Harry Belafonte
Harry Belafonte
Harold George "Harry" Bellanfanti, Jr., better known as Harry Belafonte, is an American singer, songwriter, actor, and social activist. One of the most successful Caribbean American pop stars in history, he was dubbed the "King of Calypso" for popularizing the Caribbean musical style with an international audience in the 1950s. His breakthrough album Calypsois the first million selling album by a single artist. Belafonte is perhaps best known for singing "The Banana Boat Song", with its signature lyric "Day-O". He...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPop Singer
Date of Birth1 March 1927
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
I was quite taken with her, because I'd never seen the African influence in dance with that kind of strength and artistic power. It impacted my soul. No one had reached those heights. She was the definitive black dance company. She moved among the highest intellectuals of black culture, all the writers and painters and literary folk.
The sham engineers of the music industry, who steer the wheels of public opinion, are driving the good features of calypso into the ground. I shudder to think what these greedy men will eventually do to this true art form.
Art in its highest form is art that serves and instructs society and human development.
Carmen Jones was the first all-Negro film that became a great box-office success. It established the fact that pictures with Negro artists, pictures dealing with the folklore of Negro life, were commercially feasible. This was a sign of growth that had occurred in the United States and throughout the world.
Artists are the gatekeepers of truth. We are civilization’s anchor. We are the compass for humanity’s conscience.
We Are the World ... Do They Know It's Christmas?
We talked for four hours, ... After four hours I knew I was with someone who would change the course of history.
When I was forty and looking at sixty, it seemed like a thousand miles away. But sixty-two feels like a week and a half away from eighty. I must now get on with those things I always talked about doing but put off.
doing things that were anti-Semitic and against the best interests of her people.
It was not only the extreme reverence with which the young viewed him, it was the way they began to sing the songs. It was more than just mouthing the lyrics they became deeply connected to his poetry.
We've taken citizens from this country without the right to be charged, without being told what they're taken for, we've spirited them out of this country, taken them to far away places, and reports come back with some consistency that they are being tortured, that they're not being told what they've done. And even some who have been released have come back and testified to this fact.
We respect you, admire you, and we are expressing our full solidarity with the Venezuelan people and your revolution.
We've watched her be abused in the past, and she's overcome, stood strong. We're not going to be absent or indifferent to the fact that she may be abused again.
We started filming a year ago. I will be back in Jamaica in the latter part of this year to shoot footage on my childhood days.