Daylight come, he wan’ go home
Composer Irving Burgie, who co-wrote “Day-O,” dies at 95.
Composer Irving Burgie, who helped popularize Caribbean music and cowrote the enduring Harry Belafonte hit “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song),” has died at the age of 95.
At the Barbados Independence Day Parade on Saturday, Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley announced Burgie had died Friday.
“Day-O,” written in 1952, has been ubiquitous, with appearances in the film and Broadway musical “Beetlejuice” as well as an E-Trade commercial. “Day-O” was the wake-up call for the astronauts on two space shuttle missions in the 1990s. When a superstar list of music royalty gathered to film the “We Are the World” video in 1985, most burst into a playful version of “Day-O” in between takes. Lil’ Wayne used a sample of “Day-O” in his “6 Foot 7 Foot.”
According to the Songwriters Hall of Fame, Burgie’s songs have sold more than 100 million records throughout the world. Many were recorded by Belafonte, including eight of the 11 songs on Belafonte’s 1956 album “Calypso,” the first album to sell more than 1 million copies in the U.S. Burgie also penned songs for the
Kingston Trio (“The Seine,” “El Matador,” and “The Wanderer”) and for other groups.
His “Jamaica Farewell” has been recorded by Belafonte, Jimmy Buffett, Carly Simon and others. Others who have sung his songs include Mantovani, Miriam Makeba and Julio Iglesias. Burgie’s classic Caribbean standards include such familiar hits as “Island in the Sun” and “Angelina,” and he was co-writer of “Mary’s Boy Child.” He also wrote the 1963 off-Broadway musical “Ballad for Bimshire.”
Burgie served in an allblack U.S. Army battalion in World War II and used GI Bill funds to pay for music studies. Burgie studied at the Juilliard School of Music, the University of Arizona and USC. He became a folk singer using the stage name Lord Burgess and performed the circuit between New York and Chicago, making his New York nightclub debut at the Village Vanguard in 1954.
After announcing his death, Mottley asked for a moment of silence for the Brooklyn-born Burgie, who wrote the lyrics to the national anthem of Barbados — his mother’s homeland.
“We write our names on history’s page/With expectations great/Strict guardians of our heritage/Firm craftsmen of our fate,” go some of the lines of the anthem.