VERY SAD ‘DAY-O’
Calypso songwriting star Irving Burgie dies at 95
Brooklyn-born songwriter Irving Burgie, whose songs sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, found his greatest success with a calypso classic penned for Harry Belafonte — and resurrected by “Beetlejuice.”
Burgie, who died Friday at the age of 95, catapulted Belafonte to the top of the 1956 music charts with the irresistible single “Day-O” as the pair launched a collaboration that eventually included more than 30 songs over three best-selling albums.
Thirty-two years later, “Day-O” resurfaced during a memorable dinner party scene in the hit movie “Beetlejuice” before returning yet again this year in the Broadway production of the Tim Burton-directed classic. The popular hit single was also used to rouse snoozing U.S. astronauts orbiting in outer space in 1990 and 1997.
Burgie, known professionally as Lord Burgess, was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2007 and wrote the lyrics to the national anthem for his mother’s homeland of Barbados after the island nation achieved independence on Nov. 30, 1966.
Among the artists who recorded his songs were Jimmy Buffett, the Kingston Trio, Brian Wilson, Carly Simon, Chuck Berry and Sam Cooke.
Burgie collaborated with his friend Belafonte across three albums of material: “Calypso,” with its hit single “Day-O,” followed by “Belafonte Sings of the Caribbean” and “Jump Up the Calypso.”
He wrote eight of the 11 songs on the breakout “Calypso” album, the first million-selling LP by a solo artist in history, and penned the Christmas classic “Mary’s Boy Child.”
“Irving Burgie wrote brilliant lyrics that found their way into the ears of people all over the world,” said one of his biggest fans, poet Maya Angelou.
Burgie’s death was announced Saturday by Barbados Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley at the nation’s Independence Day Parade, and a moment of silence was observed in his honor.
As a kid, Burgie was a stickball player and a fan of the beach at Coney Island. He played in a local drum and bugle corps, but never took music seriously until he returned from serving in an all-black U.S. Army battalion during World War II.
Using the G.I. Bell, he majored in voice at the prestigious Juilliard School and learned how to play guitar before launching his prodigious career as a singer/guitarist at venues like the Village Vanguard in Manhattan.
Burgie soon found his niche as a songwriter, and an annual scholarship in his name is awarded annually by the ASCAP Foundation to an AfricanAmerican songwriter from New York City.