February 18, 2025 • 51 mins
Harry Belafonte is most famous for introducing America to calypso music, with hits like Day-O and Jump In the Line. But he was also one of the most earnest and hard-working fighters of injustice America has ever produced and he deserves to be celebrated.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey yo, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, which is appropriate because
this is a barn burner of an episode.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
If you ask me, did you say, hey, oh, I
did very nice.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
I gotta freshen it up here there sometimes starting to
get a little stale. No, you don't think so.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
No, I mean you can freshen it up, but it's
not stale.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Okay, all right, okay, I like that. If you have
any ideas to freshen it up ever, you know, lamb
on me. All right, let's see, we're coming up on
your seventeen. Just want to point that out.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Yeah, what is it in April?
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Yeah? Pretty cool? Yeah. And today also we are talking
about Harry Belafonte and part of the reason why, but
not the full reason why, because this is he was
a perennial man, a man of all seasons. Yeah, but
it's Black History Month, so we want to profile him,
at least in part for a Black History Month.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Yeah. And he's awesome. And you know I watched that
We Are the World documentary not too long ago. Oh
yeahs a good yeah, it's really good. I think you
would enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Okay, I probably would, then, yeah, you think I would.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Yeah, it's actually really really good. And you walk away
from it thinking, well, thinking like, Harry Belafonte is awesome,
along with a lot of other people. But you walk
away thinking, man, I just want to be friends with
Lionel Richie.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Oh yeah, I can imagine.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
He's just the coolest and he tells really great story
He's a great storyteller and funny. And like I was like, man,
Lionel Richie is awesome and fun.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
That's pretty cool, man.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Yeah, there's a rumor that seems fairly substantiated that he's
Kylie Jenner's real father.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Oh really yeah, apparently there's.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
A lot of a lot of swinging going on out
in that neighborhood back in the day.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
I don't know what Kylie Jenner looks like. Does she
look like Is it sort of like Frank Sinatra's son
ronan Pharaoh?
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Uh No, nothing like that. And actually I'm not sure
any living human knows exactly what Kylie Jenner looks like.
So I'll just say, well.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Let's talk about Harry be then the guy. I love
this guy.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Yeah, so Harry Beliefani. I was trying to figure out
how we can name this, and we might just say
Harry Belifani or something like that, but we could also
say the thinking person sink.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Yeah, that's good, the real deal, yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Or a genuinely great.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Person yeah, entertainer slash activist, yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Like he he did it all. He was just one
of these people who you know, when you approach an iconoclast,
especially one who's just revered universally, and you start picking
at the edges, you're like, oh my god, I hope
it's not.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Like garbage, right.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
And you just don't get to that point like he
was through and through a genuinely good person. And one
of the reasons why you don't get to like pick
off the outer coating and find garbage underneath, because he
was just pretty much fully transparent his whole life, and
he just he was who he was, and he wasn't
apologetic for it, and he just put it all out
(03:27):
there based on his beliefs, and his beliefs tended to
coincide with the right side of history. Typically, he saw
people who were downtrodden being being taken advantage of, being
discriminated against, and he wanted to go help make that better.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Yeah. Yeah, And as you'll see, you know, throughout his
career he missed opportunities because he refused to cave lost opportunities,
had opportunities taken away from him, and he was just like,
you know, I'm going to be Harry Belafonte and no
one is going to change that. Yeah, career be damn, let's.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Kick the whole thing off, right, Because for those of
you who don't know, we should probably say Harry Belafine
is a legendary entertainer. That's what he's most widely known for,
and most widely known for the song Deyo, which is
why I said Heyo come full circle now in the
Banana boat song. Yeah. And if you don't know what
we're talking about still, just pause this, go onto YouTube,
(04:26):
type in doyoh, look for the original version and listen
to it and come back, and you will be pretty
much as versed as you need to be going into
this episode.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Yeah. You know, actor, stage performer, Broadway star, Egott winner. Yeah,
if you don't know an Egott, that's if you have
won the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony in your lifetime,
which mister Belafonte did, it's a rare feat indeed. But
he was born to, you know, a very humble upbringing.
In March of nineteen twenty seven, Harold George Bellefonte junior
(04:58):
in Harlem, New York City, to Caribbean parents. His father, Harold,
who was actually a cook on a banana boat, was
from Martinique and his mother, Melvin, was from Jamaica. And
he was raised in Harlem until he was eight, at
which time his mom said, you and your little brother
Dennis are going to live near in my hometown in Jamaica.
(05:21):
And so from the ages of eight to what like
twelve ish, he lived in Jamaica, and that's where he
really sort of saw the light as far as this,
you know, Caribbean folk music that would become his staple.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Yeah, And he was raised by his grandmother there. His
maternal grandmother, Melvin's mom, was a white woman, a Jamaican
white woman, and she really raised him to kind of
love all people, which is a big early influence. And
then another influence of living in Jamaica at the time
was he saw black professionals. He saw black doctors, black lawyers,
completely competent, completely normal. There wasn't anything wrong with them.
(05:59):
They were just black doctors and black lawyers and et cetera.
And it really kind of served as a foil to
him to how things were back in America, right, which
was very discriminatory at the time. Yeah, he was back
dab in the middle of the Jim Crow era in
the United States.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Yeah, so he hears this music down there, the sort
of call and response work songs that I mean, that's
where the song. Should we talk about, Dio real quick?
I mean, as we're getting going. Yeah, let's yeah, because
if you've heard the song, you might be thinking, and
you never did any research, you wondered, what the heck
is he singing about? Right, you know, come mister tally man,
(06:39):
tally me banana daylight comes and we want to go home. Yeah,
it was a work song and it was a colin
response song of these guys who worked on banana boats.
And you know, they would work through the night and
the morning is when they were allowed to leave if
the tally man, the person who counted the bananas tally
that they had enough bananas to you know, tally the
(07:00):
to their workday.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Yeah, and that's what they would get paid based on
how much they had loaded overnight, So you couldn't leave
until the guy came along and said, you loaded five
million tons of bananas, here's your fifty dollars or whatever,
then you could go home. I had no idea that's
what that song was about.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Yeah, I mean, I didn't know what a tally Man was,
but it makes perfect sense of someone him Tally's exactly.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
And I love that song even more now, and I
just it just really kind of buttons some stuff up
because yeah, to that point, like I had never looked
up the lyrics, and I was just going by ear.
My ear's not super good at picking out lyrics. So
what singing, I don't even remember what I was. I
was just listening and it was all just kind of
like vocal sounds. It was like the cocktoo, twins or
(07:44):
something like that. He was just making sounds, not actually
saying anything or saying words. So now that I know
there's a story behind it, I love it.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
Yeah. Pretty cool. So he ends up back in Harlem,
though supposedly had dyslexia, so he wasn't a great student,
so at seventeen years old he quit school. He joined
the Navy in nineteen forty four. And this was another
sort of eye opening experience because he served in World
War Two in an all black unit and at first
(08:14):
was like, you know, I don't like the segregation of
the army here. But he met a lot of guys
in that unit that turned him onto a lot of
stuff that kind of laid to groundwork for what would
be his social awareness and activism.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Yeah, they turned him onto books like The Soul of
Black Folk, The Souls of Black Folks by W. B.
Du Boyce and like that, combined with his early upbringing
where he was able to expose society in Jamaica and
society in America, like this really kind of got things started.
So by the time he met his wife, his first wife,
Marguerite Byrd, he was radicalized. At this point I saw
(08:50):
described as like he was full on, like civil rights
movement guy. And this is the forties, so this is
before the civil rights movement had really kind of started
in earnest the at least the version that we're you know,
we think of when we think of it historically, and
Marguerite was not that way at all. She was from
an upper middle class black family. She was a sorority
(09:13):
girl in Virginia. She was just raised in the type
of conservative household where it's like you just trust the system,
you trust society if the news tells you something that's true.
And she and Harry were almost like foils to an extent.
She saw her role as taking care of this misguided,
like angry man and trying to help him through life.
(09:36):
And I'm sure he saw his role in part as
like opening her eyes. But the big thing that came
out of their union, whether it was his first two kids.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
Yeah, he had two daughters with Marguerite, Adrian and of
course Sherry, who went on to become a successful actor
herself and then served as time in the Navy. They
eventually lived in Harlem, you know, as a family, and
he as a janitor's assistant at an apartment building. And
that's when another sort of monumental moment in his life happened.
(10:07):
He fixed the blinds in someone's apartment, in attendant's apartment there,
and just as a thank you, they gave him, they
gifted them some tickets to the theater, to the American
Negro Theater, which he had never seen live theater before,
like that, never seen you know, black actors on stage.
Performing and to say he caught the bug as an understatement.
(10:28):
He immediately tried to get a job there, applied to
be a stage hand at that theater. And this is
one of those life things where you're just like, are
you kidding me? This really happened. He got that job
and another young janitor there, his name was Sidney Poitier,
And it's just incredible, like, what are the odds that
(10:50):
these two incredible talented performers you get jobs as like
stage hands and janitors at this theater when they were
just in their I guess early twenties.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Yeah, and they both did so because they wanted to
do whatever they could to get their foot in the
door into theater. The world of theater. I saw somewhere
mentioned that when they were just two broke stage hands,
they loved the theater so much that they would pull
their money together to buy a single ticket to Broadway
shows and then one would see one act and then
they would switch off and the other would see the
(11:20):
second act or whatever.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Amazing.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
Yeah, I mean that's that you really love the theater.
Like you said, he caught the bug if you're doing
stuff like that. He also enrolled in a really that's
the measuring stick, by the way, for whether you love
theater or not.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Oh, I just go to one act and split it
with your friend, right, all right.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
He also enrolled in a legendary acting workshop that was
held at the New School for years. Some of his
classmates were Walter Mathow have you seen did you see
the documentary sing your song about him? Not Walter Math
about Lafonte.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
No, Math, I was a singer. No, I didn't see
that yet.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
It's good.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
I'm going to it's good.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
But they show like some stills from that workshop, and
there's young Walter Math. Now he looks like some doofy
twenty year old Walter Math.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Now it's pretty great, except he looked fifty.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Yeah, pretty much already. Yeah, but he has like a
cowlic and he's wearing like a heavy flannel shirt like
he just walked out of the woods of Minnesota or something.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
He was also in class with Tony Curtis, Marlon Brando,
and then the future Dorothy Petrillos Bornak, also known as
b Arthur.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Oh, then there's Mallod.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Can you imagine you go to class and that's who
you're in class with. But they don't mean anything. Yet
they're all just acting students.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Yeah, and I'm sure Bellefonte was like this, Brando, guy's
got some promise.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Yeah. They actually became pretty good friends.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Yeah, Brando's He's worth an episode at some point, to
say the least.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
I think we could do just one episode on Don
Juan de Marco.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
Right, So, Harry Bellefonte's in the new school, you know,
doing what you do in theater school like that, You're
doing movement and voice and eventually like some singing. And
he was like, oh, wait a minute, I can sing
pretty good too, and everyone else said, yeah, you can
sing pretty good, and you're handsome to a fault, so
(13:15):
you've kind of got it all going on. There weren't
a ton of roles for black men in the theater
at the time, or at least, and this is something
that we'll see he did throughout his career, not the
kind of roles that he wanted to take that he
thought were you know, dignified, I guess is the right word.
