Just as Belafonte hit record stores, so did the debut album by some kid from Memphis named Elvis Presley. His first single, “Heartbreak Hotel,” had already topped the charts. On that same May 5 Billboard album chart, his was number one to my number two. Different as our sounds were, I could see that in one way, at least, we were on parallel tracks. Elvis was interpreting one kind of black music—rhythm and blues—while I found my inspiration in black folk songs, spirituals, and calypso, and also in African music, which would one day be put under the heading of world music.
I hadn’t met Elvis yet, but we’d had a bit of a run-in at the new RCA studios in midtown Manhattan. We were recording our albums down the hall from each other, and my sound engineer kept looking up in puzzlement. Though the studios were state of the art, he kept picking up a “leak”: strange background noise leaking into the supposedly soundproof room. On investigation, he learned that Presley and his band were the culprits, playing louder than the studio designers had ever imagined anyone would play. I went right to the top of the food chain to complain—to George Marek, RCA’s CEO. I told him these upstarts would just have to reschedule. Marek gently passed on this sentiment. Back came the word from Presley’s famous manager, “Colonel” Tom Parker: Either I could become his new client or he would destroy me. There was also a nicely wrapped box of chocolates with a note that said “From your friend the Colonel.” Somehow, Marek managed to smooth all the ruffled egos, and both albums got done.
For Belafonte’s success, and everything else I was doing, my new manager and surrogate dad, Jay Richard Kennedy, took his share of credit, and then some. Almost every day in the columns, as the album soared, I would read about new projects I was considering in partnership with him. A movie about witchcraft in Jamaica, co-starring Lena Horne, with screenplay to be written by Jay Richard Kennedy. Another about an alligator hunter in Florida who turns out to have singing talent, original story by Jay Richard Kennedy. Yet another about a young Negro clerk working for the British government, producer, Jay Richard Kennedy. All these were to follow my latest musical revue, Sing, Man, Sing, for which Jay Richard Kennedy had written most of the songs and served as producer.
In fairness, Kennedy wasn’t entirely to blame for what became my one indisputable career bomb. I’d been fascinated by a vast photography exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art the previous year called The Family of Man. Photographer Edward Steichen had curated it, bringing together some five hundred pictures from around the world that dramatized the human experience, from birth and love and parenthood to poverty, war, and death. Why not try to capture that sense of human universality, I thought, in a musical revue? That was the genesis of Sing, Man, Sing.
My idea was to write a series of songs and interweave them with existing songs that addressed, in one way or another, man’s evolution. I wanted it to be poignant and funny, with humorous songs drawn from prehistoric times, the Bible, Columbus sailing the mighty sea, on up to the present day. Initially I thought of enlisting Lord Burgess, the Caribbean-influenced songwriter with whom I’d just collaborated on my next, as-yet-unreleased album, Calypso. But somehow Jay Richard Kennedy elbowed Lord Burgess aside. I was fine with Kennedy writing scenes and songs, but when he started to oversee the dancers—including a young Alvin Ailey—I started to get nervous. And then the lighting, and the costumes, and the directing …
We started out on the road; initially, the reactions to Jay Richard Kennedy Presents “Sing, Man, Sing” were fairly positive. Not glowing, though. Definitely not glowing. By the time we reached Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., my laryngitis was back. I could never prove that it kicked in when I got really nervous, but I sure felt like it did. The night before our New York premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, I could barely speak above a whisper. When I told Jay we’d need to go with my understudy, his face turned red, and he started shouting in a strange, high-pitched voice. All these famous, influential people—his friends—were coming. How could I let them all down?
I told him I felt terrible about that. If he could find me some doctor who might help—anyone except Dr. Jacobson, with his toxic cocktails—I’d give him a try. He had Janet call around, and soon reported that she had found just the man, a specialist at Montefiore Hospital. The doctor looked at my vocal cords and grimaced. I had nodules, he said, that needed to be removed, an operation that would involve weeks of recovery.
