Harry Belafonte memoir reviewed in NYT… Belafonte appears with Tim Robbins at Live Talks on Nov 28…
Harry Belafonte’s memoir, My Song is reviewed in the New York Times today by Garrison Keillor. Belafonte appears in conversation with Tim Robbins at Live Talks Los Angeles on Nov 28. Ticket deets here…
Here’s an excerpt:
Here is a gorgeous account of the large life of a Harlem boy, son of a Jamaican cleaning lady, Melvine Love, and a ship’s cook, Harold Bellanfanti, who endured the grind of poverty under the watchful eye of his proud mother and waited for his chances, prepared to be lucky, and made himself into the international calypso star and popular folk singer, huge in Las Vegas, also Europe, and a mainstay of the civil rights movement of the ’60s, a confidant of Dr. King’s…..
The problem of authenticity dogged Belafonte. He wasn’t from the South, didn’t play guitar, wasn’t a true Jamaican, wasn’t African-American. He was an entertainer, an actor performing songs. The blacklist almost tripped him up in 1954, when he was accused in print of being a “Communist fronter” and Ed Sullivan, a powerful man in the television world, called Belafonte up to his apartment in the Delmonico Hotel to explain himself.
In 1956, his life more or less split in two. His album “Calypso” came out with “Jamaica Farewell” and “Day-O” and was No. 1 on the Billboardchart for 31 weeks until Elvis knocked it off. And “one day in the spring of 1956, I picked up the phone to hear a courtly Southern voice. ‘You don’t know me, Mr. Belafonte, but my name is Martin Luther King Jr.’ . . . ‘Oh, I know you,’ I said. ‘Everybody knows you.’ ”