So he's like, I'm not going to play the parts
that are available to me. I'm going to start singing.
(13:36):
So he went to jazz clubs like the you know,
the legendary Blue Note would sing jazz standards on stage,
and then in the nineteen forties, spurred by the interest
in it was like a renewed interest in square dancing
and folk dancing at the time that led to what
was called the folk music Revival. This was in the
(13:56):
early nineteen forties in Greenwich's Village, which you know would
eventually culminate in the sort of the peak of that
movement in the mid sixties with people like Pete Seeger
and Bob Dylan. It all started in the early nineteen
forties with people like Harry Belafonte going to the Village Vanguard,
this legendary folk music club and seeing Lead Belly perform
(14:18):
and was like, all right, well, now we're onto something here.
It's all happening, and I'm right in the epicenter of it.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Yeah, because, like you said, he wasn't happy with singing
jazz standards or pop music, despite the fact that I
saw that he was backed at some points by Charlie Parker,
the famous drummer, Max Roach and Miles Davis, all his
young musicians, and he was like, nah, let me go
on to folk music. And he got so heavy into
folk music that he spent his time researching folk songs
(14:48):
at the Library of Congress to expand his repertoire. That's
how into folk music he got. And he was so
broke that he would find somebody to split a ticket
into the Library of Congress's archives and search for an hour,
and then they trade off and do the next hour.
And that means you're really into folk music.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
That's how we do our research, right, that's right, just
trade off. It was around this time that he met
a pretty monumental figure in his life. It was one
of his idols. It was an actor and singer named
Paul Robison, and he was most famous, probably at the
time at least for his version of Old Man River
from Showboat from the musical Showboat, and Harry was like, yeah,
(15:30):
nuts with this jazz stuff. I'm into the traditional music.
I'm into folk, I can you know. I'm trying to
find my own voice. And he found that in what
ended up being sort of like the Calypso folk music
of the Caribbean, you know, going back to his roots.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
Right, And we'll get up into that a little more
in a minute, but just kind of progressing on with
his early career, he essentially not just his singing voice,
but his stage presence. His presence was monumental, but also
he used it his movements and sometimes props and stuff
on the stage to kind of tell the story that
(16:10):
this folk song was trying to tell. So his act
was just a sensation, like basically out of the gate,
and he very quickly got picked up and put on
a Broadway, this time from the stage. And the first
thing I think he was in was John Murray Anderson's Almanac,
which was a musical review in nineteen fifty three, and
he did such a good job that his first time
out he wins a Tony. Not only does he win
(16:32):
a Tony, he's the first black man to win a Tony.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
Yeah, nineteen fifty four Best Featured Actor in a Musical.
And not only that, but around the same time in
fifty three, he made his first two movies with Dorothy Dandridge,
and the second of those Carmen Jones. Dorothy Dandridge became
the first African American woman nominated for a Best Actress Oscar.
(16:57):
So he's among this group of young African American entertainers
that are just knocking doors down left and right and
getting you know, real recognition kind of for the first time.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Yeah, and this is the early fifties.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
Let's take a little break and we'll come back and
talk a little more about his Calypso stuff.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Yeah, and we should mention before we break here that
his marriage to Marguerite was dissolving at the time, but
he would go on to marry again, as we'll see.
But maybe we should take that break. You want to
take a break, Yeah, let's take a break. We'll be
right back.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
We will.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
Stoffy jaws.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Soff you okay, Chuck. So we're talking calypso now, it's
(18:03):
really really difficult to understate, like how big of a
star Harry Belafonte became thanks to Calypso music. Calypso music
is like this traditional Caribbean music, typically folks work songs.
Call in response is a big one. So the people
in the chorus seeing like daylight come and we want
(18:24):
to go home. That's like the response where Harry Belafonte
is singing the call part right, it's just traditional work
song stuff. Come on. So he starts out this whole
jam where he is playing folk music at the village.
Vanguard goes on to Broadway start singing some of this
folk like Caribbean folk music, and within a couple of
(18:45):
years he's on an NBC show doing the same thing,
and Dave helped us out with us. And he makes
a point that had it not been for a guy,
an artist who went by Lord Burgess but his real
name was Irving Bergie, Irving Bergie, who was also a
Caribbean American who was raised in New York, also being
(19:07):
into Calypso at the same exact time, and then meeting
Harry Belafonte and them collaborating, it probably would not have
taken off. But thanks to Lord Burgess and then a
playwright friend of Harry Belafani's named William Adaway working together
rewriting some of these traditional songs, rearranging them to make
them peppier, a little poppier, like they made Calypso, like
(19:31):
they just they made it way more palatable to Americans,
way more dancing, and just way more infectious than other
people who'd recorded some of these same songs previously had.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Yeah, and you know, banana butt was a cover song.
It's an old school song that had been around since
the turn of the twentieth century. And like you said,
they had a more upbeat version and it was a huge,
huge hit. He got a little you know, as we'll see,
there are people within some of the communities even admired
and worked with it, often didn't love him back as much.
(20:05):
Calypso was one of them, some traditional Calypso purist, apparently,
especially like in Trinidad, where Calypso was born, where like, hey,
this guy's coming in. He's in New York. He's not
a real Calypsonian, and you know, he's kind of changing
it up, adding like American folk sort of interest to it.
(20:28):
And he was like, you know what I think. In
nineteen fifty nine, in a New York Times interview, he said,
purism is the best cover up for mediocrity. There's no change.
We might as well just go back to the first
oough which may have been the first song, or which
must have been the first song. And I think at
which time Tuk took a tear, rolled down his cheek. Yeah,
and he went back to the fire.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
He said that was my number one song.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Yeah. But Harry was like, you know, I'm taking it,
I'm making it popular, I'm making it my own, I'm
finding my own voice and it's you know, it's my
version of lipso folk music.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
Yeah. I think. Also he was criticized by Trinidadians for
being known as the King of Calypso. They're like, we
have our own King of Calypso competition every year and
you ain't it and he's like so, and they just
couldn't come back with anything after that, So the whole
beef ended right there.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
His nineteen fifty six album Calypso came out after that
TV special. It was a huge, huge hit. It was
stayed number one for thirty eight weeks, knocked Elvis out
of the number one spot at the time, and became
the very first record in history to sell one million
copies in its first year out.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
Yes, that was just in the US alone. It did
the same thing in the UK and Chuck. One of
the songs on this album was Dayo. Right yeah, Deyo
itself sold a million copies just to the forty five
just the single, right. I can see just the single
selling the million copies and then the album suffering because
(22:02):
of that. The album continued to sell as well. It's
crazy how nuts for Harry Belafonte. The United States and
a lot of other parts of the world too, were
at that time, like he just blew up, you said.
It was number one on the charts for thirty eight weeks,
not on the charts for thirty eight weeks, then number
(22:22):
one album in the United States for all like the
better half of a year. That's no one does that.
That's crazy.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Yeah, it was incredible. He was one of the biggest
performers in America all of a sudden, one of the
biggest singing stars, big crossover success obviously, and for all
of that. This is how he was treated on the road.
He would not be allowed to stay in the hotels
(22:52):
when he performed in Vegas because of segregation. When he
was touring the South with a Broadway show Almanac, state
troops threatened to shoot him in a whites only bathroom
in la He was stopped by the cops for just
taking a walk through Beverly Hills at night. So these
are the kinds of this. This was the world he
(23:12):
was living in. Even one of the biggest stars in
the world was not immune to the just blatant racism
that was going on.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
Yes, absolutely that didn't stop him, though it didn't discourage
him like he found it personally discouraging, but he didn't behave,
he didn't acquiesce. Basically. Yeah, one of the things he
did was he took a role and this is very
much in line with his decision making as far as
(23:42):
his career went, which we'll talk about a little more
in a second. But he took a role called in
a movie called Island in Island of the Sun from
nineteen fifty seven, and in it he has an insinuated
romance with a white woman, Joan Fontaine, and they don't touch,
(24:05):
they don't kiss, there's nothing like that. The closest to
a kiss that happens is they share a sip from
a coconut, Like one of them takes a sip, hands
it to the other one, and then she takes a sip.
That's the closest thing to an on screen kiss that there.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
Was not close to a kiss, no, but it was.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
So groundbreaking that the South Carolina legislature introduced a bill.
I don't know if they passed it that would find
any theater in South Carolina that showed Island in the Sun.
That's how controversial that movie was. And it sounds so
tame that it's actually preposterous, and like embarrassing now, but
(24:45):
that was at the forefront of pushing the envelope as
far as race relations in America went. And that's why
Harry Belafonte was like, yes, give me that role. I
will totally take that role.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
Yeah, for sure. In real life, he married his second
wife around the same time. Her name is Julie Robinson.
She was a dancer and she was white, and they
were probably, I would not even say one of the
most they were probably the most prominent interracial couple in
America at the time.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
For sure. She was also Brando's girlfriend when they met.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
Look out, Marlon, Harry Delafante pretty handsome guy.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Oh man, beyond handsome. Yeah, so, Chuck, when we were
just talking about Islands in the Sun, I was saying
that Harry Belafonte would totally choose a role that pushed
the envelope for race relations, not to stick it in
the eye of white America, but to push things forward
and just basically say black people are people too, Let's
portray them as such on the screen. Okay.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
In doing that, he had to choose over and over
and over again between advancing his career and standing by
his values and without missing a single opportunity. He stood
by his values every time.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
Yeah, I mean he was offered and that's just kind
of what I was alluding to earlier. He was offered roles.