“Come on, doc,” Kennedy said. “There must be something you can do to get him onstage tomorrow night.”
The doctor nodded. “There is—but it’s very risky.”
“Just do it!” Kennedy said.
The night of the opening, the doctor came to BAM and sprayed my vocal cords with ether. At intermission, he did it again. The ether was a quick fix that brought down the swelling, allowing me to sing. It did nothing to reduce the nodules that had caused the swelling in the first place. By singing, I was actually aggravating them. In other words, I was further damaging my vocal cords for Jay Richard Kennedy and his fancy friends. And once again, as in Almanac, I wasn’t miked. BAM is a big place; to be heard over the orchestra, I had to push my voice as far as it would go.
All for nothing, as it turned out. For the first time in my career, the critics were unanimous in their lack of excitement. They threw a few respectful adjectives my way, but they hated Sing, Man, Sing. Kennedy’s hope had been to go from BAM to Broadway, but after a few performances, I shut down the show, unleashing a wrath from Kennedy that not only startled me but forced me to review, with real concern, exactly where my life was going—starting with whether to keep Kennedy as my manager. With my laryngitis now much worse, I had to cancel my return engagement at the Waldorf, and instead, in the first week of June 1956, go back to Montefiore Hospital, this time for an operation to remove the nodules. As I lay recovering in a hospital bed, I knew my faith in Kennedy had been shaken. But how could I fire my surrogate father—and, if I did that, my surrogate mother, too?
I made a quick recovery—so quick that I was able to keep a June 28 concert date at Lewisohn Stadium, Harlem’s huge colonnaded amphitheater, where everyone from Jack Benny to Woody Guthrie to Ella Fitzgerald had performed. The stadium—sadly gone now—was on a hill, surrounded by high-rise apartments, and when I looked out over the sellout crowd, I saw thousands more listening from their apartment windows, and every rooftop lined with people. Lewisohn had twenty-seven thousand seats, but when the standing-room-only tickets were added to the total, I broke the stadium’s thirty-nine-year attendance record that night. It was the largest audience I’d ever played to, and with my voice back in form, I sang my heart out for that amazing crowd, relieved that for now I was back at the top of my game.
Following the pattern set by the previous year, I went on to perform at the Greek Theatre in L.A. in early July, the Riviera in Vegas, the Palmer House in Chicago, then back to New York at the Waldorf in September. My show, with nearly all new numbers, was called A Night with Belafonte. Two or three weeks at each venue, sellout crowds every night—even now, I remember just how exhilarating it was to get that acclaim night after night, to stand on those stages doing exactly what I wanted to do, two hours a show, then to walk off light-headed, the applause still ringing in my ears, so drenched in sweat that I’d have lost at least two or three pounds and be ravenously hungry. Usually now, Julie would be waiting backstage for me, and we’d go for a late dinner, staying up until my adrenaline dissipated. Over vodka on the rocks, our usual libation, we’d titillate each other with talk of marriage; the next day, Marguerite and I would discuss, in awkward, long-distance phone calls, the sorry, mundane details of divorce.
I was rarely home now. My tours were profitable—enormously so—but Marguerite knew I took as many bookings as I did to stay on the road as long as possible. The price I paid was not seeing my daughters. When Adrienne and Shari took the phone in those long-distance calls, I tried my best to sound upbeat, not to let my guilt and sorrow show until I’d said good night. When I did get ho
me, I showered them with gifts and took them everywhere—Broadway musicals, fancy restaurants—knowing that this probably only further confused them. But I couldn’t stop myself. If I loved them enough in these brief interludes, I felt, perhaps it would all balance out. Marguerite looked on with pursed lips, knowing on two levels how inadequate my efforts were—both as a mother and as a child psychologist. In the master bedroom of our East Elmhurst house, we stayed on our respective sides of the bed, talking quietly about the children until we fell asleep. Though it made me feel even guiltier, I couldn’t wait to get back on the road again.
