Word: west
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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 in southeast Texas, he recorded a song about the "rattler," or hound dogs used to track escaped convicts...
Singing Environment. Actually, his story needs no fanciful embellishments. Harold George Belafonte Jr. was born 32 years ago in Harlem, son of a seaman in the British merchant marine; his mother was alternately a dressmaker, a baby sitter, a domestic servant. Both parents came from Jamaica, West Indies, and both were products of white and Negro unions. Harry's father disappeared when he was two (he reappeared sporadically after that), and Harry was brought up by his mother in a succession of Harlem tenements. At his first school (P.S. 186, on 145th Street and Amsterdam Avenue...
...well-to-do Negro girl named Frances Marguerite Byrd, who was a student at Virginia's Hampton Institute, where Harry was in training. He immediately recognized her as "everything I ever wanted," assured her that she would marry him some day, and departed for more training on the West Coast, leaving her with his signet ring, a gold locket and a white poinsettia. He served in the Navy as a storekeeper, was discharged after 18 months without ever getting overseas...
...three-room walkup in a converted brownstone. ("Harry is the only millionaire in America," said a friend at the time, "who goes down to the cellar to empty his own garbage.") Since then they have moved into a more luxurious, ten-room apartment on Manhattan's West End Avenue (there was a splash of newspaper publicity when the landlords on the fashionable East Side refused to rent to a Negro family). Belafonte has collected contemporary paintings and Haitian sculptures, in the vocabulary of his trade cares little for clothes (twelve suits, eight sports jackets, three tuxedos), owns no real...
Belafonte worries constantly about how to establish longevity, but he knows that as long as the Lead Man keeps moving, there will be an audience at his heels. As his own variation of an old West Indian chant...