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Songwriter and poet Pete Brown, who co-wrote “Sunshine of Your Love” and “White Room” for the short-lived rock supergroup Cream in the 1960s, has died. He was 82. The London-based Brown died of cancer late Friday (May 20), according to a post on his Facebook page. A poet who worked in the same circles as […]
Grace Bumbry, a pioneering mezzo-soprano who became the first Black singer to perform at Germany’s Bayreuth Festival during a career of more than three decades on the world’s top stages, has died. She was 86. Bumbry died Sunday at Evangelisches Krankenhaus, a hospital in Vienna, according to her publicist, David Lee Brewer.
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She had a stroke on Oct. 20 while on a flight from Vienna to New York to attend her induction into Opera America’s Opera Hall of Fame. She was stricken with the plane 15 minutes from landing, was treated at NYC Health + Hospitals/Queens and returned to Vienna on Dec. 8. She had been in and out of facilities since, Brewer said Monday (May 8).
Bumbry was born Jan. 4, 1937, in St. Louis. Her father, Benjamin, was a railroad porter and her mother, the former Melzia Walker, a school teacher.
She sang in the choir at Ville’s Sumner High School and won a talent contest sponsored by radio station KMOX that included a scholarship to the St. Louis Institute of Music, but she was denied admission because she was Black. She sang on CBS’s Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, then attended Boston University College of Fine Arts. and Northwestern, where she met soprano Lotte Lehmann, who became her teacher at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, California, and a mentor.
Bumbry, known mostly as a mezzo but who also performed some soprano roles. was inspired when her mother took her to a recital of Marian Anderson, the American contralto who in 1955 became the first Black singer at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Bumbry became part of a generation of acclaimed Black opera singers that included Leontyne Price, Shirley Verrett, George Shirley, Reri Grist and Martina Arroyo.
Bumbry was among the winners of the 1958 Met National Council Auditions. She had a recital debut in Paris that same year and made her Paris Opéra debut in 1960 as Amneris in “Aida.”
The following year, she was cast by Wieland Wagner, a grandson of the composer, to sing Venus in a new production of Tannhäuser at the Richard Wagner Festival in Bayreuth. Bumbry’s casting in a staging that included stars Wolfang Windgassen, Victoria de los Angeles and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau resulted in 200 protest letters to the festival.
“I remember being discriminated against in the United States, so why should it be any different in Germany?” Bumbry told St. Louis Magazine in 2021. “I knew that I had to get up there and show them what I’m about. When we were in high school, our teachers — and my parents, of course — taught us that you are no different than anybody else. You are not better than anybody, and you are not lesser than anybody. You have to do your best all the time.”
Reviews of her Bayreuth debut on July 23, 1961, were mostly positive. “A voice of very large size, though a little lacking in color. It is a voice that has not as yet `set,′ as the teachers say,” Harold C. Schonberg wrote in The New York Times. “She is obviously a singer with a big career ahead of her.”
As a result of the attention, Bumbry was invited by first lady Jacqueline Kennedy to sing at a White House state dinner the following February. Debuts followed at Carnegie Hall in November 1962, London’s Royal Opera in 1963 and Milan’s Teatro alla Scala in 1964.
She appeared at the Met on Oct. 7, 1965, as Princess Eboli in Verdi’s Don Carlo, the first of 216 performances with the company. “Her assurance, self-possession, and character projection are the kind from which a substantial career can be made,” Irving Kolodin wrote in the Saturday Review.
Bumbry’s final full opera at the Met was at Amneris in Verdi’s Aida on Nov. 3, 1986, though she did return a decade later for the James Levine 25th anniversary gala to sing “Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix (Softly awakes my heart)” from Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila.
