The iconic 'Day-O' singer passed away at his home in New York City, according to longtime spokesperson Ken Sunshine.
Belafonte was born Harold George Bellanfanti Jr. in New York's Harlem, in 1927, the son of Harold George Bellanfanti Sr., a Martinique-born chef, and Melvine Bellanfanti, a Jamaica-born housekeeper. Between the ages of 8 and about 13, he lived in Jamaica with his mother, returning to the U.S. to continue high school before he served in the Navy during World War II.
Belafonte thereafter focused on vernacular and folk music, much of it expressions of the Black and Caribbean experience. Within a year, he had a hit single, "Matilda," which would stay in his repertoire for decades. By 1954, he had hit No. 3 on the album charts with "Mark Twain and Other Folk Favorites."
It also established calypso, an African Caribbean folk blend rooted in Trinidad and Tobago, as an enduring component of the American music scene, earning him the nickname the "King of Calypso.
Seeking to take control of his career, Belafonte mounted his own movie production in 1959, "Odds Against Tomorrow," a gritty film noir written by the blacklisted screenwriter Abe Polonsky and backed by a John Lewis score. By the early 1960s, Belafonte had become a force in the civil rights movement. Already a confidant to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., he campaigned for Sen. John F. Kennedy during the 1960 presidential campaign, and after Kennedy was elected, he became an intermediary between King and Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
Belafonte supported a wide variety of civil rights causes throughout the 1960s — as a main financier of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he even flew to Mississippi to join the organization's Mississippi Freedom Summer campaign in 1964. Belafonte sang in the chorus on the record, and during its recording, the assembled superstars — among them Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, Bruce Springsteen, Diana Ross and Bob Dylan — spontaneously broke out into "Day-O " in tribute.
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