He called them Uncle Tom roles, and he said that's
about all you could get at, you know, at one
point in Hollywood or on stage, and he just wouldn't
play those roles. He you know, it depends on who
you are and where you draw the line, and I
(26:24):
mean that's where he drew his line. His good friend
Sidney Poitier would take not necessarily those roles, but other
roles that Harry Belafonte didn't think had enough sort of
nuance for a black actor or spoke to his truth.
Sometimes his friend Sidney Poitier would take those roles, not
in any way like a sellout or anything like that.
(26:46):
He had his own ideas of how to you know,
advance the cause and advance his career and stay in
the limelight so he could do his good work as well.
But you know, they were rivals in a way, but
also best friends.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Yeah, exactly, but certainly professional rivals because as almost invariably
the roles that Bellefani passed on would go to Poitier because,
like you said, he would take these roles and he was.
He became, as a result, the ambassador of Black America
to white America because these roles he was taking in
the early sixties, these films were written to advance the
(27:20):
cause of black civil rights in the United States, and
Sydney Potier is like, yes, put me out there, tell
me what we need to do, and let's show these
Americans that black people are people too. And like you said,
Bellefani was like, there's just it's still missing some stuff.
And like Lily's of the Field is a good example.
It's from nineteen sixty three. It starred Sidney Potier. He
(27:42):
went on to win an Oscar for it, and he
plays a black man who is helping Nazi nuns hide
from the Communists. And the reason Bellefane passed on it
is because he said that this black man has like
no background, no history, not really a human. He said
to Henry Lewis Gates and Junior in nineteen ninety six
(28:03):
in The New Yorker, it's a really good article. He said,
he didn't kiss anybody, he didn't touch anybody. He had
no culture, he had no history. He had no family,
he had nothing, So he was like a not even
a caricature of a black person. He was like human
being happens to be black, go, you know, And that
just was not nearly enough for what Harry Bellafind was
(28:23):
willing to take on as an actor. So he would
just let these things come and go and pass on them,
or else he would try it, push the envelope, that
thing would get canceled and he'd just move on. He
never ever went to Hollywood, you know, on his knees
or asking, like they came to him and he would
either pass or not based on what kind of how
(28:46):
willing they were to portray black people in that film.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Yeah, highly principled decision making career wise, Yes, that's fair.
It is tough to do period, but very tough to
do trying to make it cut throat business like Hollywood,
you know.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
For sure. Man.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
So in fifty six, this was, you know, kind of
right around the time he had gotten married, and that
Islands in the Sun had come out just before that.
He got a phone call from Martin Luther King Junior
and they ended up meeting in person and having a
four hour meeting. On their first meeting, and this is
sort of what lit the fire for Bellefonte to really
(29:26):
really get into very public civil rights work. It was
his awakening in a lot of ways. And he wasn't
just like, yeah, you know, I'll show up and I'll
be a celebrity face here and there. He was bailing
civil rights leaders out of jail. He and Sidney Poitiers
were smuggling cash seventy grand into Mississippi during the Freedom Rides,
(29:51):
and you know with the Freedom Schools. I think we
did a whole episode in the Freedom Schools at one
point he helped. He didn't just show up at the
march on Washington. He was one of the organizers. So
he was he was in deep doing the hard work.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
Yeah, he he looked out for mlk's family during mlk's life,
but also like he he funded his children's education. Yeah,
he took out a huge insurance life insurance policy against MLK.
And then he just was there for the family afterwards.
Like he kind of stepped in when MLK was assassinated.
(30:30):
So he certainly walked the walk. He was at all
these you know, sit ins and rallies and marches, and
he just was there. He was like you said, he
wasn't just a figurehead. He didn't just show up for
the press. He didn't just write checks behind the scenes.
He did it all. And again, it just goes right
back to the upbringing from his mom, who taught him like,
(30:52):
not only just wherever you see injustice in the world,
go go fight it and try to fix it, like
actively search every day for injustice that you can go help.
And you know, there was nothing more unjustin right in
your face for an American, a black American particular at
the time than the Civil rights movement.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
Yeah. Absolutely, so his his you know, entertaining or entertainment
career kept blossoming as well, kind of in conjunction with this,
and he would use that to sort of, you know,
help subtly raise awareness just about his community and what
he's like and what his people are like. And the
(31:33):
Tonight Show is a big example. In nineteen sixty eight,
Johnny Carson invited him to host for a week, to
host the Tonight Show. You know, take Johnny Seed, first
black guest host in the history of the show. And
this is in nineteen sixty eight. You know, everything going
on in nineteen sixty eight seems fraud and race relations
certainly were a part of that, and he wasn't like,
(31:55):
all right, I'll go host the show and I'll get
in and just kind of tried out the usual guest
that Johnny might have. He said, no, I'm gonna have
Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Junior and Aretha Franklin
and Dion Warwick and you know, Paul Newman and Nipsey
Russell and all these people who had these progressive causes
(32:16):
or were just famous black entertainers who didn't get that
kind of stage very often and open every night with
a song. Obviously Johnny didn't do anything like that, so
it was it was still fun and entertaining, but it
was also educating people and talking about serious issues in
these interviews.
Speaker 2 (32:34):
Yes, so that was just huge. I mean also you
got a credit Johnny Carson too. He did that on purpose.
He wasn't like, I'm going on vacation for we just
call whoever like. He did that on purpose because he
was trying to advance race relations as well, So hats
off to him for that as well. They also had
really high ratings. That was another thing too. Harry bell
(32:54):
Fini when he did something on TV it drew viewers,
and even ill it didn't matter because there were so
many angry white racists in America that would call up
these sponsors and be like, you're sponsoring this this black
guy on this show, you better stop. They go to
the producers. The producers would come to Bellifani and be like, hey,
you know how you have white people and black people
(33:16):
dancing together. What if we just did white or just
did black. Bellifani wouldn't blink and it would get canceled
despite all of the crazy great reviews and viewership it had,
and you know, that would be that, and he would
just kind of move on. But of course he developed
like this distrust and distaste for the entertainment industry, and
(33:37):
I saw that he initially thought that he would be
able to help change America through Hollywood, and then he
quickly came to see like, no, Hollywood is just one
more facet of this machine that keeps things going exactly
as they are. So he got really disgusted by that.
Kind of fortunately for us, because he really kind of
(33:58):
started to throw more and more of his inner into
being an activist, not just in the United States but
around the world, and in particular Paul Robison, like you said,
was one of his idols, who was also just one
of the early civil rights crusaders around the world. And
then Eleanor Roosevelt FDR's wife first lady, introduced him to
to the plight of different countries in Africa, which was
(34:20):
decolonizing at the time, and he really kind of turned
his attention toward that continent for a while.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
Yeah, for sure. I mean all of the major causes
that you've heard from, you know, basically starting then even
and especially through the eighties with apartheid in South Africa,
Kenyan independence, and you know I mentioned early on We
Are the World Ethiopia and the famines there was. He
(34:48):
was the guy that you know called up Quincy Jones
and was like, hey, we need to do something here,
and We Are the World was a huge, huge hit
that sold I think twenty million copies and raised sixty
five million bucks for famine relief. And if you were
a kid in nineteen eighty five, We Are the World
(35:10):
was like that and Live Aid We're two of the
biggest deals in music history. And you know, I was
fourteen years old at the time. It was just like
it was incredible to see all these people together, and like,
even as a kid, even as a like a little
snot nosed fourteen year old white kid from the South,
I knew that I was watching was important. I didn't
(35:30):
maybe fully understand it. I had seen stuff about the
famine on television, but it was it was raising awareness
for everybody, including little white suburban kids from Georgia.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
Yeah, which is, you know, exactly part of the point,
in addition to raising money too.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
One of the cool things I saw about it was
I'm not sure if it was his idea or if
he kind of headed up the push to do this
or both, but Harry Bella finally's credited with talking radio
stations around the world into playing We Are the World
at the same time on the same day. It was,
I think March twenty eighth, nineteen eighty six. I remember
(36:07):
there was something like do you remember that? Oh, yeah, cool.
There was like five thousand radio stations around the world
and they all played it at the same time I
think ten fifty am Eastern Standard time, and Musak actually
played it as well, and it was only the second
time in the history of music that they played voices
over their service, which, by the way, at the time
reached like eighty million Americans. So that's a lot of
(36:31):
people listening to We Are the World at that same moment,
which is neat, that's.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
Right, and including just I accounted for one of those.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
I don't remember listening to it on the radio, but
I do remember my family sitting around listening to the record.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
Yeah it's so funny. All right, maybe we should take
our second break and come up and talk some more
about Harry Belafonte.
Speaker 3 (36:52):
Okay, joh all right, So Harry's doing his activism.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
He is still an entertainer. He never, you know, sort
of fully left that behind, and you know, he started
doing less and less of that as like through the
sort of eighties and nineties when his activism was I
think at its peak, but he was still doing his thing.
In nineteen sixty, he became the first black American to
(37:44):
win an Emmy for Tonight with Bellafonte, one of his
TV specials, again which they were all super big hits,
even though people loved them and the ratings were through
the roof, it was that silent majority complaining about petul
La Clark holding his arm, a white woman holding his
arm in a special. It drove away some advertisers, which
is just, you know, very sad to say the least,
(38:06):
but he was still serving up this sort of Caribbean
tinge folk music to people. CBS ordered five more episodes
after Tonight with Bellefonte was such a big success. But
of course that was one of the ones where sponsorship
was pulled because he had black people and white people
dancing and singing together and said, no, no, no, no,
(38:27):
you cannot do that.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
Right, And so he would just leave show business for
you know, years at a time, or at least like
TV or movies or something like that. But he got
pulled back into it in the early seventies because his
buddy Sidney Poitier was like, Hey, I want to start
directing blackspolitation movies. Let's do this. And they made Buck
in the Preacher, which I have not seen. I think
(38:49):
it was from nineteen seventy two. Everything I've read about
it makes me want to see it. Basically immediately Sidney
Poidier directed it, but he also plays Buck, who's this
ex Civil War soldier who helps ensure safe passage for
African Americans moving out of Louisiana out west after the
Civil War, and the Preacher is Harry Belafonte, who's this
(39:12):
con artist dressed as a preacher. It just sounds awesome.
