“To thine own self be true,” said the late Harry Belafonte — a line that summed up his entire life’s philosophy. The musician, actor and activist, who died last week at the age of 96, was one of the original superstars from the US, who courted an audience far and wide, beyond American borders decades before the streaming age.
Born in Harlem, New York, in March 1927, Harry Belafonte was of Jamaican and Martinican descent, and had traces of French and African lineage. Belafonte grew up in poverty, but spent much of his childhood living with relatives in Jamaica, while it was still a British colony.
It’s where, in the shade of banana and sugarcane plantations, rum mills, and the island’s natural bounty, Belafonte was exposed to the music and culture of the Caribbean, such as the folk music tradition called mento. It’s where he also witnessed large-scale poverty and injustice, as well as the resilience of a disenfranchised people, that informed his lifelong fight for social justice.
Belafonte returned to New York as a teenager and enlisted in the US Navy during World War II. After the war, he studied drama at the New School for Social Research in New York City, and at the same time, began to dig into his musical impulses.
After a few years of performing in clubs and theatres in the city, his breakthrough came in 1953 with his second album Calypso. It featured his signature hit Day-O (The Banana Boat Song) — a song and a genre of music that spliced its way into global popular culture, buoyed by its catchy melodies, rhythms to sway to, lyrics that spoke to the common man. He put Caribbean music on the map, recognisable by the tinny sound of the steel pan.
Belafonte followed up on that timeless album with some more Caribbean music — with albums like Belafonte Sings of the Caribbean (1957), Jump Up Calypso (1961), The Midnight Special — before expanding into other genres like R&B and jazz. Early on, his music began to feature a political edge, showing up in the album An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba (1965), a collaboration with the South African singer Miriam Makeba.
When it comes to Harry Belafonte, it is nearly impossible to separate the man from the musician, the performer from the activist. Much has been written about his close association with civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr, his role in organising the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, his support for anti-Apartheid efforts in South Africa under projects like “Sun City”, which called for a cultural boycott of the apartheid regime.
Belafonte used music and art as a vehicle for social justice and unity. In the 70 years since his breakout album Calypso, Belafonte has had an indelible impact on the craft and purpose of musicians the world over. Chief among them was Jamaican singer-songwriter Bob Marley who one called Belafonte “my father”, and said he was directly inspired by Belafonte’s own socially conscious lyrics and activism.
Marley’s War (1976) was based on a speech that then Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I gave at the United Nations in 1963 — a historical speech that called for world peace. Belafonte had introduced Selassie at the UN, and Marley was inspired by both Selassie's speech and Belafonte's activism to write the song. Bob Marley’s Buffalo Soldier , a tribute to African American soldiers that fought in the 17th century Indian Wars of the US — and directly inspired by the 1950s version that Belafonte has written.
Paul Simon (of Simon and Garfunkel) and Peter Gabriel (former Genesis frontman) have cited Harry Belafonte as a major influence on their own music. Artists like Bono (U2 frontman) and singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman cite Belafonte as an influence on their own socially conscious lyrics and activism.
Naturally, as one of the first superstars of the African-American community, his legacy was hailed in the black musical community — something which grew into power and began to commence its tour de force in the form of hip-hop culture in the latter half of the 20th century.
In newer music, artists like Kanye West and Jay-Z doffed their hat to the maestro by sampling his works. West sampled Day-O (The Banana Boat Song) in his hit songs Gone and Power; Jay-Z used the same track in Show Me What You Got, and Belafonte’s Jump in the Line in H to the Izzo; and Lil Wayne who used Jump In the Line on Phone Home.
More astute DJs have also incorporated Belafonte’s music—such as Diplo, who used samples of Jump in the Line and Day-O in his remixes and original tracks; and Moby, who sampled Island in the Sun in Porcelain. But the impact of Belafonte’s music was hardly limited to the English speaking world.
One of Belafonte’s earliest non-US fandom came from, unexpectedly, France. French musicians like Henri Salvador and Serge Gainsbourg were heavily influenced by him. In 1958, Salvador wrote and sang Island In the Sun in French; while Gainsbourg’s avant-garde album Gainsbourg Percussions, demonstrated his African inspirations without much credit.
In Brazil, Belafonte’s music helped shape the boss’s nova genre—an amalgamation of soft samba with traditional Brazilian music and rhythms, American jazz and a new style of Portuguese lyrics. The genre’s pioneer Joao Gilberto was known to be inspired by the Caribbean rhythm and incorporated it into his music.
Further east, in India, Harry Belafonte was inspiring a generation of Bollywood music producers. The great music composer duo Shankar-Jaikishan adapted the melody of the Banana Boat song in Itni Badi Mehfil, sung by Asha Bhosle, for an energetic club sequence in the film Dil Apna Aur Preet Parai. The song, and Helen’s charm, were enough to shake Raaj Kumar out of his moody funk, and be the dance number of 1960.
Geeta Dutt’s Do Chamakti Aankhon Mein, produced by Mukul Roy for the 1958 film Detective, takes inspiration from the iconic Jamaica Farewell — a song that has arguably lived in Indian pop culture memory longer than others by Belafonte. Years later, Kishore Kumar’s Aaja Gori Dil Mein Rakhle Tujhe, for the 1978 film Do Shikari, borrowed tones of Belafonte’s Coconut Woman.
But Bollywood wasn’t the only industry inspired by Harry Belafonte’s easygoing music. A huge influence in Kolkata, naturally the king of Calypso found resonance in the king of Disco, Bappi Lahiri’s music. Belafonte’s Julie Andrews-duet, Marianne, was adapted into the song Chidiya chon chon, sung by Kishore Kumar, for the film Jyoti (1987).
Architect Prasad Ranjan Das, under his musician moniker Ranjan Prasad, created Aha pother prante, inspired by Jamaica Farewell, while Kabir Suman (the man behind the groundbreaking 1992 album Tomake Chai) also paid tribute to the legend in a 2016 recording Kichhu Kichhu Roopkatha, from his home in Germany.
The harder you scratch, the more examples you’re likely to find of the many big and small, direct and indirect ways in which Harry Belafonte inspired musicians across language, territory and generations. It’s the sort of longevity that only the rarest of artists can command, that can only stem from a conjunction of talent and mission. From the understanding that even the most visible artists are but a medium, not the message.
Or, as Harry Belafonte put in in a 1981 interview with Good Morning America, speaking of how he never quite thought about stardom going into the business, even as America began to strain at its parameters and practise racial integration: “I was quite content as most blacks were in that period, to just practise my art form and hopefully I’d find a constituency somewhere in the world, because the larger dream eluded all of us… I don’t know that I have all the answers. March to a drumbeat you believe in.”
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