Word: backed
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Belafonte costume-a tailored ($27) Indian cotton shirt partially open, snug black slacks, a seaman's belt buckled by two large interlocking curtain rings-combines the dashing elegance of a Valentino cape with the muscled fascination of a Brando T shirt. The handsomely chiseled head is tipped slightly back, the eyes nearly closed. He is always backed by two guitars, a bass fiddle and a conga drum, to which may be added other instruments, or a full orchestra, or a twelve-man chorus...
...words and symbols of the songs meaningful to a wide audience. It is an audience he has virtually created for himself, because folk music has never before had mass appeal in the U.S. To protesting purists, Belafonte replies: "All folk songs are interpretations. Otherwise you might as well go back to the first time and say 'ugh.'" He takes a tape recorder with him wherever he goes and the library of his apartment on Manhattan's West End Avenue is crammed with tapes of folk art he has tapped at its source. Near the Brazos River...
Nine got away, and he brought back...
...Porgy and Bess because he felt that Catfish Row presented Negroes in an undignified light. He talks in analytically flavored prose about "Negro situations" and says: "In 1944, with three other Negro sailors and our dates, I was refused a table at the Copacabana. Nine years later I was back there as the headliner. How do you bridge that gap emotionally?" Asked about his second marriage, to a white girl, he says stiffly that the race question docs not matter: "I don't want to be anybody's brother-in-law. I just want to be his brother...
...people sang with it. The streets of Kingston were thronged with piping vendors or politicians drumming up a vote in the lilting singsong of the islands. It was "a groovy time. I was a great night gazer. I used to climb up in a mango tree and lie back and eat mangoes and look through the leaves...