On Tuesday, popular Caribbean-American singer, actor, and activist Harry Belafonte died following congestive heart failure, according to reports. He was 96 years old.
Belafonte spent his life advocating for several causes in addition to singing international songs like Day-O (The Banana Boat Song), winning a Tony Award for acting, and appearing in numerous feature films.
He backed several civil rights movements for Black Americans in the 1960s, campaigned for anti-poverty, anti-apartheid, and anti-AIDS campaigns in Africa, and supported politicians like Fidel Castro of Cuba and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.
Belafonte was born in working-class Harlem, New York, in 1927. He spent his early years in Jamaica and returned to New York for high school, but struggled with dyslexia and dropped out in his early teens.
In New York, he worked in markets and the city’s garment district, and then signed up for the US Navy at aged 17, where he worked as a munitions loader at a base in New Jersey.
Belafonte also aspired to become an actor after watching plays at New York’s American Negro Theatre, and in 1954 he released his debut album, which was a collection of classic folk songs.
His second album, Belafonte, was the first No 1 in the new US Billboard album chart in March 1956. However, his third album, Calypso, released the following year and featured songs from his Jamaican background, becoming the first album to sell more than a million copies in the US.
The lead track was Day-O (The Banana Boat Song), a signature song for Belafonte. It spent 18 weeks in the UK singles chart, including three weeks at No 2. His version of Mary’s Boy Child was a UK chart-topper later that year, while Island in the Sun reached No 3. He released 30 studio albums, plus collaborative albums with Nana Mouskouri, Lena Horne, and Miriam Makeba.
The latter release won him one of his two Grammy awards, and he was later awarded a lifetime achievement Grammy and the Academy’s President’s Merit award.
Alongside his music career, Belafonte also pursued acting. He appeared in John Murray Anderson’s Almanac, a musical revue show, for which he won a Tony Award in 1954. He also made appearances in several films, most notably as one of the leads in Island in the Sun with James Mason, Joan Fontaine, and Joan Collins, amongst others.
