![]() “And I took that song and honed it into an anthem that the world loved.” -S.V.L. “Here was a song about struggle, about black people in a colonized life doing the most grueling work,” he told PBS’ Gwen Ifill years later. And even if the audiences that bought “The Banana Boat Song” by the bushel weren’t thinking about the power dynamics on those docks, Belafonte was. “RCA’s executives worried that this kind of album would be too ethnic, too black, too out of the mainstream.” Instead, Calypso became the music industry’s first-ever million-seller, and Belafonte became a superstar. “No one at RCA Victor… had wanted to devote a whole album to Caribbean island songs,” Belafonte wrote in his 2011 memoir. It was perfect for what Belafonte had in mind for his third album, even if his label wasn’t so sure. That traditional work song, whose rhythm and style are closer to mento than calypso, came to Belafonte via his friend Lord Burgess - a dedicated scholar of Caribbean folk music whom another peer called “the black Alan Lomax” - and co-writer William Attaway. began decades earlier on the docks of Jamaica, where day laborers sang it during their long shifts loading bananas onto export ships. ![]() ![]() The song that made calypso a household word in the Eisenhower-era U.S. Image Credit: Archive Photos/Getty Images ![]()
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