Ay, Calypso

My father was not socially conscious.  He was a pretty straight guy.  He was hardly what anyone would call "cool," having grown up in the fifties virtually oblivious to rock and roll.  Having been strictly raised Catholic in the days before the Second Vatican Council, he must have found Chuck Berry completely alien.  But he was a huge fan of one performer who, while not a rock and roller, was, as the son of Caribbean immigrants who incorporated calypso and rhythm and blues into his music and whose acting ability and good looks made him one of the first major black stars in Hollywood, was hip by definition.  My father was a huge fan of Harry Belafonte.

My father had pretty much every album from Belafonte, who died this week at 96, made in the late fifties and early sixties and he incessantly played them well into the late seventies, the records still without a scratch in them.  Belafonte was a truly impressive and energetic singer, and he was a classy showman.  But for all the good taste in music my father developed when he went to St. Benedict's Preparatory School in Newark, New Jersey, he only appreciated the musical aspects of Belafonte's career and not the social ones.  My father was mostly an Eisenhower Republican who couldn't make heads or tails out of the civil rights movement or the counterculture, and do he did not share Belafonte's politics or social activism.  Belafonte was always there like Tom Joad, marching for civil rights in Washington, speaking out against the Vietnam War, featuring Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy as a guest host for Johnny Carson on "The Tonight Show" (mere months before their assassinations), and appearing on the Smothers Brothers' variety show to sing "Don't Stop the Carnival" ot images of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago (the meaning of the juxtaposition of which was clear enough to get it cut from the broadcast, though it would be shown decades later).  Belafonte didn't just sing, like his contemporaries did.  Belafonte had something to say.

Belafonte would continue his activism well into the turn to the right in this country, supporting anti-apartheid measures against South Africa and spearheading famine relief for Ethiopia.  (Although Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson get the credit for USA For Africa by writing "We Are the World," they just wtoe the song; it was Belafonte who organized  that united support of artists.) And he was one of the first people to brand George Walker Bush a terrorist for starting a war in Iraq at a time when most people supported that military misadventure.  Even in his later years he was ahead of his time.  The same held true for popular culture; he co-produced the 1984 hip-hop movie Beat Street at a time when Culture Club and Duran Duran dominated the pop charts and the biggest movies of the year included Ghostbusters.  He never stopped speaking out for what was right and promoting what was important to him, and he carried that social and political conscience right up to the end of his life.

Harry Belafonte - singer, actor, humanitarian, political activist . . . 

. . . and also a cat lover.

RIP.