Daylight Come: Harry Belafonte and the World He Made (Significations) - Hardcover

Jelly-Schapiro, Joshua

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593652703 ISBN 13: 9780593652701

Verlag: Turnaround Pub. Serv. Ltd, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

“Daylight Come takes us to places no biography in recent memory has . . . This book fills the heart and mind, and is essential reading for our times.” —Hilton Als

A vibrant, revealing portrait of the "King of Calypso," whose extraordinary performing career and activism helped remake America through the civil rights era and beyond

Even three years after his death, Harry Belafonte is everywhere. You can’t go to a wedding, or to a sports arena, without hearing “Day-O,” “Jump in the Line,” or “Jamaica Farewell.” The Harlem-born son of Caribbean immigrants, Belafonte turned the folk music of the islands into American pop—and shaped the fantasy of Caribbean life that endures as an ideal and as a multibillion-dollar tourist industry. Belafonte released the first million-selling LP in history. He was America’s first Black movie star, the first Black person to produce a prime-time special on network TV, and the first to win an Emmy Award. He was once the highest-paid Black performer of all time, beloved by Black and white fans alike, even under segregation. His artistic career helped create the pop culture of the twentieth century—and his political activism reshaped the course of American history.

In this sparkling new biography, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro brings Belafonte’s personality and music vibrantly to life, following him from rags to riches and from Harlem to Jamaica to the March on Washington. Jelly-Schapiro takes us inside Belafonte’s lifelong brotherhood with Sidney Poitier, his friendship with Fidel Castro, his collaboration with Nelson Mandela, and the sometimes shocking therapeutic relationships his difficult upbringing necessitated. At the heart of the story is Belafonte’s bond with Martin Luther King Jr., whose cause Belafonte would champion for the rest of his life. That commitment to the greater good would sustain him and benefit untold numbers—and would come at a cost.

The indelible story of an American icon—and a provocative study of authenticity, fame, and conviction—Daylight Come is, like Harry Belafonte himself, brimming with style and consequence.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro; curated by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

Harry was the first. You have to start with that. In 1956, a Harlem-bred son of Caribbean immigrants released the first million-selling LP in history. Belafonte was bigger than Elvis. And that's not the only first he laid claim to in his triumphant march across American media in the years that followed. He was the first Black movie star to become a matinee idol, thanks to a star turn in Island in the Sun in 1957, and the first Black person to produce a prime-time special on network TV and to win an Emmy (for Tonight with Belafonte in 1959). He was America's first Black pop star to be as desired for his body as his music. And the first to cause a major scandal for having his elbow touched by a white lady (Petula Clark) on television. His performance-cum-translation of the Caribbean for the masses-white Americans for whom his music felt playful, foreign, and thereby racially and sexually safe-allowed him to straddle racial, sexual, and political taboos unthinkable to his Black contemporaries.

The historic LP that helped him do so, Calypso, was a suite of Caribbean folk tunes that won the top spot on Billboard's charts in June 1956-and stayed there for an unprecedented thirty-one weeks (before being knocked from its perch by-who else-Elvis Presley). Belafonte's name-making record didn't just cement his stature as a new kind of American celebrity. It launched a putative "calypso craze," which convinced not a few commentators that calypso was poised to upend rock 'n' roll as the dominant fad among American teens. ("Warning: Calypso Next New Beat; R.I.P. for R'n'R?," trumpeted Variety in December 1957.) Such predictions may have had less to do with the music's actual popularity than with the wishful thinking of parents who found Belafonte's open-collared-but-still-dignified eroticism less scandalous than the louche gyrations of Elvis's pelvis. Nonetheless: it is hard to oversell the significance of the record that heralded the curious genre of world music; inspired the name of the most popular vocal group in America prior to the Beatles-the Kingston Trio; and perhaps most important, as Belafonte himself later put it, "proved that Americans were more ready than had been assumed to hear the voices of others or the culture of other people."