Met general manager Peter Gelb said “opera will be forever in her debt for the pioneering role she played as one of the first great African American stars. “
“Grace Bumbry was the first opera star I ever heard in person in 1967 when she was singing the role of Carmen at the Met and I was a 13-year-old sitting with my parents in Rudolf Bing’s box,” Gelb said. “Hearing and seeing her giving a tour-de-force performance made a big impression on my teenage soul and was an early influence on my decision to pursue a career in the arts, just as she influenced generations of younger singers of all ethnicities to follow in her formidable footsteps.”
In 1989, she sang in the first fully staged performance on a work at Paris’ Bastille Opéra in Berlioz’s Les Troyens (The Trojans). In 2009, she was celebrated at the Kennedy Center Honors. Bumbry’s 1963 marriage to Polish tenor Erwin Jaeckel ended in divorce in 1972. Bumbry was predeceased by brothers Charles and Benjamin.
Brewer said memorials are being planned for Vienna and New York.
A day after the shooting death of Young Lo at a Miami Beach nightclub, the 37-year-old rapper/producer is being remembered by his longtime friend, creative collaborator and Grammy-nominated producer Christian “Hitmaka” Ward.
Along with Chrishan “Prince Chrishan” Dotson, Hitmaka is a co-founder of Makasound Records, where Lo worked in A&R. During his career, the late artist had also collaborated with other label executives and artists on various projects. Young Lo’s credits include collaborations with Drake, Chris Brown, Lil Wayne, Ray J and Tyga.
“Lo has been a longtime friend of mine for like 15 years,” Hitmaka aka Yung Berg tells Billboard. “We go as far back to when Ray J and I were doing ‘Sexy Can I’ and all these different records. Lo was just a great people person who knew how to put the right people together and had the resources to where maybe a Chris Brown or such-and-such [artist] might be good for a project. Lo was always a great asset to me. He was just great energy. Everybody loved to have Lo around. He was also very selfless, putting a lot of people before himself.
“This is truly a tragedy,” Hitmaka continues. “I haven’t lost a close friend like that, so this has rocked my world. I’m just dealing with picking up the pieces, helping out his mother, his family and his son. I’m sending super condolences to his family and loved ones. And man, I want to preach to everybody to just stay safe. Tomorrow isn’t promised. Tell loved ones that you love them on a daily basis because you just never know.”
According to reports from the Miami Herald, CBS News and other outlets, Young Lo was among three people who were shot at the South Beach nightclub Gala early Sunday morning. Born Lowell Grissom, Young Lo later died at the hospital. Two women were hospitalized with gunshot wounds and are expected to recover.
As of this writing, no arrests have been made.
Chris Strachwitz, a producer, musicologist and one-man preservation society whose Arhoolie Records released thousands of songs by regional performers and comprised an extraordinary American archive that became known and loved worldwide, has died. He was 91.
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Strachwitz, recipient in 2016 of a Grammy Trustee Award, passed away Friday (May 5) from complications with congestive heart failure at an assisted living facility in the San Francisco Bay Area’s Marin County, the Arhoolie Foundation said Saturday.
Admired by Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt and many others, Strachwitz was an unlikely champion of the American vernacular — a native German born into privilege who fell deeply for his adopted country’s music and was among the most intrepid field recorders to emerge after Alan Lomax.
He founded Arhoolie in 1960 and over the following decades traveled to Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana, among other states, on a mission that rarely relented: taping little-known artists in their home environments, be it a dance hall, a front porch, a beer joint, a backyard.
“My stuff isn’t produced. I just catch it as it is,” he explained in the 2014 documentary This Ain’t No Mouse Music.
The name Arhoolie, suggested by fellow musicologist Mack McCormick, is allegedly a regional expression for field holler.
Ry Cooder would call him “El Fanatico,” the kind of true believer for whom just the rumor of a musician worth hearing would inspire him to get on a bus and ride hundreds of miles — like the time he sought out bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins in Houston. Strachwitz amassed a vast catalog of blues, Tejano, folk, jazz, gospel and Zydeco, with Grammy winners Flaco Jimenez and Clifton Chenier among those who later attracted wider followings. An Arhoolie 50-year anniversary box set featured Maria Muldaur, Taj Mahal, Savoy Family Band and Cooder, who would cite the Arhoolie release Mississippi’s Big Joe Williams and His Nine-String Guitar as an early inspiration.
