Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey-o, 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,

if you ask me.

Did you say, hey-o?

I did.

Very nice.

I got to freshen it up here or there sometimes.

It's starting to get a little stale.

No.

You don't think so?

No.

I mean, you can freshen it up,

but it's not stale.

Okay.

All right.

Okay, I like that.

If you have any ideas to freshen it up ever,

you know, lay them on me.

All right.

Thank you. nutsdale okay all right okay i like that if you have any ideas to freshen it up ever you know lay them on me all right uh let's see we're coming up on year 17 just want to point that out yeah what is it in april yeah pretty cool yeah uh and uh today also we are talking about harry belafonte and uh part of why, but not the full reason why, because this is he was a perennial man, a man of all seasons.
But it's Black History Month. So we want to profile him at least in part for Black History Month.
Yeah. And he's awesome.
And, you know, I watched that We Are the World documentary not too long ago. Oh, yeah.
Is it good? Yeah, it's really good. I think you would enjoy it.
Okay. I probably would then.
Yeah. If you think I would.
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.

Oh, yeah, I can imagine. He's just the coolest, and he tells really great story.
He's a great storyteller and funny. And I was like, man, Lionel Richie is awesome and fun.
That's pretty cool, man. Yeah.
Yeah, there's a rumor that seems fairly substantiated that he's Kylie Jenner's real father. Oh, really? there's a lot of a lot of swinging going on out in that neighborhood back in the day i don't know what kylie jenner looks like uh does she look like is it sort of like um uh frank sinatra's son uh ronan pharaoh uh no nothing like that and actually i'm not sure any living human knows exactly what Kylie Jenner looks like.
So who's to say? Well, let's talk about Harry B. then, the guy.
I love this guy. Yeah.
So Harry Belafonte, I was trying to figure out how we can name this, and we might just say Harry Belafonte or something like that. But we could also say the thinking person saint.
Yeah, that's good. The real deal.

Yeah.

Or a genuinely great person.

Yeah.

Entertainer slash activist.

Yeah.

Like he he did it all.

He was just one of these people who, you know, when you 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 like garbage. Right.
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 there based on his 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. 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 damned. Let's kick the whole thing off, right? Because for those of you who don't know, we should probably say Harry Belafonte is a legendary entertainer.
That's what he's most widely known for. And most widely known for the song Deo, which is why I said, hey, oh, come full circle now.
The banana boat song. Yeah.
And if you don't know what we're talking about, still just pause this, go onto YouTube, type in Deo, 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.
Yeah. You know, actor, stage performer, Broadway star, EGOT winner.
Yeah. If you don't know an EGOT, that's if you have won the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony in your lifetime, which Mr.
Belafonte did. It's a rare feat indeed.
But he was born to, you know, a very humble upbringing in March of 1927. Harold George Belafonte Jr.
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, Melveen, 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 in my hometown in Jamaica.
And so from the ages of eight to what, like 12-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.
Yeah. And he was raised by his grandmother there.
His maternal grandmother, Melveen'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. They were just black doctors and black lawyers and et cetera.
And it really kind of served as a foil to him, uh, to how, how things were back in America. Right.
Which was very discriminatory at the time. Uh, he was smack dab in the middle of the Jim Crow era in the United States.
Yeah. So, um, he hears this music this music down there, the sort of call and response work songs that, I mean, that's where the song, should we talk about Deo 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 like did any research, you wonder what the heck is he singing about? Right. You know, come Mr.
Tallyman, tally me banana, daylight comes and we want to go home. Yeah.
It's it's it was a work song and it was a call and 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 tallyman, the person who counted the bananas, tallied that they had enough bananas to, you know, tally the end of their workday.
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 5 million tons of bananas, here's your $50 or whatever.
Then you could go home. I had no idea that's what that song was about.
Yeah, I mean, I didn't know what a tally man was, but it makes perfect sense as someone who tallies. Exactly.
And I love that song even more now, and it just really kind of buttoned some stuff up because up 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 were you 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 Cocktooth Twins or 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.

Yeah, pretty cool.

So he ends up back in Harlem, though, supposedly had dyslexia.

So he wasn't a great student.

So at 17 years old, he quit school. He joined the Navy in 1944.
And this was another sort of eye-opening experience because he served in World War II in an all-black unit. And at first 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 on to a lot of stuff that kind of laid the groundwork for what would be his social awareness and activism. Yeah, they turned him on to books like The Soul of Black Folk, The Souls of Black Folk by W.B.
Du Bois. And like that combined with his early upbringing, where he was able to juxtapose 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 Bird, he was radicalized at this point. I saw it described as like he was full on like civil rights movement guy.
And this is the 40s. So this is before the civil rights movement had really kind of started in earnest, at least the version that we think of when we think of it.

