"I had to leave a little girl in Kingston town"

Down the Way | With Belafonte

Remembering the King of Calypso

Harry Belafonte (1927 – 2023)

Yes! It’s no exaggeration when I say this –

That Harry Belafonte’s Banana Boat Song has always been the seminal opening song that’s all along served as a musical introduction to the teaching of my Paper on Postcolonial Studies with the II MA Students, for years now.

Such is the impact of the Calypsonian number, be it the beat, the bar, the tempo or the rhythm to this track! It’s simply phenomenal!

Well, Harry Belafonte is quite fondly called the Barrier-Breaking singer. His songs, specifically, the Banana Boat Song and Jamaican Farewell – which formed part of his ‘Calypso’ album – rose up high on Billboard to become the very first album by a single artist to sell more than a million copies.

Although music and movies were his priorities, civil rights was Belafonte’s passion! He was an ardent admirer and friend of Dr. Martin Luther King, and sowed the seeds for the movement against social inequality and negative racial stereotyping!

On this solemn occasion of the passing away of this great legend, me thought of giving us all a few words from Belafonte, thoughts from the legend that carry his heart’s burden, in toto, from the book titled, We are the Change.

The Introduction that he’s given to the book is short, succinct and carries the angst of the ‘revolutionary in Belafonte’.

So here goes –

When the founders of our country wrote the Constitution, they began with three revolutionary words –

We the People.

They began with the extraordinary idea that the future of a country is its people’s future - and their fate will be its fate.

This is an idea that invests in citizenship a profound majesty, an individual dignity, and a lifelong responsibility of each man and woman to one another.

This is an idea that invests in equality the assurance that when opportunity is shared, it does not divide but rather multiplies, advancing the horizons of each individual and each industry.

This is an idea that testifies powerfully to the truth that when we turn our backs on one another, we turn the world against us, and we leave ourselves each to fight alone . . . but that when every man and woman’s plight is our plight, then we find at every hand brothers and sisters to fight for us, and at our sides.

This idea - e pluribus unum - out of many, one - insists that through our sacred bond with one another, a people can climb to a height undreamt of by the tyrannical past, and that in that light, all rights, human rights and civil rights, rights of law and rights of conscience, are, at the beginning and the end, what makes us all one, together.

How true!

Mr. Belafonte and his wife, Julie Robinson, during a civil rights event — the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom — at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington in 1957. Credit: George Tames, The NYT

It would only be appropriate to bid farewell to the mighty King of Calypso, with his own immortal number from Jamaican Farewell –

But I'm sad to say I'm on my way

Won't be back for many a day

My heart is down

My head is turning around

I had to leave a little girl in Kingston town!

That little girl here, for now, on a sad note, is… you and me and we!

Pic Courtesy: New York Times & Times of India & Chronicle Books