“It just jumped out of the speaker on this little school record player,” Cooder told NPR in 2013, adding that he decided “once and for all” to become a musician. “I’m gonna do this, too. I’m gonna get good on guitar, and I’m gonna play it like that.”
Strachwitz despised most commercial music — “mouse music,” he called it — but he did have just enough success to keep Arhoolie going. In the mid-1960s, he recorded an album in his living room for no charge by Berkeley-based folk performer Joe McDonald, who in turn granted publishing rights to Arhoolie. By 1969, McDonald was leading Country Joe McDonald and the Fish and one song from the Arhoolie sessions, the anti-war anthem “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” was a highlight of the Woodstock festival and soundtrack.
Arhoolie releases were cherished by blues fans in England, including Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. Around the same time Strachwitz met with McDonald, he taped more than a dozen songs by bluesman “Mississippi” Fred McDowell, including McDowell’s version of an old spiritual, You Gotta Move. The Stones sang a few lines from it during the 1970 documentary Gimme Shelter and recorded a cover that appeared on their acclaimed 1971 album Sticky Fingers. Strachwitz prevailed over the resistance of the band’s lawyers and ensured that royalties were given to McDowell, who was dying of cancer.
“I was able to give Fred McDowell the biggest check he’d ever seen in his life,” Strachwitz later said.
In 1993, Arhoolie was boosted again when country star Alan Jackson had a hit with “Mercury Blues,” a song co-written and first performed by K.C. Douglas for the label.
Besides his Grammy, Strachwitz received a lifetime achievement award from the Blues Symposium and was inducted as a non-performing member of the Blues Hall of Fame. In 1995, Strachwitz established the Arhoolie Foundation to “document, preserve, present and disseminate authentic traditional and regional vernacular music,” with advisers including Dylan, Bonnie Raitt and Linda Ronstadt. In 2016, Strachwitz sold his majority interest in the record label to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, part of the national museum in Washington.
“The ripple effect of Chris Strachwitz in the world of is immeasurable in preserving this music,” Raitt, a longtime friend, told the podcast The Kitchen Sisters Present in 2019.
The son of wealthy farm owners, he was born Count Christian Alexander Maria Strachwitz in the German region of Silesia, now part of Poland. His family, displaced at the end of World War II, moved to the United States in 1947, eventually settling in Santa Barbara, California. Strachwitz had already been exposed to swing overseas through Armed Forces Radio and became a jazz fan after seeing the movie New Orleans, a 1947 musical featuring Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday. He also felt a strong kinship with country and other forms of “hillbilly music.”
“I felt it all had this kind of earthiness to it that I didn’t hear in any other kind of music. They sang about how lonesome you are, and how you miss your girlfriend and all this other thing,” Strachwitz told NPR. “Those songs really spoke to me.”
By his early 20s, he was taping local radio and live performances and he perfected his craft while attending the University of California at Berkeley. He served two years in the Army, completed his studies at Berkeley through the GI Bill and, starting in the late 1950s, taught high school for a few years in Los Gatos, California.
Often short on money, Strachwitz sold pressings from his collection of old 78s to support his early recording efforts. Arhoolie’s first release was Mance Lipscomb’s Texas Sharecropper and Songster, for which Strachwitz and friends personally assembled 250 copies.
“So much of pop music has all this slop added, with this mush background that I can’t even call music,” he said in a 2013 interview with the online publication waytooindie.com. “You can hardly hear the voices! They bury the voices. If somebody wants to sing, sing god damn it! You know? In the old days, you could hear them sing.”
Linda Lewis, the British vocalist who enjoyed hits in the 1970s with “It’s In His Kiss” and others, and was the envy of fellow singers due to her five-octave range, died Wednesday (May 3) at 72.