And then Uptown Saturday Night. Haven't seen that one either,
It sounds pretty great, except it's so hard now to
get past anything with Bill Cosby. Yeah, it's so hard,
not just because of the horrible stuff he did sexually
assaulting women, but also because he was so preachy leading
(39:37):
up to it. He was so holier than how and
it makes the whole thing so much worse if you ask.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Me, Yeah, I mean and this he was doing those
things back then, right too. The CNN documentary that camal
Bell did was very upsetting to see. But the way
they did it, I think I mentioned it before, was
it was they were just sort of tracking his career
and like, and he was the biggest star and on
(40:03):
TV at the time, and this was nineteen sixty something,
and then it was like in nineteen sixty whatever, he
sexually assaulted this woman, right, and it was happening the
whole time. So I'm with you, impossible to watch that stuff,
but you can watch Bucket the Preacher.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
Though, right, he's not in that, that's right.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
So hearing all this, you're like, wow, Harry Bellefonte was
a superman and he never got in bad mood, and
he never got tired, and he was never frustrated. And
it was just wine and roses all the time for
Harry Bellefonte. And that is not the case. It was
a serious fatigue on his life. To do what he
(40:46):
did was hard work, emotionally, hard work, physically demanding, going
all over the place doing his thing while also being
an entertainer. And you know, in nineteen sixty I think
this is a little bit after Martin Luther King Jr.
Was murdered, he was bellefont He was asked what it's
like being such a prominent civil rights leader, and he
(41:08):
was pretty testy. He said, you know, I'd like to
take my family and go live in Africa and be
able to stop answering questions though I were a spokesman
for my people. I hate marching and getting called at
three am to bail some cats out of jail. And
this is just the toll that that takes on anybody,
even like a superman like Harry Bellefonte. Yeah, also a human.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
Yeah, but he had he had a really great inspiration
in the form of Paul Robison, who kind of guided
things you mentioned in before. He was an idol of
his and a real inspiration. He was the guy who's
saying old Man River among other things. But he was
this He was a model for Harry Belafonte. Paul Robison
was running around the world. He took his fame and
(41:51):
he used it to highlight, you know, plights around the
around the world. But he was also like a huge
He protested for peace and he ran around the world
trying to make peace, I mean between the US and
the USSR at the beginning of the Cold War. This
guy was going back and forth trying to create friendships
(42:12):
where there was nothing but animosity. He did the same
thing with communist China. And he was also not afraid
to criticize the United States and like its racist policies
too at the time. So you put all that together.
This guy was prime meet for the McCarthy trials and
he got blacklisted, but he refused to be cout. He
would not name names, he would not renounce his work,
(42:36):
he would not take back anything that they demanded the
take back. And he really served as this model for
Harry Belafonte. Despite I mean, Robison had it hard he
fell hard the State Department. He was doing all this
traveling to promote peace. The State Department suspended his passport
from nineteen fifty to nineteen fifty eight. Kind of hard
(42:57):
to run around the world pre internet ones are still
relatively expensive to use trying to organize peace when you
can't travel outside of the US. But he was a
really like he deserves it, I think, an episode himself.
But he stood as this inspiration and model for Harry Belafonte.
So even when he would get down trodden and defeated,
(43:18):
he had Paul Robison to look to him, be like
this guy, this guy went through even even worse than me.
Speaker 1 (43:24):
Yeah, for sure. And it wasn't always a love affair
within the black community with Harry Belafonte. He was criticized
at various times for marrying white women. He married two
white women after splitting up with Julie Robinson in two
thousand and four. He married Pamela Frank in two thousand
and eight. He don't he doesn't think, you know, he
(43:48):
was of mixed race himself, so he didn't feel like
at times he was always fully accepted by the black community,
and he would, you know, be critical of that in
nineteen ninety six in The New Yorker. He said, and
again that's a great, great read. He said, let me
tell you something, I don't know of any artist at
my level who has ever been as much on the
line for black liberation as I have, and has as
(44:10):
few black people in attendance at anything he does as
I do. And he described one of his typical concerts,
I never saw so many white people in my life.
So he never felt like he got the support from
the black community that he thought he deserved and he
thought he earned. And when it came to who he married,
he said, you know, I didn't marry anyone to further
(44:32):
and integration, cause like I married who I fell in
love with, and they married me because they fell in
love with me.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
So we've kind of talked about some of the stuff,
some of the causes he took up that he's best
known for, like civil rights. Did you mention anti apartheid? Yeah.
He performed at a rally and no New rally. In
the early eighties in Germany, he sought a broker peace
between the Crips and the Bloods, and back in the
(45:01):
late eighties he protested the Iraq War in the early
two thousands, and then the cause that he he kind
of got behind towards the very end of his life
was incarceration in general. He was I think the first
performer to play Riker's Island. James Brown famously did in
nineteen seventy two. Harry Belafinal did it a couple of
(45:22):
months before James Brown, and then throughout the rest of
his career he would visit prisons and hang out with
the inmates. But he also really focused on child incarceration
and just found that totally amoral and immoral and inexcusable.
So he really started a whole generation of like activists
(45:44):
in that right before he died. Just one more thing
he did, you know.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
Yeah, he passed away just a couple of years ago,
in April April twenty fifth of twenty twenty three, at
ninety six. So just a very full long life and
received lots of accolae during that lifetime. I mentioned the Egot.
Part of that included the OSCAR, was the gene Herschelt
Humanitarian Award in twenty fourteen and a Lifetime Achievement Grammy
(46:10):
in two thousand. You can add the Kennedy Center honor
in nineteen eighty nine to that list, and the National
Medal of the Arts. Old Billy Clinton gave him that
one in nineteen ninety four. And what else? In Harlem
he had a library named after him in twenty seventeen
near his childhood home. It was renamed the Harry Bellefonte
(46:34):
one hundred and fifteenth Street Library.
Speaker 2 (46:36):
Yeah. I also saw he was inducted into the Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame in twenty twenty two, and
the bio almost defiantly dares you to be like, he's
not rock and roll. They said that basically every artist
who's mixed politics with their music, from Bob Dylan and
Bono to Redge Against the Machine and Public Enemy, they
(46:57):
quote stand on his broad shoulders, which I mean, that's
absolutely true.
Speaker 1 (47:03):
Yeah, and there are plenty of non quote unquote rock
and roll bands in that Hall of Fame.
Speaker 2 (47:07):
Sure, but they were like, say something and then yeah,
you k back off, you did, and then you felt
like a jackass.
Speaker 1 (47:13):
Yeah, Like, is anyone going to really protest that?
Speaker 2 (47:16):
I don't know. I could see Gene Simmons saying something
about it. Right. There's also a really great appearance on
The Muppet show where he sings Deo with some of
the muppets, and it's just sweet and wholesome and just great.
Speaker 1 (47:31):
Yeah, good stuff.
Speaker 2 (47:33):
One more thing we cannot not mention Beetlejuice. Dune.
Speaker 1 (47:37):
Oh was he did he have something to do with beetlejuice? Yeah,
obviously people were already typing their emails. Beetlejuice featured not
only the Banana Boat song, but Jumping the Line, which
I like more than the banana bats. I did hold
that song to great effect. I think Tim Burton apparently
wasn't super keen. He didn't think it was funny enough,
(47:59):
and I'm like, dude, it's not funny. It's fun you
added two extra letters. It's not supposed to be like
slap your knee funny, but it is certainly fun. And
the little dance routines, they're almost like apart from the
movie itself, like additional like an additional music video or
something like in the movie. But they are part one
(48:21):
small part, or I guess a large part really of
what makes that movie so great were those two numbers.
Speaker 2 (48:26):
Yeah, and the whole I mean, the whole thing's just amazing.
But for some reason, Catherine O'Hara is just you just
see she's so cool when she's doing this, like it's
just perfect. And she's supposedly the one who suggested Calypso
for the music that they use.
Speaker 1 (48:40):
Oh that's funny, Harry Bells not funny.
Speaker 2 (48:42):
No, it's not funny at all, Chuck, You're absolutely right,
it's fun. But apparently Harry bell Fani said that about
a year after Beetle Juicy, he became popular with kids.
Apparently do and jump the line, but jump in the line. Sorry.
They both ended up on the Billboard two hundred after
be Juice for a little while, and he said that
(49:03):
all sorts of kids would come up to him after
they saw Beetlejuice, and he said that they would wipe
their hands full of tomato, ketchup and mustard on my clothes.
And I enjoyed the whole excursion.
Speaker 1 (49:15):
Yeah, go listen to some of his stuff. I've been
listening to it for two days, Harry Bellefonte and the
Bellefonte Folk Singers, and it's some of it's maybe unusual
to modern ears, but it's like really good stuff.
Speaker 2 (49:27):
Yeah, and it's even better if you watch like footage
of him singing it too, like you really his stage
presence really comes across even on video years later.
Speaker 1 (49:36):
That's right. Did we mention he was handsome? He was
easy on the eyes, the hard to look at it.
Speaker 2 (49:41):
Yeah, for sure. He could really wear a shirt unbuttoned
down to his navel too.
Speaker 1 (49:44):
Man, Oh boy, I never could get away.
Speaker 2 (49:47):
I can't either. All right, Well that's Harry Belafana. Everybody
rip Harry R I P. And if you want to
know more about Harry Belafani, like Chuck Segg, go look
him on up and start listening to them and watching
some videos. And in the meantime, I think that means
it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (50:08):
This is just a little quickie. Hey, guys, are heard
on a recent Christmas episode that you're desperate for new
Christmas material. A few months ago, I sent in a
show idea about the Halifax explosion. Did you know that
this has a Christmas connection? Halifax was so thankful for
the help from the city of Boston that we continue
to send Halifax their city's Christmas tree to this very day.
Speaker 2 (50:32):
Pretty cool Boston does or Halifax.
Speaker 1 (50:34):
Does Boston sends I don't know Halifax sends Boston the
tree yeah.
Speaker 2 (50:41):
Now the story is delightful.
Speaker 1 (50:43):
Yeah, yeah, it is all the best from your neighbors
in Canada. That is the Matthias Dernford.
Speaker 2 (50:49):
That's a great one. We should have done that as
like a segment, but now we can't because everybody knows it.
Speaker 1 (50:54):
Yeah, I mean we did a whole episode on it.
But this is a nice identity.
Speaker 2 (50:57):
Did you say Matthias or Matthias?
Speaker 1 (51:00):
Well, I mean there's an hre in there. I don't
know if it's pronounced.
Speaker 2 (51:02):
Though, Matthias.
Speaker 1 (51:03):
I said Matthiah.
