The power of a banana

If Harry Belafonte is still best known for his hit Day-O, that's fine with him. It gave him a platform for activism and a groundbreaking career.

By GINA VIVINETTO, Times Pop Music Critic
© St. Petersburg Times
published January 14, 2003

[AP photo] Harry Belafonte

Harry Belafonte, the "King of Calypso," has been delighting fans for five decades with his music, movies and television work. Belafonte brings his hits Day-O (The Banana Boat Song), Matilda and Jump in Line (Shake Shake, Senora) to Ruth Eckerd Hall tonight and to Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall in Sarasota on Thursday.

A groundbreaking entertainer, Belafonte in 1960 was the first black person to win an Emmy (for Tonight With Harry Belafonte). He has been active in many causes, marching for civil rights in the 1960s with his good friend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., speaking out against apartheid in South Africa -- Belafonte was a prime mover behind the USA for Africa benefit -- and garnering countless awards and distinctions from the NAACP, the Peace Corps, even a Nelson Mandela Courage Award.

Recently, Belafonte came under fire for comments he made during a San Diego radio interview comparing Secretary of State Colin Powell to a plantation "house slave," out to please his master, President Bush.

He also blasted Powell and Bush for not attending the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in South Africa last year -- "It was a dark page on our foreign policy" -- and compared the "manipulative" tactics of Attorney General John Ashcroft to those used during the McCarthy era.

In a lengthy telephone interview from his home in New York, Belafonte discussed his career, his political views and how the two are entwined.

Question: Do you regret what you said about Colin Powell?

Answer: Absolutely not.

Q. On Larry King Live, you were able to put your position into better context. You quoted from King Lear: " 'Tis the time's plague when mad men lead the blind." What did you mean?

A. The quote is really quite self-evident: When men who attain power become so enamored of their power that they become blind to greater and richer truths, it leads them sometimes to make decisions grounded more in arrogance than in thoughts of decency and intellect.

I think the option of war is the least of all the considerations that anyone should be holding, especially in the world as it is today. It's less than ingenuous that we define terrorists as we define them, narrowing very considerably the frame of reference that we have for where terrorism comes from. It's easy to say that it's the insanities of Saddam Hussein and (Osama) bin Laden that have us where we are and completely ignore the much more profound and the much larger picture that terrorism comes out of terrorism and that poverty is terrorism. Ignorance is terrorism.

When you have a society that extracts much of its wealth and its power from the lives and the existence of those who live in terror of poverty and the terror of ignorance, then we are not telling the truth or the whole truth as to what causes terrorism.

Q. Are you surprised at the reaction of people who blasted you for being critical of your government during a time of crisis?

A. Speaking against the government and speaking out against oppression has never been popular. It wasn't popular when we spoke against apartheid in South Africa and America's role in it. It wasn't very popular when we spoke out against the war in Vietnam. It wasn't very popular when we spoke up for civil rights. It wasn't very popular when we spoke against slavery.

Truth is not commanded by consensus. Truth stands as its own essence. It was Roosevelt who once said when the state moves into a place of villainy, it is the right and the responsibilities of citizens to speak out, and if we do not speak out, we should be charged with patriotic treason.

Q. If you were an ordinary citizen --

A. I am an ordinary citizen.

Q. Yes, but as someone who lives in the public eye, do you feel more of an obligation to make your truths heard?

A. I don't think I have more of an obligation. I think I have more opportunity.

Q. That celebrity has afforded you?

A. Yes.

Q. Why have you not run for political office?

A. Because I think my platform is sufficient. Whether people agree with me or not, the one thing they don't challenge is the integrity of it. I think once you become part of the political mechanism in this country, you become a party player and you have to run according to the platform and according to what the party says you have to and cannot do. You become somewhat suspect.

Q. You were very critical of the United States not attending the U.N. World Conference Against Racism.

A. That's how all this started. When I was at that conference, the expectations were very high that Colin Powell would be there. First of all, he is the secretary of state; it is an international platform. More importantly, South Africa, the newest democracy among our satellites of democracies, and a place where they are struggling very hard in the name of Mandela to put the right foot forward to make that democracy work, has brought to the table a nonviolent resolve to a very violent history. There was no civil war. I think what South Africa achieved was of remarkable, remarkable consequence. And here it was saying to the world, we not only invite you, but we pay for the environment to discuss an issue that is plaguing the entire planet, the issue of race.

Here we were, with tens of thousands of people coming together for this great debate, and we (the United States) took this rather arrogant and dismissive attitude.