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The tragic news was confirmed by her sister, Dee Lewis Clay. “It is with the greatest sadness and regret we share the news that our beloved beautiful sister Linda Lewis passed away today peacefully at her home,” she writes on social media. “The family asks that you respect our privacy and allow us to grieve at this heartbreaking time.”
Born Linda Ann Fredericks in West Ham, London, Lewis attended stage school, and landed film roles, including a part as a screaming fan in Beatles film, A Hard Day’s Night.
Later, fans would scream for Lewis, as she reeled off U.K. hits through the 1970s with “Rock-A-Doodle-Doo,” “It’s In His Kiss,” “Baby I’m Yours” and “I’d Be Surprisingly Good For You.”
Written and composed by Rudy Clark, “It’s In His Kiss” would give Lewis a U.K. top 10 appearance, peaking at No. 6 in 1975, and a spot on the Billboard Hot 100, at No. 96.
Lewis’ extraordinary range, and her gifts across folk, soul, pop and reggae, would catch the attention of rock music’s superstars, including David Bowie and Rod Stewart, both of whom recruited her for backing vocals. She would also work with the likes Joan Armatrading, Basement Jaxx, Turin Brakes and Jamiroquai.
Covers and samples of her work has been artists including Joss Stone and Common.
Across her career, Lewis cut ten studio album, including Say No More, her 1971 debut, which was inspired by living with fellow artists in a commune in Hampstead, north London, a place where Cat Stevens (later Yusuf Islam), Marc Bolan and Elton John would drop by.
In 2002, Warner Music released a collection of her ‘70s music, Reach for the Truth. The following year, BMG issued a career retrospective The Best of Linda Lewis, and later, the 3-CD boxed set Legends, including hits and rarities. In 2017, to celebrate her 50th anniversary in the music business, Lewis released Funky Bubbles, a 5-CD box set including rarities and live versions.
The music community is paying tribute to the late singer. “Really sad to hear this,” writes Ultravox frontman Midge Ure in a social post. “I had a massive crush on Linda Lewis. ‘Not a little girl anymore’ was a great song and beautifully sung by her.”
Really sad to hear this. I had a massive crush on Linda Lewis. ‘Not a little girl anymore’ was a great song and beautifully sung by her🙏 https://t.co/Q6QC3ADePl— midge ure💙 (@midgeure1) May 4, 2023
Mike Scott, frontman of British band The Waterboys, tweets: “Very sorry to hear about the death of British singer Linda Lewis. She was fabulous.”
Very sorry to hear about the death of British singer Linda Lewis. She was fabulous.— Mike Scott (@MickPuck) May 3, 2023
Sex Pistols bass player Glen Matlock added that Linda was “lovely.”
That’s very sad. Linda was lovely whenever I met her. 😢— Glen Matlock (@GlenMatlock) May 4, 2023
Armatrading writes, “I’m so sad to hear of the death of Linda Lewis. She had a beautiful voice and was a really lovely person.”
I’m so sad to hear of the death of Linda Lewis. She had a beautiful voice and was a really lovely person. RIP Linda xhttps://t.co/6UF7nsfkc4— Joan Armatrading (@ArmatradingJoan) May 4, 2023
French indie pop band Tahiti 80 remembers Lewis as a talent “like no one else.” A post from the band reads, “Very sad to hear of Linda Lewis’s passing. We were lucky enough to collaborate with Linda on Your Love Shines on Fosbury. She sang like no one else. I discovered her music in Japan and was instantly hooked. Collaborating with her was such a high.”
Very sad to hear of Linda Lewis’s passing. We were lucky enough to collaborate with Linda on Your Love Shines on Fosbury. She sang like no one else. I discovered her music in Japan and was instantly hooked. Collaborating with her was such a high ❤️✨ pic.twitter.com/mPhZGWjrlG— Tahiti 80 (@wearetahiti80) May 4, 2023
Gordon Lightfoot, the Canadian singer/songwriter behind the folk hits “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” “Sundown” and “If You Could Read My Mind,” died at age 84 on Monday (May 1), his family has announced.