Speaker 2 (51:04):
Good. Well, if you want to be like Matthias and
have us debate how to say your name, love that
kind of thing. You can send us an email too
to stuff podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (51:17):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey yo, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, which is appropriate because
this is a barn burner of an episode.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
If you ask me, did you say, hey, oh, I
did very nice.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
I gotta freshen it up here there sometimes starting to
get a little stale. No, you don't think so.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
No, I mean you can freshen it up, but it's
not stale.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Okay, all right, okay, I like that. If you have
any ideas to freshen it up ever, you know, lamb
on me. All right, let's see, we're coming up on
your seventeen. Just want to point that out.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Yeah, what is it in April?
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Yeah? Pretty cool? Yeah. And today also we are talking
about Harry Belafonte and part of the reason why, but
not the full reason why, because this is he was
a perennial man, a man of all seasons. Yeah, but
it's Black History Month, so we want to profile him,
at least in part for a Black History Month.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Yeah. And he's awesome. And you know I watched that
We Are the World documentary not too long ago. Oh
yeahs a good yeah, it's really good. I think you
would enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Okay, I probably would, then, yeah, you think I would.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Yeah, it's actually really really good. And you walk away
from it thinking, well, thinking like, Harry Belafonte is awesome,
along with a lot of other people. But you walk
away thinking, man, I just want to be friends with
Lionel Richie.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Oh yeah, I can imagine.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
He's just the coolest and he tells really great story
He's a great storyteller and funny. And like I was like, man,
Lionel Richie is awesome and fun.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
That's pretty cool, man.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Yeah, there's a rumor that seems fairly substantiated that he's
Kylie Jenner's real father.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Oh really yeah, apparently there's.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
A lot of a lot of swinging going on out
in that neighborhood back in the day.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
I don't know what Kylie Jenner looks like. Does she
look like Is it sort of like Frank Sinatra's son
ronan Pharaoh?
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Uh No, nothing like that. And actually I'm not sure
any living human knows exactly what Kylie Jenner looks like.
So I'll just say, well.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Let's talk about Harry be then the guy. I love
this guy.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Yeah, so Harry Beliefani. I was trying to figure out
how we can name this, and we might just say
Harry Belifani or something like that, but we could also
say the thinking person sink.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Yeah, that's good, the real deal, yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Or a genuinely great.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Person yeah, entertainer slash activist, yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Like he he did it all. He was just one
of these people who you know, when you approach an iconoclast,
especially one who's just revered universally, and you start picking
at the edges, you're like, oh my god, I hope
it's not.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Like garbage, right.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
And you just don't get to that point like he
was through and through a genuinely good person. And one
of the reasons why you don't get to like pick
off the outer coating and find garbage underneath, because he
was just pretty much fully transparent his whole life, and
he just he was who he was, and he wasn't
apologetic for it, and he just put it all out
(03:27):
there based on his beliefs, and his beliefs tended to
coincide with the right side of history. Typically, he saw
people who were downtrodden being being taken advantage of, being
discriminated against, and he wanted to go help make that better.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Yeah. Yeah, And as you'll see, you know, throughout his
career he missed opportunities because he refused to cave lost opportunities,
had opportunities taken away from him, and he was just like,
you know, I'm going to be Harry Belafonte and no
one is going to change that. Yeah, career be damn, let's.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Kick the whole thing off, right, Because for those of
you who don't know, we should probably say Harry Belafine
is a legendary entertainer. That's what he's most widely known for,
and most widely known for the song Deyo, which is
why I said Heyo come full circle now in the
Banana boat song. Yeah. And if you don't know what
we're talking about still, just pause this, go onto YouTube,
(04:26):
type in doyoh, look for the original version and listen
to it and come back, and you will be pretty
much as versed as you need to be going into
this episode.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Yeah. You know, actor, stage performer, Broadway star, Egott winner. Yeah,
if you don't know an Egott, that's if you have
won the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony in your lifetime,
which mister Belafonte did, it's a rare feat indeed. But
he was born to, you know, a very humble upbringing.
In March of nineteen twenty seven, Harold George Bellefonte junior
(04:58):
in Harlem, New York City, to Caribbean parents. His father, Harold,
who was actually a cook on a banana boat, was
from Martinique and his mother, Melvin, was from Jamaica. And
he was raised in Harlem until he was eight, at
which time his mom said, you and your little brother
Dennis are going to live near in my hometown in Jamaica.
(05:21):
And so from the ages of eight to what like
twelve ish, he lived in Jamaica, and that's where he
really sort of saw the light as far as this,
you know, Caribbean folk music that would become his staple.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Yeah, And he was raised by his grandmother there. His
maternal grandmother, Melvin's mom, was a white woman, a Jamaican
white woman, and she really raised him to kind of
love all people, which is a big early influence. And
then another influence of living in Jamaica at the time
was he saw black professionals. He saw black doctors, black lawyers,
completely competent, completely normal. There wasn't anything wrong with them.
(05:59):
They were just black doctors and black lawyers and et cetera.
And it really kind of served as a foil to
him to how things were back in America, right, which
was very discriminatory at the time. Yeah, he was back
dab in the middle of the Jim Crow era in
the United States.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Yeah, so he hears this music down there, the sort
of call and response work songs that I mean, that's
where the song. Should we talk about, Dio real quick?
I mean, as we're getting going. Yeah, let's yeah, because
if you've heard the song, you might be thinking, and
you never did any research, you wondered, what the heck
is he singing about? Right, you know, come mister tally man,
(06:39):
tally me banana daylight comes and we want to go home. Yeah,
it was a work song and it was a colin
response song of these guys who worked on banana boats.
And you know, they would work through the night and
the morning is when they were allowed to leave if
the tally man, the person who counted the bananas tally
that they had enough bananas to you know, tally the
(07:00):
to their workday.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Yeah, and that's what they would get paid based on
how much they had loaded overnight, So you couldn't leave
until the guy came along and said, you loaded five
million tons of bananas, here's your fifty dollars or whatever,
then you could go home. I had no idea that's
what that song was about.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Yeah, I mean, I didn't know what a tally Man was,
but it makes perfect sense of someone him Tally's exactly.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
And I love that song even more now, and I
just it just really kind of buttons some stuff up
because yeah, to that point, like I had never looked
up the lyrics, and I was just going by ear.
My ear's not super good at picking out lyrics. So
what singing, I don't even remember what I was. I
was just listening and it was all just kind of
like vocal sounds. It was like the cocktoo, twins or
(07:44):
something like that. He was just making sounds, not actually
saying anything or saying words. So now that I know
there's a story behind it, I love it.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
Yeah. Pretty cool. So he ends up back in Harlem,
though supposedly had dyslexia, so he wasn't a great student,
so at seventeen years old he quit school. He joined
the Navy in nineteen forty four. And this was another
sort of eye opening experience because he served in World
War Two in an all black unit and at first
(08:14):
was like, you know, I don't like the segregation of
the army here. But he met a lot of guys
in that unit that turned him onto a lot of
stuff that kind of laid to groundwork for what would
be his social awareness and activism.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Yeah, they turned him onto books like The Soul of
Black Folk, The Souls of Black Folks by W. B.
Du Boyce and like that, combined with his early upbringing
where he was able to expose society in Jamaica and
society in America, like this really kind of got things started.
So by the time he met his wife, his first wife,
Marguerite Byrd, he was radicalized. At this point I saw
(08:50):
described as like he was full on, like civil rights
movement guy. And this is the forties, so this is
before the civil rights movement had really kind of started
in earnest the at least the version that we're you know,
we think of when we think of it historically, and
Marguerite was not that way at all. She was from
an upper middle class black family. She was a sorority
(09:13):
girl in Virginia. She was just raised in the type
of conservative household where it's like you just trust the system,
you trust society if the news tells you something that's true.
And she and Harry were almost like foils to an extent.
She saw her role as taking care of this misguided,
like angry man and trying to help him through life.
(09:36):
And I'm sure he saw his role in part as
like opening her eyes. But the big thing that came
out of their union, whether it was his first two kids.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
Yeah, he had two daughters with Marguerite, Adrian and of
course Sherry, who went on to become a successful actor
herself and then served as time in the Navy. They
eventually lived in Harlem, you know, as a family, and
he as a janitor's assistant at an apartment building. And
that's when another sort of monumental moment in his life happened.
(10:07):
He fixed the blinds in someone's apartment, in attendant's apartment there,
and just as a thank you, they gave him, they
gifted them some tickets to the theater, to the American
Negro Theater, which he had never seen live theater before,
like that, never seen you know, black actors on stage.
Performing and to say he caught the bug as an understatement.
(10:28):
He immediately tried to get a job there, applied to
be a stage hand at that theater. And this is
one of those life things where you're just like, are
you kidding me? This really happened. He got that job
and another young janitor there, his name was Sidney Poitier,
And it's just incredible, like, what are the odds that
(10:50):
these two incredible talented performers you get jobs as like
stage hands and janitors at this theater when they were
just in their I guess early twenties.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Yeah, and they both did so because they wanted to
do whatever they could to get their foot in the
door into theater. The world of theater. I saw somewhere
mentioned that when they were just two broke stage hands,
they loved the theater so much that they would pull
their money together to buy a single ticket to Broadway
shows and then one would see one act and then
they would switch off and the other would see the
(11:20):
second act or whatever.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Amazing.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
Yeah, I mean that's that you really love the theater.
Like you said, he caught the bug if you're doing
stuff like that. He also enrolled in a really that's
the measuring stick, by the way, for whether you love
theater or not.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Oh, I just go to one act and split it
with your friend, right, all right.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
He also enrolled in a legendary acting workshop that was
held at the New School for years. Some of his
classmates were Walter Mathow have you seen did you see
the documentary sing your song about him? Not Walter Math
about Lafonte.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
No, Math, I was a singer. No, I didn't see
that yet.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
It's good.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
I'm going to it's good.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
But they show like some stills from that workshop, and
there's young Walter Math. Now he looks like some doofy
twenty year old Walter Math.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Now it's pretty great, except he looked fifty.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Yeah, pretty much already. Yeah, but he has like a
cowlic and he's wearing like a heavy flannel shirt like
he just walked out of the woods of Minnesota or something.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
He was also in class with Tony Curtis, Marlon Brando,
and then the future Dorothy Petrillos Bornak, also known as
b Arthur.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Oh, then there's Mallod.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Can you imagine you go to class and that's who
you're in class with. But they don't mean anything. Yet
they're all just acting students.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Yeah, and I'm sure Bellefonte was like this, Brando, guy's
got some promise.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Yeah. They actually became pretty good friends.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Yeah, Brando's He's worth an episode at some point, to
say the least.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
I think we could do just one episode on Don
Juan de Marco.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
Right, So, Harry Bellefonte's in the new school, you know,
doing what you do in theater school like that, You're
doing movement and voice and eventually like some singing. And
he was like, oh, wait a minute, I can sing
pretty good too, and everyone else said, yeah, you can
sing pretty good, and you're handsome to a fault, so
(13:15):
you've kind of got it all going on. There weren't
a ton of roles for black men in the theater
at the time, or at least, and this is something
that we'll see he did throughout his career, not the
kind of roles that he wanted to take that he
thought were you know, dignified, I guess is the right word.