With all these concert dates, and all that applause, I felt sure I’d peaked. But then my third album, Calypso, became a phenomenon, an album, truly, for the history books: the first ever to sell a million copies.
Back when I’d begun to conceive my next album, no one at RCA Victor, starting with my producer, Henri René, had wanted to devote a whole album to Caribbean island songs. I did. RCA’s executives worried that this kind of album would be too ethnic, too black, too out of the mainstream. I myself didn’t want to be typecast as a calypso singer. I recognized that calypso was only one Caribbean style among many, and I told René that only a few of the album’s songs would be actual calypso. Others would be, more broadly, mento music, from the hills of Jamaica, where men carved holes in wooden boxes and attached three or four pieces of flexible metal to them, each piece making its own note when played. Still others would be more akin to folk songs. The RCA executives were still wary, but by the time they were ready to release the album seven or eight months later, they sensed the coming trend. They had gone so far as to insist that it be called Calypso, over my objections. I didn’t object for very long.
On my first two albums, I’d modified and updated existing folk songs. On Calypso, I went further. Bill Attaway, my good friend, former Sage partner, and resident musicologist, became one of my two co-writers for the album. He, in turn, told me about Lord Burgess. “You’ve got to meet this guy,” Bill told me. “He’s the black Alan Lomax—a walking library of songs from the islands.”
Calypso had more than its share of newly minted royalty: kings and queens, dukes and duchesses, not to mention lords. Nearly all those titles were conferred by popular acclaim at an annual calypso contest in Trinidad. Lord Burgess was an exception: Irving Louis Burgie, born in Brooklyn to a half–West Indian family, had anointed himself. He might not have found many loyal subjects in Trinidad, but up north, no one questioned his title. It said a lot about him; he knew the culture but took a lot of liberties with it. He’d compiled all the Caribbean songs he could find—from all the islands—and had often modified the lyrics or written a new musical bridge so he could copyright them as his own. I was taking liberties with the songs myself, putting little spins on them that made them work better for my vocal range and stage act. Neither Burgess nor I was doing anything illegal in this, because the songs weren’t copyrighted. Later, when my co-authors and I were forced to contest various lawsuits, we won them all. It was our interpretation of those songs that gave them value and helped make calypso internationally known, our lawyers successfully argued. Still, I would come to feel guilty about that. If there was no author of record to credit or pay, we might still have passed along a slice of our profits—somehow—to the islands whose cultures had generated those songs. The truth was, we never did. My only excuse is that no one else did, either, until Pete Seeger started the practice. I’ve since tried to follow his worthy example.
Soon the three of us—Attaway, Burgess, and I—were working intensely together and having a lot of fun. One of the first songs we worked up for the Calypso album was “Jamaica Farewell,” a Lord Burgess retread of a traditional island song called “Ironbar.” It would become one of my best-known, most-loved songs. Another island favorite we picked up on was “Hill and Gully Rider,” better known as the “Banana Boat Song.”
I’d started my next run at the Waldorf’s Empire Room, and the hotel now gave me a suite whenever I played there, so it was there that Lord Burgess and Bill Attaway started bouncing new lyric ideas off each other for this old favorite. The story line in all versions was the same: After a night spent loading bananas onto boats for export, the tired farmers singing the song saw daylight breaking and wanted to go home. The “Banana Boat Song” was how islanders knew it. One version recorded not long before had been called “Day De Light,” another went by “Day Dah Light.” The island slang “Day-o” appeared in the lyrics of one version or another, but it was buried—a throwaway line. I came up with the idea of starting our version with a dramatic a cappella “Day-o” that resonated. Like the opening lyric of “Jerry,” it grabbed the listener and didn’t let him go.
We called our version “Day-O,” and made it the album’s opening track, but none of us had any idea, when we recorded it, that it would be spun off as a single, much less rocket up the charts. The fact was that after I had pushed RCA into using only Caribbean songs, we found ourselves one or two songs short, so we threw in “Day-O” as filler. Still needing a track after that, we did a retread of it as “Star-O.” We felt sure that our single, if we had one, would be “Matilda” or “Jamaica Farewell.”
