Folk Hero, Harry Belafonte
“My Song” by J. H. Belafonte: From Hollywood to Los Angeles, California to the United States, and back again
While he was writing “My Song,” he wrote: “The bleaker my acting prospects looked, the more I threw myself into political organizing.” That organizing included marches, protests, rallies. Money. He helped underwrite the civil rights movement, paying for freedom rides. Coretta Scott King was the beneficiary of the life insurance policy on Dr. King because he did not believe he could afford it. The building he bought at 300 West End Avenue in Manhattan and converted into a 21-room palace seemed to double as the movement’s New York headquarters. Martin started drafting his antiwar speech in my apartment. So, yes, Belafonte was near the psychic core and administrative center of the movement.
He was in a dispute with Dr. King’s kids over the property of the King estate. The case was settled in the next year.
But those bleak Hollywood prospects — some incalculable combination of racism and too-raw talent — kept Belafonte uniquely earthbound, doing a kind of cultural organizing. It wasn’t the movies that have kept him in so many people’s lives these many decades, though he never stopped acting altogether, best of all in a handful of Robert Altman films, particularly “Kansas City,” from 1996, in which he does some persuasive intimidation as an icy 1930s gangster named Seldom Seen. He produced shows that introduced America to Gloria Lynn and John Lewis in the 60’s, as well as his own TV shows where he was prominently featured throughout the 1960’s.
In the same interview, he noted ruefully that although he sang music with “roots in the Black culture of American Negroes, Africa and the West Indies,” most of his fans were white. As frustrating as that may have been, he was much more upset by the racism that he confronted even at the height of his fame.
The 1957 film “Island in the Sun” contained a suggestion of a romantic relationship between his character and a white woman played by Joan Fontaine, which caused outrage in the South and resulted in a bill being introduced that would have fined theaters showing the film. In Atlanta for a concert, Mr. Belafonore was twice refused service at the same restaurant. In 1968, Petula Clark was featured on television and she was threatened with a sponsor because of her white female singing.
It started with the actual folk music. Well, with Belafonte’s interpolation, which in its varied guises wed acoustic singing with Black spiritual arrangements and the sounds of the islands. He took his best-selling music on the road to white audiences who paid a lot of money to watch him perform from his million-selling album. Rather than simply translate his hot-ticket cabaret act for American living rooms, BelaFonte imagined something more intriguing. In 1959, he somehow got CBS to broadcast “Tonight With Belafonte,” an hourlong studio performance that starts with a live commercial for Revlon (the night’s sponsor) and melts from the gleaming blond actor Barbara Britton (the ad’s pitchperson) into the sight of Black men amid shadows and great big chains.
They’re pantomiming hard labor while Belafonte belts a viscous version of “Bald Headed Woman.” The whole hour is just this sort of chilling: percussive work songs, big-bottomed gospel, moaning blues, dramatically spare sets that imply segregation and incarceration, the weather system that called herself Odetta. Belafonte never makes a direct speech about injustice. He trusts the songs and stagecraft to speak for themselves. Black folks, especially, will get it. It’s their music.