So he's like, I'm not going to play the parts
that are available to me. I'm going to start singing.
(13:36):
So he went to jazz clubs like the you know,
the legendary Blue Note would sing jazz standards on stage,
and then in the nineteen forties, spurred by the interest
in it was like a renewed interest in square dancing
and folk dancing at the time that led to what
was called the folk music Revival. This was in the
(13:56):
early nineteen forties in Greenwich's Village, which you know would
eventually culminate in the sort of the peak of that
movement in the mid sixties with people like Pete Seeger
and Bob Dylan. It all started in the early nineteen
forties with people like Harry Belafonte going to the Village Vanguard,
this legendary folk music club and seeing Lead Belly perform
(14:18):
and was like, all right, well, now we're onto something here.
It's all happening, and I'm right in the epicenter of it.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Yeah, because, like you said, he wasn't happy with singing
jazz standards or pop music, despite the fact that I
saw that he was backed at some points by Charlie Parker,
the famous drummer, Max Roach and Miles Davis, all his
young musicians, and he was like, nah, let me go
on to folk music. And he got so heavy into
folk music that he spent his time researching folk songs
(14:48):
at the Library of Congress to expand his repertoire. That's
how into folk music he got. And he was so
broke that he would find somebody to split a ticket
into the Library of Congress's archives and search for an hour,
and then they trade off and do the next hour.
And that means you're really into folk music.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
That's how we do our research, right, that's right, just
trade off. It was around this time that he met
a pretty monumental figure in his life. It was one
of his idols. It was an actor and singer named
Paul Robison, and he was most famous, probably at the
time at least for his version of Old Man River
from Showboat from the musical Showboat, and Harry was like, yeah,
(15:30):
nuts with this jazz stuff. I'm into the traditional music.
I'm into folk, I can you know. I'm trying to
find my own voice. And he found that in what
ended up being sort of like the Calypso folk music
of the Caribbean, you know, going back to his roots.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
Right, And we'll get up into that a little more
in a minute, but just kind of progressing on with
his early career, he essentially not just his singing voice,
but his stage presence. His presence was monumental, but also
he used it his movements and sometimes props and stuff
on the stage to kind of tell the story that
(16:10):
this folk song was trying to tell. So his act
was just a sensation, like basically out of the gate,
and he very quickly got picked up and put on
a Broadway, this time from the stage. And the first
thing I think he was in was John Murray Anderson's Almanac,
which was a musical review in nineteen fifty three, and
he did such a good job that his first time
out he wins a Tony. Not only does he win
(16:32):
a Tony, he's the first black man to win a Tony.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
Yeah, nineteen fifty four Best Featured Actor in a Musical.
And not only that, but around the same time in
fifty three, he made his first two movies with Dorothy Dandridge,
and the second of those Carmen Jones. Dorothy Dandridge became
the first African American woman nominated for a Best Actress Oscar.
(16:57):
So he's among this group of young African American entertainers
that are just knocking doors down left and right and
getting you know, real recognition kind of for the first time.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Yeah, and this is the early fifties.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
Let's take a little break and we'll come back and
talk a little more about his Calypso stuff.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Yeah, and we should mention before we break here that
his marriage to Marguerite was dissolving at the time, but
he would go on to marry again, as we'll see.
But maybe we should take that break. You want to
take a break, Yeah, let's take a break. We'll be
right back.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
We will.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
Stoffy jaws.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Soff you okay, Chuck. So we're talking calypso now, it's
(18:03):
really really difficult to understate, like how big of a
star Harry Belafonte became thanks to Calypso music. Calypso music
is like this traditional Caribbean music, typically folks work songs.
Call in response is a big one. So the people
in the chorus seeing like daylight come and we want
(18:24):
to go home. That's like the response where Harry Belafonte
is singing the call part right, it's just traditional work
song stuff. Come on. So he starts out this whole
jam where he is playing folk music at the village.
Vanguard goes on to Broadway start singing some of this
folk like Caribbean folk music, and within a couple of
(18:45):
years he's on an NBC show doing the same thing,
and Dave helped us out with us. And he makes
a point that had it not been for a guy,
an artist who went by Lord Burgess but his real
name was Irving Bergie, Irving Bergie, who was also a
Caribbean American who was raised in New York, also being
(19:07):
into Calypso at the same exact time, and then meeting
Harry Belafonte and them collaborating, it probably would not have
taken off. But thanks to Lord Burgess and then a
playwright friend of Harry Belafani's named William Adaway working together
rewriting some of these traditional songs, rearranging them to make
them peppier, a little poppier, like they made Calypso, like
(19:31):
they just they made it way more palatable to Americans,
way more dancing, and just way more infectious than other
people who'd recorded some of these same songs previously had.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Yeah, and you know, banana butt was a cover song.
It's an old school song that had been around since
the turn of the twentieth century. And like you said,
they had a more upbeat version and it was a huge,
huge hit. He got a little you know, as we'll see,
there are people within some of the communities even admired
and worked with it, often didn't love him back as much.
(20:05):
Calypso was one of them, some traditional Calypso purist, apparently,
especially like in Trinidad, where Calypso was born, where like, hey,
this guy's coming in. He's in New York. He's not
a real Calypsonian, and you know, he's kind of changing
it up, adding like American folk sort of interest to it.
(20:28):
And he was like, you know what I think. In
nineteen fifty nine, in a New York Times interview, he said,
purism is the best cover up for mediocrity. There's no change.
We might as well just go back to the first
oough which may have been the first song, or which
must have been the first song. And I think at
which time Tuk took a tear, rolled down his cheek. Yeah,
and he went back to the fire.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
He said that was my number one song.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Yeah. But Harry was like, you know, I'm taking it,
I'm making it popular, I'm making it my own, I'm
finding my own voice and it's you know, it's my
version of lipso folk music.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
Yeah. I think. Also he was criticized by Trinidadians for
being known as the King of Calypso. They're like, we
have our own King of Calypso competition every year and
you ain't it and he's like so, and they just
couldn't come back with anything after that, So the whole
beef ended right there.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
His nineteen fifty six album Calypso came out after that
TV special. It was a huge, huge hit. It was
stayed number one for thirty eight weeks, knocked Elvis out
of the number one spot at the time, and became
the very first record in history to sell one million
copies in its first year out.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
Yes, that was just in the US alone. It did
the same thing in the UK and Chuck. One of
the songs on this album was Dayo. Right yeah, Deyo
itself sold a million copies just to the forty five
just the single, right. I can see just the single
selling the million copies and then the album suffering because
(22:02):
of that. The album continued to sell as well. It's
crazy how nuts for Harry Belafonte. The United States and
a lot of other parts of the world too, were
at that time, like he just blew up, you said.
It was number one on the charts for thirty eight weeks,
not on the charts for thirty eight weeks, then number
(22:22):
one album in the United States for all like the
better half of a year. That's no one does that.
That's crazy.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Yeah, it was incredible. He was one of the biggest
performers in America all of a sudden, one of the
biggest singing stars, big crossover success obviously, and for all
of that. This is how he was treated on the road.
He would not be allowed to stay in the hotels
(22:52):
when he performed in Vegas because of segregation. When he
was touring the South with a Broadway show Almanac, state
troops threatened to shoot him in a whites only bathroom
in la He was stopped by the cops for just
taking a walk through Beverly Hills at night. So these
are the kinds of this. This was the world he
(23:12):
was living in. Even one of the biggest stars in
the world was not immune to the just blatant racism
that was going on.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
Yes, absolutely that didn't stop him, though it didn't discourage
him like he found it personally discouraging, but he didn't behave,
he didn't acquiesce. Basically. Yeah, one of the things he
did was he took a role and this is very
much in line with his decision making as far as
(23:42):
his career went, which we'll talk about a little more
in a second. But he took a role called in
a movie called Island in Island of the Sun from
nineteen fifty seven, and in it he has an insinuated
romance with a white woman, Joan Fontaine, and they don't touch,
(24:05):
they don't kiss, there's nothing like that. The closest to
a kiss that happens is they share a sip from
a coconut, Like one of them takes a sip, hands
it to the other one, and then she takes a sip.
That's the closest thing to an on screen kiss that there.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
Was not close to a kiss, no, but it was.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
So groundbreaking that the South Carolina legislature introduced a bill.
I don't know if they passed it that would find
any theater in South Carolina that showed Island in the Sun.
That's how controversial that movie was. And it sounds so
tame that it's actually preposterous, and like embarrassing now, but
(24:45):
that was at the forefront of pushing the envelope as
far as race relations in America went. And that's why
Harry Belafonte was like, yes, give me that role. I
will totally take that role.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
Yeah, for sure. In real life, he married his second
wife around the same time. Her name is Julie Robinson.
She was a dancer and she was white, and they
were probably, I would not even say one of the
most they were probably the most prominent interracial couple in
America at the time.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
For sure. She was also Brando's girlfriend when they met.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
Look out, Marlon, Harry Delafante pretty handsome guy.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Oh man, beyond handsome. Yeah, so, Chuck, when we were
just talking about Islands in the Sun, I was saying
that Harry Belafonte would totally choose a role that pushed
the envelope for race relations, not to stick it in
the eye of white America, but to push things forward
and just basically say black people are people too, Let's
portray them as such on the screen. Okay.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
In doing that, he had to choose over and over
and over again between advancing his career and standing by
his values and without missing a single opportunity. He stood
by his values every time.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
Yeah, I mean he was offered and that's just kind
of what I was alluding to earlier. He was offered roles.
