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 Belfonte’s rise to stardom.
From The San Diego Union, Friday, June 12, 1959:
POINT OF VIEW
All About Harry — In Retrospect
By Donald Freeman, The San Diego Union’s Radio-TV Editor
It has been roughly 6 1/2 years since the first time I say 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.”
However, in 1952, at the Thunderbird Hotel, Belafonte was not even a headliner. He was the ing act in a bill headed by the comic, Henny Youngman, this curious situation being one which I greatly doubt will ever again be duplicated.
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, Dina 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.
Here was a young man—he was barely 26—with a kind of classic bravura and the shattering authority to lift you right out of your seats.
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 Leadbellys 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 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 an Billie Holiday. And there, I thinking is at least one wellspring of his strength.
And why, I wondered, didn’t he play the guitar? Wasn’t it against the law, practically, for a folk singer not to accompany himself on the guitar?
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.”
“I’d like something distinctive—like, say, ‘The Wayfaring Stranger’ or The Wandering Minstrel,’ ” Belafonte said one night.
Without too much prescience, I suggesting that soon the name, Harry Belafonte, would be enough. Warily , he said: “I hope so.”
Belafonte, who’ll appear in concert tonight and tomorrow at Balboa Park Bowl, has been on TV’s biggest shows, starred in four movies and several stage productions. His records sell more than Elvis Presley’s.
I’ve heard that 20 per cent of his income goes to the Belafonte Foundation of Music and Arts, a scholarship organization—as he says—”to get young people with talent out from under the hammer.”
Once, as a kid, Belafonte wanted desperately to be a jockey. To keep from growing he smoked rope and starved himself. But this is one ambition that was thwarted. He grew and grew. And, if you want to know, he still is.