“Gordon Lightfoot passed away this evening in a Toronto hospital at 7:30 p.m.,” a statement on Lightfoot’s Facebook page announced, promising “more to come.”
Earlier this month, Lightfoot had canceled his upcoming U.S. and Canada tour dates due to health issues. “Gordon Lightfoot announces the cancellation of his U.S. and Canadian concert schedule for 2023,” a statement read at the time. “The singer is currently experiencing some health related issues and is unable to confirm rescheduled dates at this time.”
Lightfoot’s six-decade career began in the early 1960s on the Toronto folk circuit and went worldwide in the 1970s thanks to a string of influential hits. He scored four top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 in the ’70s, starting with “If You Could Read My Mind,” which peaked at No. 5 in 1971. Next up were “Sundown” — his lone No. 1 — and “Carefree Highway” (No. 10), both from 1974’s Sundown — also his only No. 1 album on the Billboard 200.
Finally, there was the most epic song of his catalog, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which was released in 1976 and peaked at No. 2 on the Hot 100. The song told the story of the fatal sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald a year earlier in Lake Superior, which killed all 29 men aboard the Great Lakes freighter. “They might have split up or they might have capsized/ They may have broke deep and took water/ And all that remains is the faces and the names/ Of the wives and the sons and the daughters,” the poetic lyrics read.
Lightfoot was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2012. He was nominated for four Grammys but never won — best folk performance for Did She Mention My Name (1968), best pop vocal performance, male for “If You Could Read My Mind” (1971) and song of the year and best pop vocal performance, male for “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” (1976).
Lightfoot is survived by his wife, actress Kim Hasse, whom he married in 2011. He had six children from his past relationships, including two previous marriages.
Tim Bachman, guitarist and co-founder of Canadian rock band Bachman-Turner Overdrive, has died at age 71. The news was announced by Bachman’s son, Ryder, on Friday, who wrote in a Facebook post, “My Dad passed this afternoon. Thank You Everyone for the kind words. Grateful I got to spend some time with him at the end. Grab yer loved ones and hug em close, ya never know how long you have.”
In a previous post, Ryder revealed that he got a call from the care unit where his father was staying last Wednesday in which they informed him to pay his final respects after doctors found “cancer riddled all throughout his [Tim’s] brain.”
Tim Bachman co-founded the group commonly referred to as BTO in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1973 with his brothers, singer/guitarist Randy Bachman and drummer Robin Bachman; the latter died in January of this year at age 69. Tim performed on the band’s eponymous album and their breakthrough second collection, Bachman-Turner Overdrive II, which dropped in December of that year and featured two of the band’s most beloved, hard-charging hits, “Let It Ride” and Billboard Hot 100 No. 12 hit “Takin’ Care of Business,” which Tim sang backing vocals on in addition to playing second lead guitar.
His run in the brotherly band would be short-lived, however, as he left in early 1974 shortly after the second album dropped, reportedly due to singer Randy’s strict rules prohibiting drugs, alcohol and premarital sex on the road. He was replaced by Blair Thornton, who played on the band’s third album, 1974’s Not Fragile, which included the No. 1 single “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” and “Roll on Down the Highway.”
After a series of lineup changes — including the departure of singer Randy in 1977 — BTO reunited in 1983 with Randy and Tim leading the charge, with younger brother Robbie declining to participate. They released Bachman-Turner Overdrive in Sept. 1984 and a live album from their stint opening for Van Halen before Randy left again in 1986, which marked the last year of Tim Bachman’s run with the group as well. The group re-re-reformed in 1988 with Randy Bachman again taking lead along with Robbie on drums, but no Tim Bachman.
On Sunday, Ryder Bachman continued paying tribute to his dad, writing “The last words he said were, “I love you Paxton, Share the Music” and so I’ll honour Dad this afternoon by sharing songs, some he’s played a million times on stage; c’mon down and sing em with me, I bet u know the words.”
