My Song by Harry Belafonte

Author:Harry Belafonte [Belafonte, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography
ISBN: 978-0-307-70048-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-09-02T04:00:00+00:00

I was plunging deeper into the movement, but I hadn’t let my day job slide. Miriam Makeba was with me on tour that whole summer and fall, from an outdoor concert at the Forest Hills Music Festival (in that all-white enclave with housing covenants against blacks), where we sang in pouring rain while the band took cover, to a sold-out three-week stand at L.A.’s Greek Theatre, to Harrah’s in Lake Tahoe, where the waiting list for our opening-night concert had 1,700 names. I had a new album out, Jump Up Calypso, that became one of my best sellers and my sixth gold album. But I was still taking care not to let calypso dominate my repertoire, which was why for my next album, Midnight Special, I mixed up folk and blues, and in so doing made a little music history with a very young Bob Dylan.

For the title track, I’d planned to have Sonny Terry play harmonica. That was an easy choice; Sonny was the world’s greatest blues harp player, best known for his amazing collaborations with blues guitarist Brownie McGhee. Sonny and Brownie had shared stages with me that summer, and I adored them both. But with an orchestra due to assemble the next day, I got news that Sonny was sick in bed in Mississippi. Millard Thomas, my steady guitarist—the one who’d nearly burned down a hotel in St. Louis with both of us in it in the early days—said he had a young guy who could take Sonny’s place. The next day, a skinny, scraggly-haired kid no more than twenty years old sauntered into the studio with a brown paper bag. He emptied it onto a table, and four or five harmonicas fell out. “Mind if I hear you all run through it one time?” he asked. “Midnight Special” was a standard blues song, but sure, I said, why not?

When we’d done our run-through, Bob nodded, chose one of the harmonicas, and asked for a glass of water. We started in again. Just as we reached his part, Bob dipped his harmonica into the glass of water, then shook off the water and began to blow a very funky harp. When he was finished, we listened to the playback and nodded. It was right on the money.

We told him as much, but the kid didn’t linger. I’m not sure he even shook hands good-bye. On his way out, he tossed the harmonica he’d just played into the trash. I thought, Well, he certainly didn’t think much of that song. I had the sense he viewed me as an elder, and maybe not a worthy one at that. Two years later, he played a few songs at the March on Washington. He sang with Joan Baez, whom I associated with a nasty put-down of me in a Time cover story on emerging folksingers. Whoever called me “Belaphony” in the story was too cowardly to be quoted by name, and maybe it wasn’t Baez, but she was the folkie on the cover, so I blamed her! And I assumed her buddy Dylan probably felt the same way.

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