Right. And this is the 40s.
So this is before the civil rights movement had really kind of started in earnest, at least the version that 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 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. 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 with her was his first two kids. Yeah.
He had two daughters with Marguerite, Adrienne and of course, Sherry, who went on to become a successful actor herself and then served his time in the Navy. They eventually lived in Harlem, you know, as a family.
And he worked as a janitor's assistant at an apartment building. And that's when another sort of monumental moment in his life happened.
He fixed the blinds in someone's apartment, an attendant's apartment there. And just as a thank you, they gave him, they gifted him 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 is an understatement.
He immediately tried to get a job there, applied to be a stagehand 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 these two incredible, talented performers, you know, get jobs as like stagehands and janitors at this theater when they were just in their, I guess, early 20s. 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 stagehands, they loved the theater so much that they would pool 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 second act or whatever.

Amazing.

Yeah, I mean, 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.

Oh, if you just go to one act and split it with your friend. Right.

All right. He also enrolled in a legendary acting workshop that was held at the New School for years.
Some of his classmates were Walter Matthau. Have you seen, did you see the documentary Sing Your Song about him? Not Walter Matthau, but about Belafonte? I didn't know Matthau was a singer.
No, I didn't see that yet. It's good.
I'm going to. It's good, but they show some stills from that workshop, and there's young Walter Matthau.
He looks like some doofy 20-year-old Walter Matthau. It's pretty great.
Except he looked 50. Yeah, pretty much already, yeah.
But he has a cowlick, and he's wearing a heavy flannel shirt, like he just walked out of the woods of Minnesota or something. I love it.
He was also in class with Tony Curtis, Marlon Brando, and then the future Dorothy Petrillos Bornak, also known as Bea Arthur. Oh, then there's Maude.
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.
Yeah, and I'm sure Belafonte was like, this Brando guy's got some promise. Yeah, they actually became pretty good friends.
Yeah, Brando's. He's worth an episode at some point, to say the least.
I think we could do just one episode on Don Juan DeMarco. Right.
So Harry Belafonte's in the new school. He's, 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 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. So he went to jazz clubs like the, you know, the legendary Blue Note would sing jazz standards on stage.
And then in the 1940s, 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 early 1940s in Greenwich Village, which would eventually culminate in sort of the peak of that movement in the mid-60s with people like Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan.
It all started in the early 1940s with people like Harry Belafonte going to the Village Vanguard, this legendary folk music club, and seeing Lead Belly perform and was like, all right, well, now we're on to something here. It's all happening and I'm right in the epicenter of it.
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's like, nah meh let me go on to folk music and he got so heavy into folk music that he spent his time researching folk songs 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 would research for an hour and then they trade off and do the next hour.
And that means you're really into folk music. That's how we do our research, right? That's right.
We 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 Robeson.
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, 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 the Calypso folk music of the Caribbean, you know, going back to his roots.
Right. And we'll get 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 his movements and sometimes props and stuff on the stage to kind of tell the story that 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 onto 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 1953. And he did such a good job that his first time out, he wins a Tony.
Not only does he win a Tony, he's the first black man to win a Tony. Yeah, 1954, best featured actor in a musical.
And not only that, but around the same time in 53, 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.
So he's 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. Yeah.
And this is the early 50s. That's right.
Let's take a little break and we'll come back and talk a little more about his Calypso stuff. 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.

We will.

Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles.

Stuff you should know. We were getting where we couldn't pay the bill.
PG&E asked customers about their biggest concerns so we could address them one by one. That's terrifying.
That's fair. Joe, Regional Vice President, PG&E.
We have to run the business in a way that keeps people safe, but it starts driving costs down. I would love to see that.
We're on our way. I hope so.
PG&E electricity rates are now lower than they were last year. Hear what other customers have to say and what PG&E is doing about it at pge.com slash open dash lines.
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and continues to impact the lives of millions of people now playing only in theaters. Okay, Chuck, so we're talking Calypso now.
It's 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 folk songs, work songs.

Call and response is a big one.

So the people in the chorus singing, daylight come and me want to go home.