See Ryder Bachman’s post below.
Rapper MoneySign Suede has died after he was stabbed in a shower at a California prison, authorities and his attorney said.
Jaime Brugada Valdez, 22, of Huntington Park was found in the shower area of the Correctional Training Facility in Soledad State Prison shortly before 10 p.m. Tuesday, according to a statement from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Despite life-saving efforts, he died at a prison medical facility.
The agency didn’t detail his injuries but said his death was being investigated as a homicide.
“They said it was a stabbing to the neck,” Valdez’s attorney, Nicholas Rosenberg, told the Los Angeles Times.
Suede signed to Atlantic Records in 2021 and released his most recent album Parkside Baby in September, the Times said.
The Monterey County prison houses more than 4,000 minimum- and medium-security inmates.
Valdez was sent there after being sentenced in Riverside County in December to serve two years and eight months on two charges of being a convicted felon in possession of a gun, according to state corrections officials.
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Harry Belafonte died on Tuesday morning (April 25) at 96 in his Manhattan home from congestive heart failure. According to the actor, singer and producer’s longtime spokesperson, Ken Sunshine, Belafonte’s wife, Pamela Frank, was by his side, Billboard confirmed.
As news of his death spread, musicians remembered the artist and civil rights activist. John Legend, who spoke about Belafonte after learning of his passing at the Time100 Summit, wrote on Twitter, “I loved Mr Belafonte and I’m so grateful for his revolutionary work and his massive influence on our nation and the world … He worked so hard and did so much. May he get his well-deserved rest.”
Questlove shared a few words on his Instagram account, posting few snapshots from the late star’s lifetime. “Shining example of how to use your platform to make change in the world. Hi$ activi$m was crucial for the civil rights movement. His activism was key in the anti apartheid movement,” The Roots frontman wrote, adding that the late artist “represented many things to us: fun calypso music, iconic acting (I came to know him as #GeechieDan in the iconic #UptownSaturdayNight as a child)—-but most importantly he taught me to think in terms of ‘WE’ not ‘I.’”
Tony Bennett also shared a photo of himself with the “Day-O” singer and recalled the beginning of their friendship. “Met Harry in 1948 and knew then he would be a huge star. More than that, he fought for social justice and equality and never, ever gave up,” he wrote. “Our dearest of friends, he will be deeply missed by myself and so many for all he contributed to the world.”
See reactions to Harry Belafonte’s death, from Patti LaBelle, Bootsy Collins and more below.
I loved Mr Belafonte and I’m so grateful for his revolutionary work and his massive influence on our nation and the world. I found out that he passed just before this interview. He worked so hard and did so much. May he get his well-deserved rest. https://t.co/8NJqNaHGBS— John Legend (@johnlegend) April 25, 2023
The world has just lost a true great. A beautiful man inside and out. Rest peacefully sweet Harry Belafonte. You shall be terribly missed. pic.twitter.com/kOWOkyQSyH— Garbage (@garbage) April 25, 2023
Another brick in our fabric has risen, Mr. Harry Belafonte; 3-1-1927 – 4-25-2023)🙏was an American singer, activist, and actor. His breakthrough album Calypso (1956) was the first million-selling LP by a single artist. Best known for “The Banana Boat Song”. R.I.P.😥Bootsy!!!🏆🫡 pic.twitter.com/zEngkBSb0O— Bootsy Collins (@Bootsy_Collins) April 25, 2023
Harry Belafonte, the actor, producer and singer who made calypso music a national phenomenon with “Day-O” (The Banana Boat Song) and used his considerable stardom to draw attention to civil rights issues and injustices around the world, has died at 96.
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Belafonte, the Caribbean-American star who received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in November 2014, died on Tuesday morning (April 25) at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan due to congestive heart failure longtime spokesperson Ken Sunshine told the New York Times.
