on the life of Nelson Mandela, starring Marlon Brando, Sidney Poitier and Jane Fonda, which probably will air next year. Mr. Belafonte is serving as producer on two theatrical movies still in the works: a vehicle for Whoopi Goldberg about an iconoclastic black nun titled “Sister Thea,” and a police saga that will star Lou Gossett Jr. He is also a chairman of the National Black Arts Festival, which continues through Aug. 7 in Atlanta.
“It’s inordinate,” says Mr. Belafonte of the pace, which is uptempo even by his workaholic standards. “I thought that of the five or six projects I threw out there, one would catch, and all six caught hold.”
But sit with Harry Belafonte in his dressing room during the brief break between the sound check and an evening performance, and he is the picture of composure. He has weathered several television and press interviews earlier in the day, but his attention is unwavering and his courtesy exemplary.
At close range, a few telltale signs of age reveal themselves - some strands of silver in his close-cropped hair, wrinkles at the corners of those dark button eyes. But it is the voice that surprises. The years of theater are revealed by his impeccable, Shakespearean elocution, yet his speaking voice is a dry rumble, like a heavy wheelbarrow being pushed up a gravel driveway. Does it hurt to talk? “No I’m relaxed here,” he says, smiling. “I’m tense when I sing.”
This husky voice is not the result of poor singing technique or a two-pack-a-day habit. “I’ve had all the training . . . ‚” he begins, then bursts suddenly from a subdued conversational croak into an operatic bellow. “LAAAA! See? I can do it when I need to. I just happen to be offstage right now, and when I’m at ease, my voice sounds like this.” A devilish twinkle flashes in the eye: “The ladies love it.”
Mr. Belafonte, shod in butter-soft blue moccasins, strides from his dressing quarters to a conference room in the backstage area, where his band is enjoying a catered supper. On this same evening, Jesse Jackson will move to the podium of the National Democratic Convention and deliver a speech that will electrify that assemblage. Mr. Belafonte, a supporting player in the drama of the civil rights movement, knows that Rev. Jackson’s ascent to the convention spotlight opens a new chapter in the story of black America.
“Jesse has an opportunity to move the underclass ahead,” says the actor before heaping a paper plate with sauteed broccoli and snow peas, “but I’m not too sure that the Democratic Party should be his exclusive dominion. What he has to offer is bigger than the Democratic Party.” Though the singer believes the Rev. Jackson could vastly improve U.S. relations with Third World nations, he is not in favor of Jesse Jackson as Secretary of State.
“I have a problem with Jesse being anything [in elected politics],” he says. “I don’t see him as a cog in the wheel, unless it’s the wheel of mischief.” He says the Rev. Jackson has brought about beneficial change while working outside of politics, as did Martin Luther King Jr. “Nothing could have changed this country politically if all we had to depend on was the political process.”
Mr. Belafonte could be talking about himself. He has a history of urging black people into public service - he helped push Atlantan Andrew Young into his first congressional race in 1970, and contributed to the campaign with fund-raising concerts - but he has shied away from the election game himself. A 1986 dalliance with a New York Senate race was the closest he came.
“They couldn’t convince me that I should give up the next eight years of my life being the only black guy in Washington trying to convince the rest of the guys to get Nelson Mandela out of jail,” says Mr. Belafonte, who never threw his hat in the ring.
Yet he has devoted much of his offstage life to working as a humanitarian and an activist, frequently with results that have overshadowed his efforts as an entertainer. He is the man who originally suggested a benefit concert for famine-stricken Africans, an idea that snowballed, in 1985, into the song “We Are the World,” the “Live Aid” concert and the creation of the USA for Africa organization, of which he is vice president and a spokesman.
Mr. Belafonte served as a point man for the brigade of artists and musicians who took part in the 1965 civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., as he had done during the Freedom March on Washington in 1963.
He was appointed by President John Kennedy as an adviser to the Peace Corps and has served for years as a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, an organization he quietly promoted onstage in Pittsburgh.
But his activism has not always made Mr. Belafonte a popular man. He spoke out strongly against Sen. Joe McCarthy’s witch hunts of the 1950s, then drew the displeasure of other civil rights workers by becoming a vigorous opponent of the Vietnam War and a supporter of women’s rights.
“Those things were always against the main grain of the American view, including the black community,” he says. “Blacks abandoned you because you became a liability, and they’d rather not have the association. So not all of it was to gain public approval. I followed my heart.”
That heart still belongs to the West Indies. Though Mr. Belafonte was born in Harlem, he returned as a child with his family to his mother’s native Jamaica, where he lived for five years. Songs from this country would later figure prominently in his life.
Mr. Belafonte attended high school in New York, served in the Navy during World War II, and returned to the city to work at a collection of jobs, from pushing racks in the garment district to laboring as a janitor. He attended a performance of the American Negro Theatre on a ticket he had been given, and Mr. Belafonte decided to pursue a theatrical career. He studied at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research, but found that he could make greater headway as a singer than an actor.
His early album on RCA, “Calypso,” became the first million-selling LP in the history of recorded music and made Mr. Belafonte a star. (“The Banana Boat Song” was recently revived for the soundtrack of the hit movie “Beetlejuice.”) While the songs from “Calypso” permanently entered the American consciousness, few listeners peered beneath the happy-go-lucky surfaces to detect in the lyrics the difficult life of the Jamaican underclass.
Similarly, Mr. Belafonte utilized the lively township beats of the South African ghetto to sing of a dark and oppressive environment in “Paradise in Gazankulu.” The lyrics can be appreciated on several levels. For example, “Amandla” is a love song to a woman that says, Amandla . . . It’s time to change your partner/ Time to dance with me/ You’re hanging with the wrong crowd/ You need a change of scene. Since Amandla means “power” in the Zulu tongue, the song is also a request for self-rule by the black majority.
Many of the album’s musical tracks were secretly recorded in South Africa by local musicians under the direction of Mr. Belafonte’s musical director, Richard Cummings, his lyricist, Jake Holmes, and producer Hilton Rosenthal, who also produced Paul Simon’s “Graceland” album. Mr. Belafonte himself was not allowed in the country because of his political views, and his vocals were added later.
As he tells the Pittsburgh audience, “I’ve been barred by the government of South Africa. I’m a political undesirable there, which means I’ve obviously done something right.”
An ongoing theme in his work is the need for black people to explore and preserve their own culture, reflected in his involvement with the National Black Arts Festival. “If we are not concerned with, or attentive to, the best we have to offer, we are in jeopardy not only of losing our society, we are also in jeopardy of losing our souls,” Mr. Belafonte says. ‘’We shouldn’t abandon the gifts that we bring to the society to make it a healthier place.”
He works toward that goal, onstage and off. Because it had been six years since his previous album, and several years since his last U.S. tour, the singer was described as “retired” by some publications when “Gazankulu” was released.
“You don’t count if you don’t have a hit record,” he said, remembering an incident in a small town record store in Eastern Pennsylvania. Mr. Belafonte visited the store after a performance, as he sometimes does, to see if any of his old albums were in stock.
The clerk, a woman from the Caribbean, did not recognize the broad- shouldered gent. “No, we don’t have no records of that man,” she said. As Mr. Belafonte turned to leave, she called out to him, “You know, I tink de man long time dead.”
Not by a long shot.
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