{"id":6354,"date":"2017-02-27T22:13:55","date_gmt":"2017-02-27T22:13:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.artinfo.com\/blunotes\/?p=6354"},"modified":"2017-02-27T22:13:55","modified_gmt":"2017-02-27T22:13:55","slug":"harry-belafonte-when-colors-come-together","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/2017\/02\/27\/harry-belafonte-when-colors-come-together\/","title":{"rendered":"Harry Belafonte: When Colors Come Together"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\"courtey\/Legacy<\/a>
courtey\/Legacy Recordings<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nI’ve been thinking lately about Harry Belafonte<\/strong>, who will turn 90 on March 1.
\nIn many ways, particularly in this moment, Belafonte answers questions we seem to be confused about: what it means to be an American; where that identity comes from; how culture and politics and social justice connect.
\nBelafonte\u2019s autobiography (written with Michael Shnayerson), \u201cMy Song<\/a><\/strong>” is a required read if you’re working on those questions.
\nThe release of \u00a0“When Colors Come Together: The Legacy of Harry Belafonte<\/a>“<\/b> (Legacy Recordings)<\/span> has sparked some good recent coverage. The album is an\u00a0essential anthology of Belafonte’s biggest hits and timeless classics, including\u00a0“Day-O” (from “Banana Boat”) and other hits from Belafonte’s 1956 breakout LP, “Calypso,” which\u00a0became the first album ever, by any artist of any race or gender, to sell more than a million copies. The album also includes\u00a0a new recording of \u201cWhen Colors Come Together (Our Island In The Sun),\u201d performed by a children’s choir. The original recording of that song (co-written by Belafonte and Irving\u00a0Burgie) served as the title music for the successful and at-the-time controversial 1957 film, “Island In The Sun,” which starred Belafonte, James Mason, Joan Fontaine, Joan Collins and Dorothy Dandridge, and has since become an oft-covered standard.
\nIn a nice piece in\u00a0The New Yorker<\/a>, Amanda Petrusich aptly called Belafonte “one of America\u2019s most vital and insurrectionary folk singers.”
\nIn a lovely New York Times piece<\/a>, John Leland\u00a0profiles Belafonte today, on the cusp of 90, saying:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I took up with Martin, I really thought, two, at best three years, this should be over. Fifty years later, he\u2019s dead and gone, and the Supreme Court just reversed the voting rights, and the police are shooting us down dead in the streets. And I look at this horizon of destruction, and I watch the black community by our state of being mute \u2014 we have no movement. I don\u2019t know where to go to find the next Robeson. Maybe I don\u2019t deserve a next one. Takes a lot of courage and a lot of power to step into the space and lead a holy war.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n


\n

\"courtesy\/<\/a>
courtesy\/ Legacy Recordings<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n

In 2001, Belafonte released “The Long Road to Freedom: An Anthology of Black Music<\/a>,” a lovingly assembled collection of recordings I can’t imagine living without.<\/p>\n

Back then, here’s the interview piece I did for RhythmMusic, a magazine I once edited:<\/p>\n

Belafonte’s Long Road<\/strong>
\nBy Larry Blumenfeld
\nIf Harry Belafonte looked tired, it wasn\u2019t just his 74 years showing through. It was the long flight back from South Africa, where he\u2019d traveled as part of a UNICEF team working to combat HIV in children. His voice, that famously coarse whisper, quickly grew animated as he spoke of the imminent release of The Long Road to Freedom: An Anthology of Black Music<\/em>, a project he\u2019d dreamed up nearly a half-century ago. We\u2019d last seen each other in Havana, at a performance by pianist Chucho Valdes.
\nHARRY BELAFONTE: If you have a sense, for instance, that in Cuba\u00a0there are elements in place that give a vitality to the cultural expression that you see missing here, and you examine or begin to look at what is really different beyond the politics, it is the fact that Cubans have such a respect for their history and where they came from and who they are. They yield nothing to anyone who even begins to suggest that their culture or their history is inferior in any way.
\nPart of my whole struggle is how, when I was born, I was called \u201ccolored,\u201d and not too long after that I was called \u201cNegro,\u201d and not too long after that I became \u201cBlack,\u201d and most recently I\u2019m called \u201cAfrican-American.\u201d Each time I have come closer, and what\u2019s true is the fact that I have been spending three-quarters of this century just in search of identity.
\nWhat I found that Cuban culture did under the present regime was that it said, \u201cIf you do nothing else, you will learn your history, look deep into your slave past, look over the line that\u2019s traced by the blood that flows in your veins, and by who you are.\u201d
\nLARRY BLUMENFELD: Was the process of assembling this boxed set your way of instilling that sense?
\nBELAFONTE: When I call myself an American, I say it, and it \u201crolls trippingly off the tongue,\u201d but in that one second or that fraction of a second, I think, \u201cWhat are you really?\u201d Now, Jamaicans haven\u2019t got that problem. Cubans don\u2019t have that problem, the Brazilians don\u2019t \u2014 because they may not have settled the score entirely, but they\u2019ve settled the question with their slave existence, their slave past. We stood there in the belly of the beast, and the beast still does not acknowledge us as a whole people. They still killed off affirmative action; they\u2019re still trying to relegate us to some secondary position; they\u2019re still shooting us down, 41 bullets, in Harlem, or whatever.
\nI feel a new bravado. I wake up every morning with something to do because the injustice, fear, isn\u2019t gone. That\u2019s not my exclusive motivation, but it certainly is central to where I make a commitment in what I do.
\nBLUMENFELD: Forty or fifty years ago, were you thinking along those same lines?
\nBELAFONTE: Yeah. I was thinking along the same lines, but I thought then the opportunity was greater than it turned out to be.
\nIf you have a popular platform and you are able to reach a constituency that will at least listen, how you deliver something makes a difference. If you can get them to sing your song, you know, then they\u2019ll want to know who you are, right?
\nWell, okay, that means \u201cDay-O,\u201d \u2014 and, in a simplistic way that popular cultures could teach, it was just a ditty. But now, that was a work song that came from the people who struggled in a place on a banana plantation, a song my heard my folks singin\u2019, people in poverty. But there\u2019s more to the \u201cDay-O\u201d than that. It\u2019s all in there. Now, can you take it to the next place?
\nAs Paul Robeson told me, \u2018The purpose of art is not just to show life as it is but to show life as it should be, could be.\u201d
\nBLUMENFELD: You tapped some wonderful voices for these recordings \u2014 Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Joe Williams, Gloria Lynne. Did you ever consider asking Robeson to participate?
\nBELAFONTE: Well… yes, and ultimately no… that would have been like asking god to lunch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been thinking lately about Harry Belafonte, who will turn 90 on March 1. In many ways, particularly in this moment, Belafonte answers questions we seem to be confused about: what it means to be an American; where that identity comes from; how culture and politics and social justice connect. Belafonte\u2019s autobiography (written with Michael … <\/p>\n

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