The mojo of Belafonte’s blues…

Harry Belafonte

Harold George Bellanfanti Jr. (1927-2023)

requiescat in pace

I realize that Harry Belafonte isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, and the blues may not make you tingle, I get that part, too…

So, just saying, there’s a side of Belafonte you may not know, and that’s the gritty, gutsy, smoke-gets-in-your-eyes, I-gambled-on-your-love kind of blues…

I realize most folks don’t talk like this these days, but Belafonte Sings The Blues is my favorite album of all time, and I do mean “album,” I bought this vinyl 33⅓ record in a cardboard jacket sometime in the early 1960s, when I was in high school. I thought reading the jacket notes was cool, I read them time after time, Nat Hentoff wrote the notes for this one, in the old formal style, very articulate, erudite, Hentoff assumed readers would understand his references to blues structure, jazz origins, and he used big words like “exultantly” and “wryly unconquerable spirit”…it’s a re-education to read the notes again.

I’ve listened to Belafonte’s blues all my adult life, and listening to these cuts again now is a re-generation of the spirit, I know all the words, I can sing the nuances, I experiment with feeling the hurt in “I gambled on your love, baby, and got a losing hand…”

I just slump into Belafonte’s mood when he sings “The Way That I Feel”:

This is the way that I do feel,

I feel it everywhere I go…

I feel just like a engine

that lost its driving wheel.

This is the mojo of the blues, the inconvenient truth, and the inconvenient love.

This is the music of mellow desperation. There is so much innocent sadness in Harry’s voice.

Of course, “the blues” are blue, but there are blues and then there are blues, and there are shades of blue. Belafonte’s blues have the stiffening truth of losing love the second time around and the softening slump of being helpless with the ripening feelings that rebuke and tempt the heart…

Blues is about wanting it, but not having it. Blues is about touching it once or twice, and letting it go.

Blues is not about the courtly idea of unrequited love. Blues is about finding and feeling love, and listening with your heart as your lover’s footsteps fade beyond the door that will not close.

I’ve written some poems to express my sense of Belafonte’s mood in this music, here’s one of them:

“…ain’t no rhyme…

Music ain’t no poem,

you say?

Ain’t singing out no poem,

you say?

…but catch a tune—

you see,

that’s what a poet can do,

like a songwriter, too…

…and hear the notes—

a poet grabs them

from the air,

and makes them into words,

and a singer chews a poem,

and makes a song with his lips,

ain’t no denyin’

ain’t no rhyme for “Belafonte,” see,

no use tryin’,

but he sure can sing the right words…

July 13, 2017

Thanks again, Harry.

Original album, Belafonte Sings The Blues, released by RCA in 1958.

* * * * * *

A poem about the right thing

…and the lesser incarnation…

“Vanity”

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