That Harry Belafonte album and me

Today we lost Harry Belafonte, an artist and human rights activist—two of my favourite things. For me, it was one particular album of his that I always think of, and it wasn’t even one of his most successful.

One of the first albums I remember clearly was his sixth album, and least successful up to that point: To Wish You a Merry Christmas, released for Christmas 1958 (I was born the following January). His previous five albums had all been (at least) Top 3, and two were Number One, but that one was his least successful of the entire 1950s (it only reached 125 in the USA). However, Christmas records are seldom big sellers, so that’s not a huge surprise. Even so, of all the Christmas records my parents played when I was growing up, that’s one I connnected to the most strongly.

Interestingly, the earliest release of the album didn’t include his 1956 Christmas single, “Mary’s Boy Child”, which hit Number 12 in the USA. I distinctly remember my parents talking about the song in the late 1960s or very early 1970s. My dad wanted to listen to it, saw it wasn’t on the album, and was confused because he was sure they owned it. It was sometime later that it turned up in a boxed set of 45rpm-size records, because they’d bought the single version.

The song was added to a 1962 re-issue of the album. There was another reissue in 1976, named Belafonte’s Christmas, which was basically the 1962 edition with sides one and two switched. In 2001, a CD re-issue called Harry Belafonte Christmas included five bonus tracks.

I bought a CD version of the album while I was still living in the USA. My CD is the 1976 version, but using the 1962 album art. According to the CD liner notes—a phrase I don’t think I’ve ever used on this blog—the versionI have was remastered in 1990. There are, of course, no bonus tracks, unless you count “Mary’s Boy Child”.

I’d missed the record ever since I grew up and no longer had the album, so when I found the CD I was excited. I brought it to New Zealand with me and found out that Nigel wasn’t all that familiar with the Belafonte version: He knew Boney M’s 1978 version, ”Mary's Boy Child – Oh My Lord”, and I, as was often the case, had never heard that version (this could be because Boney M’s version reached Number 8 in New Zealand, but only 85 in the USA).

I eventually stopped playing Christmas music, for no particular reason, so I seldom played To Wish You a Merry Christmas. However, every once in awhile, I still break out in a few lines from any one of the songs, including “Mary’s Boy Child”. I guess the album became a part of me, not just my life.

I don’t remember how much, if anything, I knew of Belafonte’s activism when I was very young, or when I first learned about it. It’s probable that in the 1960s my parents might not have been supportive of it, and, if so, I would’ve followed their lead. But at a point I don’t remember I came to appreciate the fierceness of his determined spirit, something that, as an activist, I greatly admired. I wish more people were like him.

There will be plenty of good and profound remembrances of Harry Belafonte, many eloquently talking about his music, his acting, and/or his activism, but my personal enduring connection is mainly that one long-ago album that was a big part of the soundtrack of my life, literally there from my earliest days. To this day, I still find his vocals and the arrangements, old-fashioned as they may now be, to be as comforting and soothing as if it was a lullaby sung to me by my own parents.

Not every album can affect someone for their entire lives, and not every artist can make that sort of connection. But Harry Belafonte managed that with that album that I’ve known by heart ever since I could understand language. That’s reason enough for me to feel sad at his death, and I certainly do. So much has changed over the decades—my parents are both gone, and now Harry is, too—but thanks to recorded music, I’ll always have this one thing, this one album, to be with me until my own time is done.

Thanks, Mr. Belafonte, for everything, but especially for that one album that became part of me and my life.