That's like the response where Harry Belafonte 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, starts singing some of this folk, like Caribbean folk music. And within a couple of years, he's on an NBC show doing the same thing.
And Dave helped us out with this. 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 Burgey, Irving Burgey, who was also a Caribbean American who was raised in New York, also being 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 Belafonte's named William Attaway, working together, rewriting some of these traditional songs, rearranging them to make them peppier, a little poppier. Like they made Calypso like they just they made it way more palatable to Americans and way more dancing and just way more infectious than other people who'd recorded some of these same songs previously had.
Yeah. And, you know, Banana Boat was a cover song.
It's an old school song that had been around since the turn of the 20th 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 he even admired and worked with that often didn't love him back as much. Calypso was one of them, some traditional Calypso purists, apparently, especially like in Trinidad, where Calypso was born, were like, hey, this guy's coming in.
He's in New York. He's not a real Calypso-nian.
And, you know, he's kind of changing it up adding like american folk um sort of interest to it and he was like you know what he i think in 1959 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 which may have been the first song or which must have been the first song uh and i think at which time tukuk Tuk, a tear rolled down his cheek. And he went back to the fire.
He said, that was my number one song. 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 Calypso folk music.
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 folk music. 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.

His 1956 album, Calypso, came out after that TV special.

It was a huge, huge hit.

It stayed number one for 38 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.

Yes, that was just in the U.S. alone.

It did the same thing in the U.K.

And Chuck, one of the songs on this album was Deo, right? Yeah. Deo itself sold a million copies just to the 45.
So just the single, right? I can see just the single selling a million copies and then the album suffering because 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 38 weeks. Not on the charts for 38 weeks.
The number one album in the United States for the better half of a year. No one does that.
That's crazy. 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 when he performed in Vegas because of segregation. When he was touring the South with a Broadway show Almanac, a state trooper threatened to shoot him in a whites-only bathroom.
In L.A., 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 was living in. Even one of the biggest stars in the world was not immune to the just blatant racism that was going on.
Yes, absolutely. That didn't stop him, though.
It didn't discourage him. 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 his career went, which we'll talk about a little more in a second.

But he took a role called a movie called Island of the Sun. It's from 1957.
And in it, he has an insinuated romance with a white woman, Joan Fontaine. And they don't touch, 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 was.
Not close to a kiss. No, but it was so groundbreaking that the South Carolina legislature introduced a bill.
I don't know if they passed it that would fine 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 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.
Yeah, for sure. In real life, IRL, he married his second wife around the same time.
Her name was 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. For sure.
She was also Brando's girlfriend when they met. Look out, Marlon.
Harry Villafonte, pretty handsome guy. 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. OK.
Yeah. 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. Yeah.
I mean, he was offered and that's 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 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 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. 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. Yeah, exactly.
But certainly professional rivals, because almost invariably the roles that Belafani 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 60s, these films were written to advance the cause of Black civil rights in the United States.
And Sidney Poitier 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, Belafine was like, there's just, it's still missing some stuff.
And like Lilies of the Field is a good example. It's from 1963.
It starred Sidney Poitier. He 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 Belafonte 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 Louis Gates Jr. in 1996 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 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 Belafine was 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 what how willing they were to portray black people in that film. Yeah.
Highly principled decision making career wise. Yes, that's very tough to do, period.
But very tough to do trying to make it in a cutthroat business like Hollywood, you know, for sure, man. So in 56, 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 Jr., 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 Belafonte to really, 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 Poitier were smuggling cash, 70 grand into Mississippi during the Freedom Rides.
And, you know, with the Freedom Schools, I think we did a whole upset on 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 in deep doing the hard work.
Yeah, he looked out for MLK's family during MLK's life, but also he funded his children's education. He took out a huge life insurance policy against MLK.
And then he just was there for the family afterward. Like he kind of stepped in when MLK was assassinated.
So he certainly walked the walk. He was at all these, you know, sit-ins and rallies and marches.
And he just was there. 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, not only just wherever you see injustice in the world, 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 unjust and right in your face for an american a black american