A master at blending pop, jazz and traditional West Indian rhythms, Belafonte released more than 30 albums during his career and received a Lifetime Achievement Grammy from the Recording Academy in 2000.
One of his three albums that charted in the top three in 1956, Calypso, which featured “Day-O” and another hit, “Jamaica Farewell,” topped the Billboard pop list for an incredible 31 weeks and is credited as the first LP to sell 1 million copies. In the late 1950s, Belafonte also made news as a rare non-white sex symbol and matinee idol.
In the Darryl F. Zanuck-produced Island in the Sun (1957), his politician character is romantically pursued by a rich white woman (Joan Fontaine), a storyline that created much controversy (and big box office) at the time.
And in two films released in 1959, he played a bank robber opposite a racist partner (Robert Ryan) in Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow and survived a nuclear disaster — and then battled Jose Ferrer over Swedish actress Inger Stevens — in The World, the Flesh and the Devil. Both movies were financed by his own company, HarBel Productions.
Following an acclaimed Carnegie Hall two-night stand in April 1959, Belafonte became the first African-American performer to win an Emmy (in 1960) for his Revlon Revue TV special, Tonight With Belafonte.
Belafonte — who found inspiration in such figures as Eleanor Roosevelt and Paul Robeson — helped round up celebrities for the Freedom March on Washington in 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his historic “I Have a Dream” speech. Later, he participated in the Alabama march from Selma and Montgomery (archive footage of him appears in the 2014 film Selma), performed in Paris and Stockholm for the first European-sponsored benefit concerts on behalf of King and sat alongside his widow at MLK’s funeral.
Belafonte was a driving force behind the nonprofit organization USA for Africa, which was launched to stamp out famine and spawned the mega-selling single “We Are the World,” which brought together such artists as Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Ray Charles. A year later, he masterminded the 1986 human-chain campaign Hands Across America, which benefited U.S. poor.
Belafonte, a Kennedy Center honoree in 1989, also was active in efforts to end apartheid in South Africa and to release Nelson Mandela.
“Tonight is no casual encounter for me,” Belafonte said during his Hersholdt acceptance speech. “Along with the trophy of honor, there is another layer that gives this journey this kind of wonderful Hollywood ending. To be rewarded by my peers for my work for human rights and civil rights and for peace — well, let me put this way: It powerfully mutes the enemy’s thunder.”
Harold George Belafonte Jr. was born in the New York on March 1, 1927. While a child, his mother, a cleaning lady, moved the family in 1936 from Harlem to her native Jamaica, where they lived for five years. After returning to New York, he attended George Washington High School but dropped out and enlisted in the U.S. Navy.
After he was discharged, Belafonte found work as a janitor’s assistant but dreamed of becoming an entertainer. For repairing a tenant’s apartment, he received two free tickets to the American Negro Theatre (“The universe opened up for me there,” he said), was accepted there and wound up winning the lead in the Sean O’Casey play Juno and the Paycock.
Belafonte later enrolled in the Actors Studio and Erwin Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research, where his fellow students included Tony Curtis, Walter Matthau, Bea Arthur, Elaine Stritch, Rod Steiger and Marlon Brando. He also began a lifelong friendship with another struggling actor, Sidney Poitier, whose parents were from the Bahamas.
At the New School, Belafonte’s performance of an original song, “Recognition,” won him applause and prompted him to consider a music career. He landed a job singing standards like “Pennies From Heaven” for $70 a week at the Royal Roost, a New York nightclub, and his original two-week contract was extended to 22.
He bought a club in Greenwich Village and gravitated to folk music as the best way to combine his acting and singing talents. He had a three-month gig at the Village Vanguard, made his movie debut as a school principal opposite Dorothy Dandridge in Bright Road (1953) and in 1954 won a Tony Award for his performance in the musical revue John Murray Anderson’s Almanac.
In 1955, Belafonte starred in Otto Preminger’s film adaptation of Oscar Hammerstein’s Carmen Jones, again with Dandridge, and was a Broadway sensation in the song- and dance-filled 3 for Tonight.