He called them Uncle Tom roles, and he said that's
about all you could get at, you know, at one
point in Hollywood or on stage, and he just wouldn't
play those roles. He you know, it depends on who
you are and where you draw the line, and I
(26:24):
mean that's where he drew his line. His good friend
Sidney Poitier would take not necessarily those roles, but other
roles that Harry Belafonte didn't think had enough sort of
nuance for a black actor or spoke to his truth.
Sometimes his friend Sidney Poitier would take those roles, not
in any way like a sellout or anything like that.
(26:46):
He had his own ideas of how to you know,
advance the cause and advance his career and stay in
the limelight so he could do his good work as well.
But you know, they were rivals in a way, but
also best friends.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Yeah, exactly, but certainly professional rivals because as almost invariably
the roles that Bellefani passed on would go to Poitier because,
like you said, he would take these roles and he was.
He became, as a result, the ambassador of Black America
to white America because these roles he was taking in
the early sixties, these films were written to advance the
(27:20):
cause of black civil rights in the United States, and
Sydney Potier is like, yes, put me out there, tell
me what we need to do, and let's show these
Americans that black people are people too. And like you said,
Bellefani was like, there's just it's still missing some stuff.
And like Lily's of the Field is a good example.
It's from nineteen sixty three. It starred Sidney Potier. He
(27:42):
went on to win an Oscar for it, and he
plays a black man who is helping Nazi nuns hide
from the Communists. And the reason Bellefane passed on it
is because he said that this black man has like
no background, no history, not really a human. He said
to Henry Lewis Gates and Junior in nineteen ninety six
(28:03):
in The New Yorker, it's a really good article. He said,
he didn't kiss anybody, he didn't touch anybody. He had
no culture, he had no history. He had no family,
he had nothing, So he was like a not even
a caricature of a black person. He was like human
being happens to be black, go, you know, And that
just was not nearly enough for what Harry Bellafind was
(28:23):
willing to take on as an actor. So he would
just let these things come and go and pass on them,
or else he would try it, push the envelope, that
thing would get canceled and he'd just move on. He
never ever went to Hollywood, you know, on his knees
or asking, like they came to him and he would
either pass or not based on what kind of how
(28:46):
willing they were to portray black people in that film.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Yeah, highly principled decision making career wise, Yes, that's fair.
It is tough to do period, but very tough to
do trying to make it cut throat business like Hollywood,
you know.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
For sure. Man.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
So in fifty six, this was, you know, kind of
right around the time he had gotten married, and that
Islands in the Sun had come out just before that.
He got a phone call from Martin Luther King Junior
and they ended up meeting in person and having a
four hour meeting. On their first meeting, and this is
sort of what lit the fire for Bellefonte to really
(29:26):
really get into very public civil rights work. It was
his awakening in a lot of ways. And he wasn't
just like, yeah, you know, I'll show up and I'll
be a celebrity face here and there. He was bailing
civil rights leaders out of jail. He and Sidney Poitiers
were smuggling cash seventy grand into Mississippi during the Freedom Rides,
(29:51):
and you know with the Freedom Schools. I think we
did a whole episode in the Freedom Schools at one
point he helped. He didn't just show up at the
march on Washington. He was one of the organizers. So
he was he was in deep doing the hard work.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
Yeah, he he looked out for mlk's family during mlk's life,
but also like he he funded his children's education. Yeah,
he took out a huge insurance life insurance policy against MLK.
And then he just was there for the family afterwards.
Like he kind of stepped in when MLK was assassinated.
(30:30):
So he certainly walked the walk. He was at all
these you know, sit ins and rallies and marches, and
he just was there. He was like you said, he
wasn't just a figurehead. He didn't just show up for
the press. He didn't just write checks behind the scenes.
He did it all. And again, it just goes right
back to the upbringing from his mom, who taught him like,
(30:52):
not only just wherever you see injustice in the world,
go go fight it and try to fix it, like
actively search every day for injustice that you can go help.
And you know, there was nothing more unjustin right in
your face for an American, a black American particular at
the time than the Civil rights movement.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
Yeah. Absolutely, so his his you know, entertaining or entertainment
career kept blossoming as well, kind of in conjunction with this,
and he would use that to sort of, you know,
help subtly raise awareness just about his community and what
he's like and what his people are like. And the
(31:33):
Tonight Show is a big example. In nineteen sixty eight,
Johnny Carson invited him to host for a week, to
host the Tonight Show. You know, take Johnny Seed, first
black guest host in the history of the show. And
this is in nineteen sixty eight. You know, everything going
on in nineteen sixty eight seems fraud and race relations
certainly were a part of that, and he wasn't like,
(31:55):
all right, I'll go host the show and I'll get
in and just kind of tried out the usual guest
that Johnny might have. He said, no, I'm gonna have
Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Junior and Aretha Franklin
and Dion Warwick and you know, Paul Newman and Nipsey
Russell and all these people who had these progressive causes
(32:16):
or were just famous black entertainers who didn't get that
kind of stage very often and open every night with
a song. Obviously Johnny didn't do anything like that, so
it was it was still fun and entertaining, but it
was also educating people and talking about serious issues in
these interviews.
Speaker 2 (32:34):
Yes, so that was just huge. I mean also you
got a credit Johnny Carson too. He did that on purpose.
He wasn't like, I'm going on vacation for we just
call whoever like. He did that on purpose because he
was trying to advance race relations as well, So hats
off to him for that as well. They also had
really high ratings. That was another thing too. Harry bell
(32:54):
Fini when he did something on TV it drew viewers,
and even ill it didn't matter because there were so
many angry white racists in America that would call up
these sponsors and be like, you're sponsoring this this black
guy on this show, you better stop. They go to
the producers. The producers would come to Bellifani and be like, hey,
you know how you have white people and black people
(33:16):
dancing together. What if we just did white or just
did black. Bellifani wouldn't blink and it would get canceled
despite all of the crazy great reviews and viewership it had,
and you know, that would be that, and he would
just kind of move on. But of course he developed
like this distrust and distaste for the entertainment industry, and
(33:37):
I saw that he initially thought that he would be
able to help change America through Hollywood, and then he
quickly came to see like, no, Hollywood is just one
more facet of this machine that keeps things going exactly
as they are. So he got really disgusted by that.
Kind of fortunately for us, because he really kind of
(33:58):
started to throw more and more of his inner into
being an activist, not just in the United States but
around the world, and in particular Paul Robison, like you said,
was one of his idols, who was also just one
of the early civil rights crusaders around the world. And
then Eleanor Roosevelt FDR's wife first lady, introduced him to
to the plight of different countries in Africa, which was
(34:20):
decolonizing at the time, and he really kind of turned
his attention toward that continent for a while.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
Yeah, for sure. I mean all of the major causes
that you've heard from, you know, basically starting then even
and especially through the eighties with apartheid in South Africa,
Kenyan independence, and you know I mentioned early on We
Are the World Ethiopia and the famines there was. He
(34:48):
was the guy that you know called up Quincy Jones
and was like, hey, we need to do something here,
and We Are the World was a huge, huge hit
that sold I think twenty million copies and raised sixty
five million bucks for famine relief. And if you were
a kid in nineteen eighty five, We Are the World
(35:10):
was like that and Live Aid We're two of the
biggest deals in music history. And you know, I was
fourteen years old at the time. It was just like
it was incredible to see all these people together, and like,
even as a kid, even as a like a little
snot nosed fourteen year old white kid from the South,
I knew that I was watching was important. I didn't
(35:30):
maybe fully understand it. I had seen stuff about the
famine on television, but it was it was raising awareness
for everybody, including little white suburban kids from Georgia.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
Yeah, which is, you know, exactly part of the point,
in addition to raising money too.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
One of the cool things I saw about it was
I'm not sure if it was his idea or if
he kind of headed up the push to do this
or both, but Harry Bella finally's credited with talking radio
stations around the world into playing We Are the World
at the same time on the same day. It was,
I think March twenty eighth, nineteen eighty six. I remember
(36:07):
there was something like do you remember that? Oh, yeah, cool.
There was like five thousand radio stations around the world
and they all played it at the same time I
think ten fifty am Eastern Standard time, and Musak actually
played it as well, and it was only the second
time in the history of music that they played voices
over their service, which, by the way, at the time
reached like eighty million Americans. So that's a lot of
(36:31):
people listening to We Are the World at that same moment,
which is neat, that's.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
Right, and including just I accounted for one of those.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
I don't remember listening to it on the radio, but
I do remember my family sitting around listening to the record.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
Yeah it's so funny. All right, maybe we should take
our second break and come up and talk some more
about Harry Belafonte.
Speaker 3 (36:52):
Okay, joh all right, So Harry's doing his activism.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
He is still an entertainer. He never, you know, sort
of fully left that behind, and you know, he started
doing less and less of that as like through the
sort of eighties and nineties when his activism was I
think at its peak, but he was still doing his thing.
In nineteen sixty, he became the first black American to
(37:44):
win an Emmy for Tonight with Bellafonte, one of his
TV specials, again which they were all super big hits,
even though people loved them and the ratings were through
the roof, it was that silent majority complaining about petul
La Clark holding his arm, a white woman holding his
arm in a special. It drove away some advertisers, which
is just, you know, very sad to say the least,
(38:06):
but he was still serving up this sort of Caribbean
tinge folk music to people. CBS ordered five more episodes
after Tonight with Bellefonte was such a big success. But
of course that was one of the ones where sponsorship
was pulled because he had black people and white people
dancing and singing together and said, no, no, no, no,
(38:27):
you cannot do that.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
Right, And so he would just leave show business for
you know, years at a time, or at least like
TV or movies or something like that. But he got
pulled back into it in the early seventies because his
buddy Sidney Poitier was like, Hey, I want to start
directing blackspolitation movies. Let's do this. And they made Buck
in the Preacher, which I have not seen. I think
(38:49):
it was from nineteen seventy two. Everything I've read about
it makes me want to see it. Basically immediately Sidney
Poidier directed it, but he also plays Buck, who's this
ex Civil War soldier who helps ensure safe passage for
African Americans moving out of Louisiana out west after the
Civil War, and the Preacher is Harry Belafonte, who's this
(39:12):
con artist dressed as a preacher. It just sounds awesome.
