The first Harry Belafonte albums I ever bought must have been back in the late '50s. There were two of them, Belafonte and Calypso. At the time I was into The Weavers and Leadbelly, and Belafonte was another voice in the folk singing army that was beginning to make itself heard around the country. I remember tucking the LP's in next to a well worn copy of The Weavers at Carnegie Hall. The first time I ever saw him perform was on the stage of a Brooklyn nightclub called the Town and Country. I remember thinking at the time that this was kind of a strange venue to host a folk singer. Later the Town and Country became the home base for a troop of female impersonators called the Jewel Box Revue, definitely not the place for a folk singer.
I bring this up because it seems to me that back then at the time he was making a big name for himself, there was a sense among some of us in our ignorance that there were folk singers who were activists, like Seeger, Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman, and Belafonte wasn't one of them. There was a sense that there were folk singers who were authentic like Leadbelly, and the sweet-voiced Belafonte wasn't one of them either. Next thing you know he's in Hollywood making movies and he's a movie star, again not quite what we had come to expect from the typical folk singer.
Of course, Belafonte had seemingly never been concerned with playing to other people's expectations. So when he turned up marching with Martin Luther King, Jr. and we discovered that he'd been a civil rights activist all along, those of us who knew little more about him than "Matilda" were kind of shocked. The extent of what many of us didn't know, or maybe didn't want to know, is made abundantly clear in the HBO documentary, Sing Your Song, which aired earlier this October. Not only was the man a fighter for civil rights in this country, but also a humanitarian involved in the struggle for social justice around the world.
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