Songwriter made millions from Day-O and other calypso hits for Harry Belafonte
The song was simple enough, opening with a distant, a cappella rumble from singer Harry Belafonte. But with its swinging percussion, yearning refrain about a dockworker finishing his night shift, and colourful lyrics about a ‘‘beautiful bunch o’ ripe banana’’ and ‘‘deadly black tarantula’’, the 1956 single Day-O (The Banana Boat Song) helped launch a calypso craze around the world.
Adapted from a traditional Jamaican calland-response tune, the song was in large part the creation of Irving Burgie, a halfBarbadian, New York-born songwriter who wrote or co-wrote more than 30 songs for Belafonte, drawing on
Caribbean folk music for hits including
Jamaica
Farewell and
Island in the Sun. Burgie, who has died aged 95, also sang under the stage name Lord Burgess, penned a well-received off-Broadway musical and wrote the lyrics to Barbados’ national anthem.
Although he was surrounded by Caribbean folk music as a boy, Burgie began his music career singing German lieder and French and Italian arias. The American folk musical revival of the 1940s and 50s led him to reconnect with his roots, and he went on to adapt countless Caribbean songs. By the time he connected with Belafonte, he was being hailed as ‘‘the black Alan Lomax – a walking library of songs from the islands’’, by novelist and screenwriter William Attaway.
The trio united for Belafonte’s Calypso, which spent 31 weeks atop the Billboard charts, outsold two Elvis Presley albums and is generally considered the first millionselling record by a single artist in the United States. Eight of the album’s 11 songs were credited to Burgie, including Jamaican Farewell, which was later covered by Chuck Berry, Jimmy Buffett and Sam Cooke.
But it was the album’s opener, Day-O, that became an international sensation. The single reached No 5 on the US charts and spawned five Top 40 versions by other artists within the next year.
An earlier rendition was recorded by Trinidadian singer Edric Connor, under the name Day Dah Light, and Burgie said he wrote his version in 1954, inspired by chants of Jamaican dockworkers loading bananas. He, Belafonte and Attaway polished the song in a suite at the Waldorf Astoria hotel, and all three were listed as songwriters, with Burgie claiming primary credit in interviews.
‘‘None of us had any idea, when we recorded it, that it would be spun off as a single, much less rocket up the charts,’’ Belafonte wrote in his memoir, My Song. ‘‘The fact was that, after I had pushed RCA into using only Caribbean songs, we found ourselves one or two songs short, so we threw in Day-O as filler.’’
The song was later sampled by singer
Jason Derulo and rapper Lil Wayne, and covered by legions of artists. Astronauts on the space shuttle Atlantis woke to Day-O, and dinnerparty guests in the 1988 movie Beetlejuice were forced, by ghosts, to join hands and dance along.
Burgie thrived off royalties. He said earlier this year that he ‘‘made about $20 million over 50 years’’, although in other interviews he said he had unwittingly signed over many of his publishing rights, which reverted to his name after 28 years.
‘Itook a trip around the world in 1958, and [Day-O] was No 1 everywhere,’’ he told Billboard magazine in 1997. ‘‘I heard it in Japan, Africa, Europe, Scandinavia. I guess it sort of hit a responsive chord in people [with the lyric] ‘Daylight come and [me wan’] go home.’ For people who had been working all day, it became sort of an office cry.’’
Irving Louis Burgie was born in Brooklyn. His father was a day labourer at a
slaughterhouse, his mother a seamstress and domestic worker. ‘‘I think I was in the third grade when I found out that Brooklyn was not in the West Indies,’’ he later told Canada’s Globe and Mail, recalling his upbringing in a neighbourhood of immigrants.
After working with Belafonte into the early 1960s, he made his off-Broadway theatrical debut with Ballad for Bimshire, which took its name from a nickname for Barbados. ‘‘Mr Burgie’s songs almost cover the gamut – they are sweet, nostalgic, torch, comic and ebullient,’’ wrote the New York Times.
Over the decades, Burgie performed only occasionally. In 1996, he recorded his first fulllength solo album, Island in the Sun: The Songs of Irving Burgie, featuring his own version of Day-O.
Burgie’s wife of nearly 50 years, Page Turner, died in 2003, and his second wife, Vivia Heron, died in 2007. Survivors include two sons from his first marriage.
He wrote the Barbadian national anthem by chance, after being asked to provide the lyrics while on holiday there. On Saturday, the island celebrated its Independence Day, with Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley calling for a moment of silence in Burgie’s honour. – Washington Post
‘‘I took a trip around the world in 1958, and [Day-O] was No 1 everywhere. For people who had been working all day, it became sort of an office cry.’’