Vale: Harry Belafonte

Trailblazing US performer and rights activist Harry Belafonte, often dubbed the King Of Calypso, has died aged 96.

He died of congestive heart failure, at home in Manhattan said his spokesman Ken Sunshine.

Born in Harlem, New York, in 1927, he scored hits with Island In The Sun, Mary’s Boy Child and the UK number one Day-O (The Banana Boat Song).

A high school drop out, he joined the Navy during the Second World War, working as a munitions loader at a base in New Jersey.

After the war, he pursued his dream of becoming an actor, studying drama alongside the likes of Marlon Brando, Walter Matthau and Tony Curtis.

He paid for the classes by singing at New York clubs, where he was backed by groups that included Miles Davis and Charlie Parker.

That led to a recording contract and, in a search for material, Belafonte began to study the folk song archives at the US Library of Congress. He sparked a fad for the genre with songs like Jamaica Farewell and Day-O (a song about Caribbean dock workers). His third album, Calypso, topped the Billboard charts in 1956 and was said to be the first album by a solo artist to sell more than a million copies in the US.

His success was such that he was the first black person allowed to perform in many upmarket US venues – including some that had been off-limits to artists like Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. Over his career, he recorded more than 30 albums, including collaborative records with Nana Mouskouri, Lena Horne, and Miriam Makeba.

His first lead role in film was Island in the Sun, where he starred alongside James Mason, Joan Fontaine and Joan Collins, with whom he had an affair. Other films included Carmen Jones, Odds Against Tomorrow, The World the Flesh and the Devil, Bobby and BlaKkKlansmen. He was also the first black Emmy winner.

But his greatest achievements were as a campaigner for black civil rights.

A close friend of Martin Luther King, he was a visible supporter of the civil rights movement, who bankrolled several anti-segregation organisations and bailed Dr King and other activists out of jail.

For a whole week in 1968 Johnny Carson handed over the reins of The Tonight Show to the multi-talented Belafonte. Guests included Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Petula Clark, Dionne Warwick and Freda Payne.

He also campaigned against poverty, apartheid and AIDS in Africa; and became an ambassador for Unicef, the United Nations children’s fund.

In 1985, he helped organised the charity single We Are the World, an all-star musical collaboration that raised money for famine relief in Ethiopia.

“A lot of people say to me, ‘When as an artist did you decide to become an activist?'” Belafonte said in a National Public Radio interview in 2011. “I say to them, ‘I was long an activist before I became an artist.'”

Source: BBC