That last potent fact remains a crucial achievement. But what's perhaps most remarkable about Belafonte's early successes was that they served as mere forerunners and sparks for his larger public life. He used the cash he earned from scaling pop's heights in the late 1950s not to build mansions but to bankroll a still-speculative movement for civil rights. And then, as that movement picked up steam, he assumed an indispensable role as the crucial bridge between its protest marches and Hollywood's stars; between Black preachers who led the movement and white liberals who backed it; between Martin Luther King, Jr., the minister who became Harry's best friend, and the federal government. As the civil rights era reached its most intense phase in the early 1960s, he was the only person to speak, on a near-daily basis, with both Dr. King and Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general who was at first a tricky foil for King's aims but became a crucial ally.

But those also-remarkable facts, are only part of how his story at once resonated with, and has shaped, the story of his age. When in 1968 he accepted a historic invitation from Johnny Carson to serve as a guest host of The Tonight Show for an entire week, he invited his august friends from politics and showbiz-from Lena Horne and Bobby Kennedy to Marlon Brando, Sidney Poitier, and Buffy Sainte-Marie-to speak with unvarnished candor about America's ills and the disastrous war in Vietnam. He used an interview with Dr. King, not two months before King was killed, to ask if he feared for his life. It was an encounter on national TV, seen by millions, that only one man-Harry Belafonte-could have made happen. But it bears new weight when you consider that Harry had for years by then footed the bill for his friend's health care and supported his family. Far more than a celebrity fundraiser or spokesman, he was an integral part of this movement that changed the country forever.

America had seen Black celebrities before Belafonte. And in the postwar years, others also had won mass-market appeal. Sammy Davis, Jr., did so as the Rat Pack's self-deprecating mascot. Sidney Poitier became one of Hollywood's biggest stars by enacting, with gracious manners and un-American charm, a Black man who anyone but the most dire racist would be glad to bring home to dinner. The persona that Harry cultivated wasn't dissimilar to the one his close friend Sidney, a fellow West Indian who was from the Bahamas, used to scale Hollywood's heights: as a "Caribbean gentleman"-foreign and charming, proper and safe-whose image was far more palatable to whites than were Black entertainers descended from America's slaves. But behind Harry's easeful smile, there was a dose of sexuality and rage that left him allergic to playing roles meant to make whites comfortable. He turned down a few of those that made Poitier famous.

Decades later, talking to me at a restaurant near his home on Manhattan's Upper West Side, he said, "When me and Sidney were coming up, people took the way we carried ourselves as proud, imperial." That's how Harry broke it down, over a plate of littleneck clams the first time we met. "But that's every fucking Jamaican I know! And a lot of them are a pain in the ass!"




Harry, to those closest to him, could be a pain in the ass himself. His outlook was shaped from boyhood by extended sojourns in a Black-majority society-Jamaica-whose history and culture were shaped by its slaves’ rebellions against the island’s colonial owners, and where mixed-race families like his were commonplace. His Caribbean roots were inseparable from his American success. “I think people perceive him as a nice person,” said Johnny Carson, “and if people seem to like you, that’s half the game in the entertainment business.” Yet part of his magnetism also derived from the anger that drove him-anger at America’s racism; anger at himself and his dyslexia; anger at the demons he spent decades unpacking on his therapist’s couch. “Perhaps in the end,” he said of what he learned there, “where your anger comes from is less important than what you do with it.” What he did with his, in alchemizing his ire into his art and activism, changed the world.

Just as remarkable was the more personal journey he undertook to wrestle with his demons and with his country by evolving its culture. That journey would see him produce a film (Beat Street) that helped introduce hip-hop to the world; turn the world's eyes to modern Africa's urgent needs by recording "We Are the World" with stars ranging from Michael Jackson to Bruce Springsteen and Cyndi Lauper, and become a genial fixture on The Muppet Show and Sesame Street, in the 1970s and '80s, who was later known an elder radical and sometimes moral scold. Harry's life's third and fourth and fifth acts were as full of incident and impact as those preceding them.




What forces conspired, back when it all began, to help him become America’s “first Negro matinée idol”? How did he become the dominant figure in American pop right before the emergence of Elvis? What made him a kind of Representative Man capable of meaning all things to all people? In his life’s last decades, he became a totem of Black pride known for his intemperate radicalism (calling fellow son of the Caribbean Colin Powell “a house slave” ). But once he was our first post-racial pop star. He was a hero to immigrants, a sex symbol who was also a wholesome folkie, a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Turnaround Pub. Serv. Ltd
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593652703
• ISBN 13: 9780593652701
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland