KWXY Presents ● An Interview with Harry Belafonte

Harry Belafonte / Arquivo Nacional 1970

Harry Belafonte is a Grammy Award-winning singer who helped popularize calypso music starting in the mid-1950s and was the first solo artist to sell one million albums in a single year.  He is also a songwriter, actor, World War II veteran and political activist. 

He was born Harold George Bellanfanti, Jr. in Harlem, New York to Jamaican-born parents on March 1, 1927.  He spent his early childhood in Jamaica and returned to New York where he attended high school.  Upon graduation, he joined the Navy and served in the war.  After the war, a tenant in the New York building where he worked as a janitor’s assistant gave him a pair of tickets to the American Negro Theater.  It was there he met his friend Sidney Poitier, and the pair began to attend plays on a regular basis.

Belafonte (center) at the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C with Sidney Poitier (left) and Charlton Heston. U.S. Information Agency. Press and Publications Service. (ca. 1953 - ca. 1978) Photograph by Rowland Scherman

Belafonte took acting classes starting in the late 1940s and paid his tuition by being a New York club singer.  His first record contract came in 1953 as did his first hit, “Matilda.”  In 1956, his third studio album, Calypso, became the first-ever LP to sell more than one million copies in a year and was the first-ever million-seller in England.  The album featured what would become his best-known song, “Banana Boat Song (Day-O),” a traditional Jamaican folk song.  Despite dwindling commercial success in the early 1960s, largely due to The Beatles and the British Invasion in general, Belafonte continued to be a frequent guest on television specials and was a guest host of The Tonight Show in 1968.

Renewed interest in his music came about in the 1980s, due to his involvement in the charity “supergroup” USA for Africa and its single, “We Are The World.”  More recognition followed in 1988 when two of Belafonte’s singles, “Banana Boat Song” and “Jump In The Line” were used in the Tim Burton comedy, Beetlejuice.    

Harry Belafonte continues to be active as a civil rights leader as well.  A longtime supporter of the NAACP, Belafonte was awarded the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 2013.  As a recording artist, Belafonte released thirty studio albums and eight live albums between 1954 and 2012.

Belafonte with Nat King Cole in 1957 - NBC Television/photo by Gerald Smith

KWXY Presents an Interview with Harry Belafonte today at 1pm on The Wink Martindale Show on KWXY Music Radio 92.3FM ● 1340AM ● streaming at kwxy.com and ivoxradio.com