HARRY BELAFONTE: THE GREAT EMISSARY!/ KEN MURRAY*

My first introduction to Harry was with his Live at Carnegie Hall album, which somehow came into my hands in the late 1950s. It wasn’t inevitable. I was weaned by the next-generation music of Alan Freed’s Rock and Roll shows, which was anathema to the sophistication of Carnegie Hall. But here in NYC, at least, those shows included many black rhythm and blues performers who would be poorly imitated by soulless but ambitious white singers who wanted to catch the wave outside of NY. Pat Boone singing Little Richard songs didn’t make it for any of us New Yorkers lucky enough to have been Alan Freed adherents. Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke, and Screaming Jay Hawkins were just a few of Freed’s frontmen. The house bands backing them were almost all NY club and studio musicians, who were heavily Afro-American with a sprinkle of Caribbean musicians–after all, the Calypso was huge in NY night clubs of the 1940s and the 1950s–as were many of the do-wop groups with their a capella masterpieces. These were my first influences.

The smooth, laid-back sounds of Harry Belafonte were entirely different. He seems to come to me through my mother’s generation of musical influences. She was a Sinatra, Bennett, etc. fan, and these were the kind of stars that made it to Carnegie Hall. Harry’s magnetic voice penetrated all genres and established an expansion of range that knew no boundaries. He wanted to share his songs with the entire audience and the world. Anyone who knew quality music gravitated toward him. Little wonder that Calypso found a space in the immaculate Carnegie Hall! And Harry Calypso’s album outsold Elves Presley and all the early rock ‘n’ roll aspirants. Perhaps Harry’s only regret may have been the King Of Calypso labeling of the LP during the year when the young Mighty Sparrow won the Calypso Crown in Trinidad and Tobago and Lord Melody was composing classics that Harry later covered.

If an earlier generation of Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Nat King Cole-major pioneers of their times–paved the way for Harry, Calypso provided his platform. Still, I did not come to these jazz giants until much later. In contrast, I grew up with Harry Belafonte, the ambassador who pulled me onto a cultural path of exploration that was nothing but rewarding.

My subsequent encounter with Harry after “Live at Carnegie Hall” was at the 1963 March on Washington. I don’t remember him speaking, but his presence on the stage brought a legitimacy of peace and integrity that was in bold contrast to the “bulldog mentality” of Southern repressors. Everything that day was a prelude to the “I Have A Dream Speech.” Harry’s presence there helped me validate my path, knowing I was where I wanted to be.

Familiarity with that smooth, gentle voice calmed my fears of the profound impact of Caribbean people on my birth borough of Brooklyn. In my Park Slope neighborhood, we first noticed the Puerto Rican diaspora. Yes, we knew they were US citizens, but their presence around Court Street, Brooklyn alarmed many of my neighbors. The loud, fast rhythms and foreign language seemed more defiant than inclusive. Yet, on the surface, Harry’s tunes appeared much more friendly, calm, and inviting.

It was the next generation of “Jamaicans,” Bob Marley’s generation, where the real estate of Brooklyn was turned upside down. I put quotes around Jamaicans because we didn’t appreciate the variety of cultures of the different Caribbean islands. Everybody with a Caribbean accent was Jamaican to us. Ludicrous now to think that we lumped Calypso the same as Reggae. It took a long time for native Brooklynites to appreciate the differences of every island.

When West Indians moved into areas around Eastern Parkway, there was some similar fear that the walls were closing in from the South, as they had from the North, when the previous generation had to “welcome” the Puerto Ricans on our Northern side. I don’t know neighbors who expected so many “friendly” West Indians to become neighbors. For example, the early route of the West Indian parade did not terminate at Grand Army Plaza. When the two or three hundred revelers reached Grand Army Plaza in the early days, they turned and followed the park’s northern side to reach Bartell Pritchett Square, in the heart of Park Slope. Most of my Irish neighbors expected the West Indian Parade to remain quaint. They never expected the Parade to displace the St. Patrick’s Day Parade as it drew millions of people. For over a Century, St Patrick had that honor that the West Indians now celebrate when their Parade terminates at Grand Army Plaza.

I was a guitar player during those years. Bob Dylan, Elvis, Peter, Paul and Mary, and the Beatles started me, but Peter Tosh, Bob Marley, Sparrow, and Shadow et al. invited me to new rhythms. I joined with two Jamaican musicians (bass and drums) to form the Leftovers, a group that explored the combination of West Indian roots rhythms with lyrical American Folk Music like the Police made famous some years later. While I thought of the Leftovers as pioneers in those days, I now see that those seeds that Harry at Carnegie Hall planted in my brain predisposed me towards seeing the genius of Caribbean music and culture. My appreciation of Caribbean music would have been less complete and more delayed if I had not been recruited by that great emissary, Harry Belafonte. Here I express my deep gratitude.

My next connection came not with Harry directly but with his Baldwin piano. When AIDS was rampant and took someone I was close to, I became aware of Housing Works, the NYC non-profit organization that donated its proceeds to the fight against AIDS. I bought many high-quality items from them that I could never have afforded unless some wealthy donor made it possible. In one of his many humanitarian gestures, Harry Belafonte donated his Baldwin piano to support that effort, and Housing Works put a reasonable price on it. I wanted that piano so severely that I kept visiting the W 17th St branch of Housing Works to measure and pluck the keys trying to think of a way to squeeze it into my small Chelsea Studio apartment. Unfortunately, the apartment dimensions precluded my purchase, but a New Yorker probably still enjoys that instrument.

These days, I play ukulele, which a Trini friend, on seeing it, said, “That’s a cuatro we use in parang and on early calypso records!” My cultural connections with the Caribbean continued expanding. One night after a gig near the Empire State Building, some musicians and I went to a Rooftop bar at a hotel in Koreatown. On this warm and bustling night, many tourists sat at tables with others they just met. As we carried our instruments, they, in halting English, asked us to play a song. We went through a repertoire of Elvis, Beatles, and Rolling Stone songs-none of which they recognized. The first tune that caught their interest was when we did Harry’s classic, Jamaica Farewell. They knew it enough to join the chorus with their halting English, encouraging other tables to harmonize.

If I teach a new player to play ukulele, that is the tune I use as the first song they should learn. It is so simple in the chord progression but often a tune they are familiar with. I have been doing that song for 50 years and never tire of it. Like the ukulele and pan, it is global, speaks from the heart, and yearns for human connection. If the man did nothing more than leave us with this one song, it would have been enough, but he continued and continued until his 96th year.

So here we are now in a world without Harry Belafonte. It is a much lonelier world. I am grateful for this chance to declare my debt to Harry and thank him for sharing his enormous talent with old, new, and distant friends who can get a glimpse of him.

Down the way, where the nights are gay,
And the sun shines pretty on a mountain top….