Q. Ready to switch gears here? Let's discuss your work in entertainment.

A. Now you're talking!

Q. There are so many articles about you that mention your humanitarian and artistic endeavors. Inevitably, most of them begin or end with a line like, "Harry Belafonte is best known for his hit Day-O (The Banana Boat Song). Does that annoy you?

A. No. No. As a matter of fact, it delights me no end. Because, like I have occasion to say so often now, many have made the mistake, but I will hasten to tell you, "Never underestimate the power of a banana" (laughs).

Q. Okay, Beetlejuice: That film is a celebration of your music, even ending with its star Winona Ryder channeling you, singing Jumpin' the Line. How did you feel when you saw that?

A. It delighted me. There are four songs of mine in the film. When I started as an artist, one of the things I very much wanted to do was use the platform I had come up on -- you know, I fancied myself a folk singer -- and using songs that came out of the folk archives of the world.

If you look at my body of work, you'll see that I've sang songs from the chain gang, from the rural South. I've done songs from Greece and Africa. I wanted to use my platform to show the remarkable diversity of culture that exists in our world.

Q. That film introduced a new generation to songs from the Caribbean. And, at that time, (director) Tim Burton's fan base included a lot of teenage punk rockers, such as myself, who then investigated this man, Harry Belafonte.

A. Yes. I'm delighted by your observation. With my records, at first, there was some resistance from administrators of the record label and the marketers and the guys who had to do PR work. They said, "Well, nobody's interested in that kind of stuff."

This is what happened with the (1956) album Calypso, in which Day-O (The Banana Boat Song) and Matilda and Jamaica Farewell and a host of songs sat. When I finished the album, they didn't quite know what to do with it. When they finally released it, it turned out to be the first album in the history of the music business to ever sell 1-million copies within a year. It became the first gold record. What I liked and delighted in is that one of my mentors said to me, "Harry, get them -- meaning the world, the audience -- get them to sing your song and they will want to know who you are."

I woke up one day and the whole world was saying Day-O. Once they began to sing my song, they wanted to know where it came from and who I was. Once they got into that, they began to find history, and they found geography far more dimensional than anyone suspected.

When I look at the world today, at singers like Youssou N' Dour and people who come out of Africa and have such a huge influence on Peter Gabriel and the stuff we do here, I just say, "Hey, it's great to be a pioneer."

Q. You were the first black person to win an Emmy. Watching television now, how do you feel the black experience is portrayed? Have we progressed? Are you frustrated by what you see? Encouraged?

A. All of the above. I saw moments when we had great breakthroughs. I saw moments when we had great promise. There is no question about the power of television. It is the single most powerful piece of technology people have ever had at their disposal. Especially for communication.

I firmly believe those who control what you know, and those who control what you hear, will control what you do. The technology has grown, but the content of life has been seriously diminished by the way television has been used. It has not opened up diversity to us. It has not given us deep insight into other cultures. It has not given us deep insight into the history of other people, so many of whom we are in conflict with and know so little about.

I've always thought that the misuse and abuse of that power has been much to our shame.

Q. Before you were famous, you ran a hamburger joint in Greenwich Village. Had stardom not happened, where would you be now?

A. I would have probably been chief executive officer of McDonald's (laughs heartily). First of all, my father and mother were cooks. I grew up in the kitchen, and I still cook.

When I first started as a pop singer -- that's what I did at first -- my first backup band singing professionally was Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Max Roach, Tommy Potter and a piano player by the name of Al Haig. For the first year, I sang with these guys at a place called the Royal Roost in 1948.

Q. Talk about spoiled!

A. Spoiled rotten! But I really understood then that that was not my voice, that being a pop singer wasn't for me. I had just gotten out of drama school. My classmates were Marlon Brando, Walter Matthau, Rod Steiger, Bea Arthur and Tony Curtis. Jazz was the big thing, and I hung around with a lot of jazz players. When I ended school, I couldn't get any work in the theater because of the racial thing, so I turned to singing as a second choice. I opened this restaurant in Greenwich Village with a little money I had saved, thinking I could maybe get a fast food joint going, make a living while I continued to pursue my interests in theater. It was while I was in that environment that I went to a place called the Village Vanguard and discovered Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, all those people from the folk culture and the labor movement. I said, "Oh my god, this is where I belong." I always say, "Hamburgers helped me become who I am."

AT A GLANCE

Harry Belafonte performs at 8 tonight at Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater. Tickets are $40-$50; call (727) 791-7400. He will appear at 8 p.m. Thursday at Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall in Sarasota. Tickets are $45-$55; call toll-free 1-800-826-9303.

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