particular day for injustice that you can go help. And, you know, there was nothing more unjust and right in your face for an American, a black American in particular at the time than the civil rights movement.
Yeah, absolutely. So 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 Tonight Show is a big example.
In 1968, 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 1968. You know, everything going on in 1968 seems fraught.
And race relations certainly were a part of that. And he wasn't like, all right, I'll go host the show and I'll get in and just kind of tried out the usual guests that Johnny might have.
He said, no, I'm going to have Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. and Aretha Franklin and Dionne Warwick and, you know, Paul Newman and Nipsey Russell and all these people who had these progressive causes 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 still fun and entertaining, but it was also educating people and talking about serious issues in these interviews.
Yes. So that was just huge.
I mean, also, you got to credit Johnny Carson, too. He did that on purpose.
He wasn't like, I'm going on vacation for a week. Just call whoever.
Like 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 belafani when he did something on tv it drew viewers and even still 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 black guy on this show. You better stop.
They'd go to the producers. The producers would come to Belafonte and be like, hey, you know how you have white people and black people dancing together? What if we just did white or just did black? Belafonte 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 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 started to throw more and more of his energy into being an activist, not just in the United States, but around the world. And in particular, Paul Robeson, 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 the plight of different countries in Africa, which was decolonizing at the time. And he really kind of turned his attention toward that continent for a while.
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 80s with apartheid in South Africa, Kenyan independence.
And, you know, I mentioned early on, we are the world, Ethiopia and the famines there. He was he was the guy that, you know, called up Quincy Jones and was like, hey, we need to we need to do something here.
And we are the world was a huge, huge hit that sold, I think, 20 million copies and raised 65 million bucks for fame and relief.

And if you were a kid in 1985, We Are the World was like that in Live Aid were two of the biggest deals in music history.

And, you know, I was 14 years old at the time and it was just like it was incredible to see all these people together.

And like even as a kid, even as a like little snot nose, 14-old white kid from the South, I knew that what I was watching was important. I didn't maybe fully understand it.
I had seen stuff about the famine on television, but it was raising awareness for everybody, including little white suburban kids from Georgia. Yeah, which is exactly part of the point in addition to raising money too.

Yeah.

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 Belafonte

is 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 28th, 1986.

I remember.

There was something like, do you remember that?

Oh, yeah.

Cool.

There was like 5,000 radio stations around the world, and they all played it at the same time, I think 10.50 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.

And Muzak actually played it as well.

And it was only the second time in the history of Muzak that they played voices over their service, which, by the way, at the time reached like 80 million Americans. So that's a lot of people listening to We Are the World at that same moment, which is neat.
That's right. Including just, I accounted for one of those.
I don't remember listening to it on the radio, but I do remember my family sitting around listening to the record. Yeah.
So funny. All right.
Maybe we should take our second break and come up and talk some more about Harry Belafonte. OK.
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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 80s and 90s when his activism was, I think, at its peak.
But he was still doing his thing. In 1960, he became the first black American to win an Emmy for Tonight with Belafonte, 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 Petula Clark holding his arm, a white woman holding his arm in a special that drove away some advertisers, which is just, you know, very sad, to say the least.

But he was still serving up this sort of Caribbean-tinged folk music to people.

CBS ordered five more episodes after Tonight with Belafonte 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. They said, no, no, no, no, you cannot do that.
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 70s because his buddy Sidney Poitier was like, hey, I want to start directing blaxploitation movies.

Let's do this. And they made Buck and the Preacher, which I have not seen.
I think it was from 1972. Everything I've read about it makes me want to see it basically immediately.
Sidney Poitier 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 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.
It's so hard, not just because of the horrible stuff he did, sexually assaulting women, but also because he was so preachy leading up to it. He was so holier than how.
And it makes the whole thing so much worse, if you ask me. Yeah.
I mean mean and this he was doing those things back then right to uh the cnn documentary that uh uh kamau bell did was very upsetting to see but the way he they did it i think i mentioned it before was um it was they were just sort of tracking his career and uh like and he was the biggest star and on tv at the time and this is 1960 something then it was like in a 1960 whatever he sexually assaulted this woman right and it was it was happening the whole time so I'm with you it's impossible to watch that stuff but you can watch Buck and the Preacher though right he's not in that that's right so hearing all this you're like wow har, wow, Harry Belafonte was a Superman and he never got in a bad mood and he never got tired and he was never frustrated. And it was just wine and roses all the time for Harry Belafonte.
And that is not the case. It was a serious fatigue on his life to do what he 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 1968, I think this is a little bit after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered.
He was, Belafonte was asked what it's like being such a prominent civil rights leader.

And he 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 as though I were a spokesman for my people. I hate marching and getting called at 3 a.m.
to bail some cats out of jail.