And then Uptown Saturday Night. Haven't seen that one either,
It sounds pretty great, except it's so hard now to
get past anything with Bill Cosby. Yeah, it's so hard,
not just because of the horrible stuff he did sexually
assaulting women, but also because he was so preachy leading
(39:37):
up to it. He was so holier than how and
it makes the whole thing so much worse if you ask.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Me, Yeah, I mean and this he was doing those
things back then, right too. The CNN documentary that camal
Bell did was very upsetting to see. But the way
they did it, I think I mentioned it before, was
it was they were just sort of tracking his career
and like, and he was the biggest star and on
(40:03):
TV at the time, and this was nineteen sixty something,
and then it was like in nineteen sixty whatever, he
sexually assaulted this woman, right, and it was happening the
whole time. So I'm with you, impossible to watch that stuff,
but you can watch Bucket the Preacher.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
Though, right, he's not in that, that's right.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
So hearing all this, you're like, wow, Harry Bellefonte was
a superman and he never got in bad mood, and
he never got tired, and he was never frustrated. And
it was just wine and roses all the time for
Harry Bellefonte. And that is not the case. It was
a serious fatigue on his life. To do what he
(40:46):
did was hard work, emotionally, hard work, physically demanding, going
all over the place doing his thing while also being
an entertainer. And you know, in nineteen sixty I think
this is a little bit after Martin Luther King Jr.
Was murdered, he was bellefont He was asked what it's
like being such a prominent civil rights leader, and he
(41:08):
was pretty testy. He said, you know, I'd like to
take my family and go live in Africa and be
able to stop answering questions though I were a spokesman
for my people. I hate marching and getting called at
three am to bail some cats out of jail. And
this is just the toll that that takes on anybody,
even like a superman like Harry Bellefonte. Yeah, also a human.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
Yeah, but he had he had a really great inspiration
in the form of Paul Robison, who kind of guided
things you mentioned in before. He was an idol of
his and a real inspiration. He was the guy who's
saying old Man River among other things. But he was
this He was a model for Harry Belafonte. Paul Robison
was running around the world. He took his fame and
(41:51):
he used it to highlight, you know, plights around the
around the world. But he was also like a huge
He protested for peace and he ran around the world
trying to make peace, I mean between the US and
the USSR at the beginning of the Cold War. This
guy was going back and forth trying to create friendships
(42:12):
where there was nothing but animosity. He did the same
thing with communist China. And he was also not afraid
to criticize the United States and like its racist policies
too at the time. So you put all that together.
This guy was prime meet for the McCarthy trials and
he got blacklisted, but he refused to be cout. He
would not name names, he would not renounce his work,
(42:36):
he would not take back anything that they demanded the
take back. And he really served as this model for
Harry Belafonte. Despite I mean, Robison had it hard he
fell hard the State Department. He was doing all this
traveling to promote peace. The State Department suspended his passport
from nineteen fifty to nineteen fifty eight. Kind of hard
(42:57):
to run around the world pre internet ones are still
relatively expensive to use trying to organize peace when you
can't travel outside of the US. But he was a
really like he deserves it, I think, an episode himself.
But he stood as this inspiration and model for Harry Belafonte.
So even when he would get down trodden and defeated,
(43:18):
he had Paul Robison to look to him, be like
this guy, this guy went through even even worse than me.
Speaker 1 (43:24):
Yeah, for sure. And it wasn't always a love affair
within the black community with Harry Belafonte. He was criticized
at various times for marrying white women. He married two
white women after splitting up with Julie Robinson in two
thousand and four. He married Pamela Frank in two thousand
and eight. He don't he doesn't think, you know, he
(43:48):
was of mixed race himself, so he didn't feel like
at times he was always fully accepted by the black community,
and he would, you know, be critical of that in
nineteen ninety six in The New Yorker. He said, and
again that's a great, great read. He said, let me
tell you something, I don't know of any artist at
my level who has ever been as much on the
line for black liberation as I have, and has as
(44:10):
few black people in attendance at anything he does as
I do. And he described one of his typical concerts,
I never saw so many white people in my life.
So he never felt like he got the support from
the black community that he thought he deserved and he
thought he earned. And when it came to who he married,
he said, you know, I didn't marry anyone to further
(44:32):
and integration, cause like I married who I fell in
love with, and they married me because they fell in
love with me.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
So we've kind of talked about some of the stuff,
some of the causes he took up that he's best
known for, like civil rights. Did you mention anti apartheid? Yeah.
He performed at a rally and no New rally. In
the early eighties in Germany, he sought a broker peace
between the Crips and the Bloods, and back in the
(45:01):
late eighties he protested the Iraq War in the early
two thousands, and then the cause that he he kind
of got behind towards the very end of his life
was incarceration in general. He was I think the first
performer to play Riker's Island. James Brown famously did in
nineteen seventy two. Harry Belafinal did it a couple of
(45:22):
months before James Brown, and then throughout the rest of
his career he would visit prisons and hang out with
the inmates. But he also really focused on child incarceration
and just found that totally amoral and immoral and inexcusable.
So he really started a whole generation of like activists
(45:44):
in that right before he died. Just one more thing
he did, you know.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
Yeah, he passed away just a couple of years ago,
in April April twenty fifth of twenty twenty three, at
ninety six. So just a very full long life and
received lots of accolae during that lifetime. I mentioned the Egot.
Part of that included the OSCAR, was the gene Herschelt
Humanitarian Award in twenty fourteen and a Lifetime Achievement Grammy
(46:10):
in two thousand. You can add the Kennedy Center honor
in nineteen eighty nine to that list, and the National
Medal of the Arts. Old Billy Clinton gave him that
one in nineteen ninety four. And what else? In Harlem
he had a library named after him in twenty seventeen
near his childhood home. It was renamed the Harry Bellefonte
(46:34):
one hundred and fifteenth Street Library.
Speaker 2 (46:36):
Yeah. I also saw he was inducted into the Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame in twenty twenty two, and
the bio almost defiantly dares you to be like, he's
not rock and roll. They said that basically every artist
who's mixed politics with their music, from Bob Dylan and
Bono to Redge Against the Machine and Public Enemy, they
(46:57):
quote stand on his broad shoulders, which I mean, that's
absolutely true.
Speaker 1 (47:03):
Yeah, and there are plenty of non quote unquote rock
and roll bands in that Hall of Fame.
Speaker 2 (47:07):
Sure, but they were like, say something and then yeah,
you k back off, you did, and then you felt
like a jackass.
Speaker 1 (47:13):
Yeah, Like, is anyone going to really protest that?
Speaker 2 (47:16):
I don't know. I could see Gene Simmons saying something
about it. Right. There's also a really great appearance on
The Muppet show where he sings Deo with some of
the muppets, and it's just sweet and wholesome and just great.
Speaker 1 (47:31):
Yeah, good stuff.
Speaker 2 (47:33):
One more thing we cannot not mention Beetlejuice. Dune.
Speaker 1 (47:37):
Oh was he did he have something to do with beetlejuice? Yeah,
obviously people were already typing their emails. Beetlejuice featured not
only the Banana Boat song, but Jumping the Line, which
I like more than the banana bats. I did hold
that song to great effect. I think Tim Burton apparently
wasn't super keen. He didn't think it was funny enough,
(47:59):
and I'm like, dude, it's not funny. It's fun you
added two extra letters. It's not supposed to be like
slap your knee funny, but it is certainly fun. And
the little dance routines, they're almost like apart from the
movie itself, like additional like an additional music video or
something like in the movie. But they are part one
(48:21):
small part, or I guess a large part really of
what makes that movie so great were those two numbers.
Speaker 2 (48:26):
Yeah, and the whole I mean, the whole thing's just amazing.
But for some reason, Catherine O'Hara is just you just
see she's so cool when she's doing this, like it's
just perfect. And she's supposedly the one who suggested Calypso
for the music that they use.
Speaker 1 (48:40):
Oh that's funny, Harry Bells not funny.
Speaker 2 (48:42):
No, it's not funny at all, Chuck, You're absolutely right,
it's fun. But apparently Harry bell Fani said that about
a year after Beetle Juicy, he became popular with kids.
Apparently do and jump the line, but jump in the line. Sorry.
They both ended up on the Billboard two hundred after
be Juice for a little while, and he said that
(49:03):
all sorts of kids would come up to him after
they saw Beetlejuice, and he said that they would wipe
their hands full of tomato, ketchup and mustard on my clothes.
And I enjoyed the whole excursion.
Speaker 1 (49:15):
Yeah, go listen to some of his stuff. I've been
listening to it for two days, Harry Bellefonte and the
Bellefonte Folk Singers, and it's some of it's maybe unusual
to modern ears, but it's like really good stuff.
Speaker 2 (49:27):
Yeah, and it's even better if you watch like footage
of him singing it too, like you really his stage
presence really comes across even on video years later.
Speaker 1 (49:36):
That's right. Did we mention he was handsome? He was
easy on the eyes, the hard to look at it.
Speaker 2 (49:41):
Yeah, for sure. He could really wear a shirt unbuttoned
down to his navel too.
Speaker 1 (49:44):
Man, Oh boy, I never could get away.
Speaker 2 (49:47):
I can't either. All right, Well that's Harry Belafana. Everybody
rip Harry R I P. And if you want to
know more about Harry Belafani, like Chuck Segg, go look
him on up and start listening to them and watching
some videos. And in the meantime, I think that means
it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (50:08):
This is just a little quickie. Hey, guys, are heard
on a recent Christmas episode that you're desperate for new
Christmas material. A few months ago, I sent in a
show idea about the Halifax explosion. Did you know that
this has a Christmas connection? Halifax was so thankful for
the help from the city of Boston that we continue
to send Halifax their city's Christmas tree to this very day.
Speaker 2 (50:32):
Pretty cool Boston does or Halifax.
Speaker 1 (50:34):
Does Boston sends I don't know Halifax sends Boston the
tree yeah.
Speaker 2 (50:41):
Now the story is delightful.
Speaker 1 (50:43):
Yeah, yeah, it is all the best from your neighbors
in Canada. That is the Matthias Dernford.
Speaker 2 (50:49):
That's a great one. We should have done that as
like a segment, but now we can't because everybody knows it.
Speaker 1 (50:54):
Yeah, I mean we did a whole episode on it.
But this is a nice identity.
Speaker 2 (50:57):
Did you say Matthias or Matthias?
Speaker 1 (51:00):
Well, I mean there's an hre in there. I don't
know if it's pronounced.
Speaker 2 (51:02):
Though, Matthias.
Speaker 1 (51:03):
I said Matthiah.
Speaker 2 (51:04):
Good. Well, if you want to be like Matthias and
have us debate how to say your name, love that
kind of thing. You can send us an email too
to stuff podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (51:17):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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