Column looks back at Harry Belafonte’s rising star
The late Union entertainment columnist Don Freeman first saw Harry Belafonte perform in 1952 on a bill with comedian Henny Youngman at the Thunderbird Hotel in Las Vegas.
Belafonte, the activist and entertainer who died Tuesday, made an impression on Freeman, who recognized the young singer as an extraordinary artist. “Let me put it this way,” Freeman wrote at the time, “Belafonte’s folk singing provides the listener with an emotional feeling akin to seeing a deeply moving play.”
In this 1959 column, Freeman looked back at at that first encounter and Belafonte’s rise to stardom.
From The San Diego Union, Friday, June 12, 1959:
ALL ABOUT HARRY — IN RETROSPECT
By Donald Freeman, The San Diego Union’s Radio-TV Editor
It has been roughly 61⁄2 years since the first time I saw Harry Belafonte. This would be in the last weeks of October, in 1952, when Belafonte had popped up at the Thunderbird in Las Vegas, which was not exactly the most fashionable hotel on the Vegas Strip.
Right now, Belafonte is unquestionably the most popular folk singer ever heard in America and certainly the highest paid. He hauls in not too much less than a million dollars a year. Bing Crosby has called him “a great, great artist with an illimitable future.”
In those days, even with the raw edges in his delivery and all the small uncertainties, Belafonte was brilliant. It was impossible not to be caught by the genuine tenderness he invested into “Scarlet Ribbons,” a song which had previously been identified loosely with, of all people, Dinah Shore.
Belafonte singing “Ma-tilda,” a serio-comic piece about betrayed love, was wonderful stuff and incomparably fresh. His “Mark Twain” was showmanship on an extraordinary level and his “Suzanne,” a blues rhythm song, really gripped you by the throat.
Taken as nightclub entertainment, it was an electrifying act, just about the best I’d ever seen anywhere. It was — and I approach the term gingerly — a work of art.
I had seen folk singers before and I’m afraid I had been prejudiced against the lot — not the Josh Whites and the Burl Ives or the Lead Bellys or Billy Broonzys or Sam Hintons, but the self-conscious fellows gently twanging out their quaint little tunes.
However, I had never seen anyone like Belafonte, with this bone-deep sense of showmanship and all that fire, which you see only in the very best of actors. Belafonte is also a very earthy performer and those you can count on your fingers.
Afterward, I remember talking about the source of Belafonte’s music. He mentioned that he was a big jazz fan and that his favorite performers weren’t folk singers, but jazz stars such as Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. And there, I remember thinking is at least one wellspring of his strength.
Belafonte pointed to his guitarist, and smiled. “Millard can’t sing,” Belafonte said, “and I can’t play the guitar, so we work together.”
Actually, Belafonte explained, when he turned to folk singing in the first place, combing the Library of Congress for material, tracking down old songs on the road gangs and the storefront churches, he did take a flyer at the guitar.
“Then I realized I was just blindly bowing to some unwritten law,” Belafonte said. “Why immobilize my hands?”
Some months later, Belafonte appeared at the Cocoanut Grove and by now he was fast on the rise. All the same, he expressed some reservations when the posters identified him, I think, as “a balladeer.”
Without too much prescience, I remember suggesting that soon the name, Harry Belafonte, would be enough. Warily, he said: “I hope so.”