“I must admit I thought it would come to fruition much sooner,” says Belafonte. “But like so many other things in this country that I thought would have happened by now, it never seemed to come into being.”
Yet the civil-rights activist, actor and “King of Calypso” says he never lost hope the recordings would be released. A few years ago, RCA’s archival sub-label Buddha Records rediscovered them. Executives there were floored by the sounds of late singer Bessie Jones and a tribe from Ghana (RCA had flown them in for the session) performing the songs of early African slaves, rural field workers, city day laborers and down-and-out bluesmen.
Engineers dusted off the work of Belafonte and arranger-director Leonard de Paur and put it on disc. The set’s augmented with a cover painting by George White, an accompanying book of archival photos and notes by black historian Mari Evans. Belafonte spoke with NEWSWEEK’s Lorraine Ali about the blood, sweat–and years–that brought this set into being.
Harry Belafonte: I think so. When America understands how profound all this really is, they’ll recognize in what remarkable ways Africa has shaped the national menu. The spirituals, the plantation songs, the Louisiana stuff, the music of the Civil War, the blues–you find everything about America is rooted somewhere in the African journey.
I was a young rebel, and Dr. [Martin Luther] King [Jr.] and I were very close. Here we were designing the civil-rights movement, wondering how far can we push the envelope, talking with Kennedys, visiting the Justice Department, partaking in debates, marches, arrests. But every time I went South, at the end of a long day, I would listen to the farm workers and sharecroppers sing. I believed then that we were on the verge of a big social change, and I just knew I had to get this down, capture all this now, or it would be gone.
You’re like an archeologist. You find the skull, then trace certain known evidence and pursue assumptions. It was of great fortune that Leonard de Paur was this kind of Sherlock Holmes. He’d listen to a piece from Georgia, then from Mississippi, then put these two together to find missing bits and pieces. But when it came to recording, we had a lot of cultured voices and it was coming off too academic. We finally found Bessie Jones and her clan from the Georgia Sea Islands. They gave us the truest link we could find to early slave culture, because much of the 20th century had not reached them. She did the earth dance, and we knew from research that tribes did almost the same steps and sounds.
Painful and amazing. They’re all stories. The Christmas chants, the sunrise songs from the earliest slaves to the tale of a black regiment who went into the Civil War. The first day they met their Confederate adversaries they were crushed in battle. The shame inspired them to regroup and go back into battle to defeat the same enemy.
Although I have special interests in what happens to the black community, this is for all Americans. The more we know about each other, the more we know about ourselves, the richer we become as a nation, as a people. My tool is art, my tool is music. Let me put all my stuff out there and let everyone be a beneficiary. I want to awaken interests. My mentor Paul Rose, a great black American figure of the 20th century, said, “Get them to sing your song and they’ll want to know who you are.” That always stuck so deep in my soul. It’s branded there. “Get them to sing your song, and they’ll wanna know who you are.” That’s what this anthology is all about.
