It started with the songs, of course, real folk music. Well, with Belafonte’s interpolation, which in its varied guises combines acoustic vocals with black spiritual arrangements and the sounds of the islands. He took his best-selling music on tour to white audiences who would pay big bucks to see him perform his multi-million selling album ‘Calypso’, the one with ‘Day-O’. A big part of his knowing people was knowing they watched TV. And instead of simply translating his popular cabaret act into American living rooms, Belafonte imagined something weirder and more appealing. In 1959, he somehow got CBS to air “Tonight With Belafonte,” an hour-long studio show that begins with a live commercial for Revlon (the night’s sponsor) and merges with the shiny blonde actor Barbara Britton (the ad’s pitch person) in the eyes of Black men amid shadows and big chains.
They pantomize hard work as Belafonte belts out a viscous version of “Bald Headed Woman.” The whole hour is just this kind of chilling: percussive work songs, big-bottomed gospel, moaning blues, dramatic spare sets that imply segregation and confinement, the weather system calling itself Odetta. Belafonte never makes a direct speech about injustice. He trusts the songs and the performing arts to speak for themselves. People – especially black people – will understand. It’s their music.
“The bleaker my acting prospects looked,” Belafonte wrote in “My Song,” his 2011 memoir, “the more I threw myself into political organization.” This organizing took on familiar forms: marches, protests, meetings. Money. He helped endorse the civil rights movement and paid for freedom rides. He maintained a life insurance policy on Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., with Coretta Scott King as beneficiary, because Dr. King didn’t believe he could afford it. The building he purchased at 300 West End Avenue in Manhattan and converted into a 21-room palace appeared to function as the movement’s headquarters in New York. (“Martin started drafting his anti-war speech in my apartment.”) So yes, Belafonte was near the movement’s psychic core and administrative center.
But those bleak Hollywood prospects — an incalculable combination of racism and too-raw talent — kept Belafonte uniquely earthbound, doing a cultural organization of sorts. It wasn’t the movies that have kept him in so many people’s lives over the decades, though he never completely stopped acting, best of all in a handful of Robert Altman movies, most notably 1996’s ‘Kansas City’, in which he pulls off some convincing intimidation as a 1930s icy mobster named Seldom Seen. His organization took place on TV, where he featured prominently as himself throughout the 1960s, and where his political reach was arguably as pervasive as that of his soulmate, on variety shows he produced that introduced America to Gloria Lynne and Odetta and John Lewis.