And this is just the toll that that takes on anybody, even like a Superman like Harry Belafonte. Yeah.
Also a human. Yeah.
But he had a really great inspiration in the form of Paul Robeson, who kind of guided things. You mentioned him before.
He was an idol of his and a real inspiration. He was the guy who sang Old Man River, among other things.
But he was a model for Harry Belafonte. Paul Robeson was running around the world.
He took his fame and he used it to highlight plights 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 U.S. and the USSR at the beginning of the Cold War, this guy was going back and forth trying to like create friendships 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 meat for the McCarthy trials and he got blacklisted, but he refused to be cowed.
He would not name names. He would not renounce his work.
He would not take back anything that they demanded he take back. And he really served as this model for Harry Belafonte.
Despite, I mean, Robeson 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 1950 to 1958.
Kind of hard to run around the world pre-internet. Phones are still relatively expensive to use.
Trying to organize peace when you can't travel outside of the U.S. 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 downtrodden and defeated, he had Paul Robeson to look to and be like, this guy, this guy went through even even even worse than me.
Yeah, for sure. Um, and it wasn't always, uh, a love affair with, within the black community with Harry Belafonte.
He, uh, he was criticized, um, at various times for marrying white women. Uh, he married two white women, uh, after splitting up with Julie Robinson in 2004, he married Pamela Frank in 2008.
Uh, he don't, he doesn't doesn't think, you know, he 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 1996 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 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 an integration cause.
Like I married who I fell in love with and they married me because they fell in love with me. Yeah, for sure.
Yeah. Yeah.
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, a no-nuke rally in the early 80s in Germany. He sought to broker peace between the Crips and the Bloods in L.A.
back in the late 80s. He protested the Iraq War in the early 2000s.
And then the cause that he kind of got behind toward the very end of his life was incarceration in general. He was, I think, the first performer to play Rikers Island.
James Brown famously did in 1972. Harry Belafonte did it a couple of 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 in that right before he died. It's just one more thing he did, you know.
Yeah. He passed away just a couple of years ago in April, April 25th of 2023 at 96.
So just a very full, long life and received lots of accolades during that lifetime. I mentioned the EGOT.
Part of that included the Oscar was the Gene Herschelt Humanitarian Award in 2014 and a Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 2000. You can add the Kennedy Center Honor in 1989 to that list and the National Medal of the Arts.
Oh, Billy Clinton gave him that one in 1994. And what else? In Harlem, he had a library named after him.
2017, near his childhood home, it was renamed the Harry Belafonte 115th Street Library. Yeah.
I also saw he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2022. 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 Rage Against the Machine and Public Enemy, they, quote, stand on his broad shoulders, which, I mean, that's absolutely true. Yeah.
And there are plenty of non quote unquote rock and roll bands in that hall of fame.

Sure.

But they were like, say something.

And then, you know, you did. And then you felt like a jackass.
Yeah. Like, is anyone going to really protest that? 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. Yeah, good stuff.
One more thing. We cannot not mention Beetlejuice, dude.
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 Jump in the Line, which I like more than the Banana Boat song.
I do, too. I love that song.
To great effect, I think Tim Burton apparently wasn't super keen. He didn't think it was funny enough.
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 an additional music video or something like in the movie. But they are one small part, or I guess a large part really, of what makes that movie so great were those two numbers.
Yeah. And the whole, I mean, the whole thing is just amazing.
But for some reason, Catherine O'Hara is just, you just see she is 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. Oh, that's funny.
Not funny. No, it's not funny at all, Chuck.
You're absolutely right. That's fun.
But apparently Harry Belafonte said that about a year after Beetlejuice, he became popular with kids. Apparently, Deo and Jump in the line, they both ended up on the Billboard 200 after Beetlejuice for a little while.
And he said that 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. Yeah, go listen to some of his stuff.
I've been listening to it for two days. Harry Belafonte and the Belafonte folk singers.
And some of it's maybe unusual to modern ears, but ears but it's like really good stuff 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 that's right did we mention he was handsome he was easy on the eyes not hard to look at no for sure he could really wear a shirt unbuttoned down to his navel, too, man. Oh, boy.
I never could get away with that one. I can't either.
All right. Well, that's Harry Belafonte, everybody.
R.I.P. Harry.
R.I.P. And if you want to know more about Harry Belafonte, like Chuck said, go look him up and start listening to him and watching some videos.
And in the meantime, I think that means it's time for listener mail.

This is just a little quickie. Hey, guys, I 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.

Pretty cool.

Boston does or Halifax does?

Boston sends, I don't know, Halifax sends Boston the tree, I guess.

Now the story is delightful.

Yeah, yeah, it is.

All the best from your neighbors in Canada. That is Matthias Dernford.
That's a great one. We should have done that as like a segment, but now we can't because everybody knows it.
Yeah. I mean, we did a whole episode on it, but this is a nice addendum.
Did you say Matthias or Matthias? Well, I mean, there's an H in there. I don't know if it's pronounced though.
Matthias. I said Matthias.
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 stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

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