JUST-IN: Ground-Breaking Singer, Harry Belafonte Dies At 96

April 25, 2023

3 minute read

One of the most successful African-American pop stars in history and renowned human rights activist, Harry Belafonte is dead.

Belafonte who stormed the pop charts and smashed racial barriers in the US and later became very vocal about racial discrimination reportedly died at home in Manhattan at the age of 96 years.

New Telegraph gathered that the cause of his death was congestive heart failure, According to Ken Sunshine, his longtime spokesman.

But until his death, his greatest achievements were as a campaigner for black civil rights in the US.

Often dubbed the King Of Calypso, Belafonte was born in Harlem, New York, in 1927.

A high school dropout, he joined the Navy during the Second World War, working as a munitions loader at a base in New Jersey.

After the war, he pursued his dream of becoming an actor, studying drama at Erwin Piscator’s famed Dramatic Workshop alongside the likes of Marlon Brando, Walter Matthau and Tony Curtis.

He paid for the classes by singing at New York clubs, where he was backed by groups that included Miles Davis and Charlie Parker.

That led to a recording contract and, in a search for material, Belafonte began to study the folk song archives at the US Library of Congress, alighting on the Calypso music his parents had grown up with.

It proved to be a wise move. The handsome young star sparked a craze for the genre with songs like the Banana Boat Song and Jamaica Farewell – both of which featured on his third album, Calypso.

Released in 1956, it topped the Billboard charts and was said to be the first album by a solo artist to sell more than a million copies in the US.

His success was such that he was the first black person allowed to perform in many upmarket US venues – including some that had been off-limits to artists like Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald.

He made his Broadway debut in the musical John Murray Anderson’s Almanac in 1953, for which he won a Tony Award for supporting actor. He later appeared in films, scoring his first lead role in Island in the Sun, where he starred alongside James Mason, Joan Fontaine and Joan Collins, with whom he had an affair.

Over his career, he recorded more than 30 albums, including collaborative records with Nana Mouskouri, Lena Horne, and Miriam Makeba. Bob Dylan made his first recorded appearance playing harmonica on Belafonte’s 1962 album, Midnight Special.

In 1985, he organised the charity single We Are the World, an all-star musical collaboration that raised money for famine relief in Ethiopia.

After seeing a grim news report on the famine, he decided that American artists needed to raise money in the same way Bob Geldof and Midge Ure had done with the song Do They Know It’s Christmas? a year earlier.

Featuring superstars like Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles and Diana Ross, the song – written by Jackson and Lionel Richie – raised millions of dollars.

“A lot of people say to me, ‘When as an artist did you decide to become an activist?'” Belafonte said in a National Public Radio interview in 2011. “I say to them, ‘I was long an activist before I became an artist.'”

Belafonte was married three times. He and his first wife Marguerite Byrd had two children, including actress-model Shari Belafonte. He also had two children with his second wife Julia Robinson, a former dancer.

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