After signing with RCA Records, Belafonte released two albums in 1956 that shot him to stardom: Belafonte, which also made it to No. 1 on the Billboard charts, and the West Indian-flavored Calypso. (Mark Twain and Other Folk Favorites, which was released in 1954, leap-frogged to No. 3 that year.)
“When I sing the ‘Banana Boat Song,’ the song is a work song,” Belafonte said in a 2011 interview with NPR. “It’s about men who sweat all day long, and they are underpaid, and they’re begging the tallyman to come and give them an honest count — counting the bananas that I’ve picked, so I can be paid. And sometimes, when they couldn’t get money, they’ll give them a drink of rum.
“There’s a lyric in the song that says, ‘Work all night on a drink of rum.’ People sing and delight and dance and love it, but they don’t really understand unless they study the song that they’re singing a work song that’s a song of rebellion.”
In 1956, Belafonte broke a 39-year record when he attracted a crowd of 25,000 to Lewisohn Stadium, an open-air auditorium on the campus of City College of New York since razed. He played The Palace in New York for 14 weeks and the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles for four, filling the venue to capacity at each performance (he released a live double album from a show there in 1963). And in 1971, Belafonte played a record 16-week engagement at L.A.’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
“When Harry Belafonte strides out of semi-darkness into the spotlight of stage center at the Palace Theatre, the total effect will be theatrical but simple — deceptively simple,” The New York Times wrote in 1959. “The open-necked cotton shirt he wears, the lights which bathe his easy grace, the projected scenery, the musical effects, none of this will be there because of happenstance.”
Belafonte used his clout to bring African-American entertainers into the spotlight by producing The Strollin’ Twenties, a 1966 musical remembrance of Harlem in its heyday for CBS that featured Duke Ellington, Sammy Davis Jr., Diahann Carroll, Nipsey Russell and Joe Williams, and the 1967 ABC project A Time for Laughter, which showcased comics Richard Pryor, Redd Foxx and Moms Mabley.
In 1968, Belafonte appeared with blond, blue-eyed English singer Petula Clark on her NBC special. During one song, Petula touched Belafonte’s forearm — the first time a black man and white woman touched on primetime television, producer-director Steve Binder recalled in a 2004 interview with the Archive of American Television — and that contact ignited a national controversy.
Five months later, Belafonte found himself in the eye of the storm again when, on the season-opening installment of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, he performed an extended calypso medley as news footage of the riotous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago played on a green screen behind him.
CBS took out the song “and inserted instead a commercial for [Richard] Nixon for president … we were furious,” Tommy Smothers recalled in a 2000 interview. “That piece was never seen on television.”
Belafonte co-starred with Poitier in Buck and the Preacher (1972), a Western that was produced by their respective production companies, and teamed again with his pal in Uptown Saturday Night (1974), this time playing a gang leader.
He played famed football coach Eddie Robinson in the 1981 NBC telefilm Grambling’s White Tiger, was a bigot in White Man’s Burden (1995) and appeared as mobster Seldom Seen in Robert Altman’s Kansas City (1996).
He published a memoir, My Song, in 2011.
Belafonte was married three times — to nurse Marguerite Byrd, dancer Julie Robinson and photographer Pamela Frank, who survives him, as do his daughters Shari, Gina (both actresses) and Adrienne and son David (a producer).
In the NPR interview, he remembered what his mother had told him when he was 5, something that shaped his life forever.
“She was tenacious about her dignity not being crushed,” he said. “And one day she said to me — she was talking about coming back from the day when she couldn’t find work — fighting back tears, she said, ‘Don’t ever let injustice go by unchallenged.’ And that really became a deep part of my life’s DNA. A lot of people say to me, ‘When as an artist did you decide to become an activist?’ I say to them, ‘I was long an activist before I became an artist.’ ”
Duane Byrge contributed to this report.