As the album started coming together, I made a first move toward taking control of my own material. Pete Kameron, the former Weavers manager who’d given me such life-changing advice after that first Vegas show at the Thunderbird, put the idea in my head. As long as I was writing, or rewriting, these songs, Pete suggested, why not publish them?
Publishing fees, Pete explained, could be the quiet big money on a solid, long-standing hit song, and there was no reason some stodgy publishing company had to get that money just for doing the paperwork. I could do it myself. So I did. It was less about money than control, because in fact I signed away 100 percent of any publishing revenues on Calypso to Attaway and Burgess. All I wanted was to share title credit with them, I said, to show I’d helped create the songs. My expectation was that I’d get royalties when the album sold, perhaps not insignificant sums. I’d also be getting paid by clubs around the country to perform these songs, perhaps for many years to come. So giving them the publishing fees just gave them their own skin in the game. I was happy to share the wealth, if it came. I was even happier to set up what certainly had to be one of the first—if not the first—all-black music-publishing companies.
This business thing—I liked it! I liked being responsible for rising or falling by my own decisions. I also liked working with black professionals who understood where I came from and what I was trying to do. When I’d started out, there were no black agents or managers, no major black club owners. There were still hardly any, and certainly none in the movie business. No black movie executives, no black entertainment lawyers, no black screenwriters. The whole entertainment hierarchy was predominantly Jewish. I’d been represented by a lot of smart people—I had more Jews in my life than some Jews—but none truly understood the black experience. So now I created Belafonte Enterprises, Inc., and rented office space at 157 West Fifty-seventh Street, right across from Carnegie Hall. The music-publishing company became one subsidiary of BEI. For film projects, I formed HarBel Productions, both to scout for good scripts and to pitch them to the studios, not just as some supplicant on bended knee, but as a business—a black business—coming at them on their own level. Another arm of the company handled my concert tours. Yet another backed Broadway plays, among them, thanks to producer Phil Rose, Lorraine Hansberry’s great A Raisin in the Sun.
All this black corporatizing stirred mixed reactions in the entertainment world. I was described as arrogant; often when I left a meeting, some friend who remained would tell me that as soon as the door closed, a white executive would mutter, “Who does that nigger think he is?” Even among whites in the industry who never used the N-word, the whole concept of BEI rankled. Black people weren’t supposed to make contract demands. They were supposed to be grateful for what they got. But even among the naysayers, BEI commanded re
spect—and for me, respect was what it was all about. It was the moral mission.
RCA Victor planned to release Calypso toward the end of 1956, after Belafonte had had its run. But old conventions were falling away; Elvis Presley’s debut was doing so well that RCA had decided to bring out his second album sooner rather than later. So why not do the same with me?
I left the timing to RCA. But not the cover. The first mock-ups I saw had me with a big bunch of bananas superimposed on my head. I looked like Carmen Miranda in drag, only in bare feet, with a big toothy grin, as if I were saying, “Come to dee islands!” I nixed that one, and two or three others that similarly engaged in racial stereotyping. The one I approved had no props at all: just me in a green shirt on a red backdrop. RCA’s marketers were chagrined. But not for long.
By July 14, 1956, Calypso had risen to number three on the Billboard album chart, just behind Elvis. On September 8, it hit the number one spot—and kept hitting it, off and on, for thirty-one weeks. No album had done that before.
But there was more: Calypso stayed on the Billboard chart, usually in one of the upper slots and then fading ever so slowly, for ninety-nine weeks. Not until Michael Jackson’s Thriller would an album stay longer on the charts. I could hardly begrudge him. Not only was Michael supremely talented, he had a good and generous heart. When I asked him, not long after Thriller, to help in an effort I had in mind for African famine victims, he did a lot more than lend his name and write a check. He co-authored “We Are the World.”
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