Harry Belafonte became an international sensation in the 1950s taking the popularity of Calypso music up with him. The album did it was Calypso, and the song, “Day-O (Banana Boat Song)”.
Most of the songs on the album are love songs that range from tender to jovial, but these are inconsequential in the light of “Day-O” and “Star-O” both opposite and necessary sides of same coin.
The intrigue is in the subject matter: a story of a poor Jamaican banana picker who works all night in squalid and dangerous conditions. The power is in the sweet delivery of the lead vocals and backing instrumentation countered by the detached indefatigable chorus of “Daylight come and me wan’ go home.” The anguish can be heard of generations of field workers in the “six foot, seven foot, bunch” refrain as it builds in quick succession as if it is a field recording of workers singing energetically just to keep themselves going to get to the next day ad infinitum; working to live and only living in order to work waiting for the cycle to break since they do not have the time to break it otherwise because of the amount of time and energy it takes to earn the amount of money that they do; working on a “drink of rum” to kill hunger (and other) pains to get the meager pay for doing back breaking work.
The couplet, “A beautiful bunch, a ripe banana / a highly deadly black tarantula,” perfectly depicts the visual of the black field workers amid the ripe, beautiful, colorful, profitable, nourishing banana bunches. The “deadly” aspect of the phrase refers literally to the immediate threat from wandering tarantulas feasting insects attracted to the bananas, and it can be construed inversely as the owner/manager of the fields who walks among the “a beautiful bunch, [and] ripe” workers whom are the prize of life instead of the bananas, which are the actual cheap commodities that can be lost or gained without much pain or tumult.
For all of this, and any other meaning that can be teased out of it, “Day-O” is one of the greatest pop songs of the 20th century regardless of genre, era, etc. despite Belafonte never actually being a field worker. An even more chilling a capella version can be heard on At Carnegie Hall (1959), which closer mimics the possible source material with the stringed and percussion instruments left out. “Star-O” works only as a companion song with a cute line, “Woman sweet, she take your money,” that ties “Day-O” in with the rest of the love songs on the album.
Belafonte’s “Jamaica Farewell” could have made him a star with the jazz club crowd. The jovial vocals and backing instrumentation could have done it too, and they probably had a lot to do with making Calypso the most popular selling album in recorded history through by its release. His looks and connections could have done all of this as well. “Day-O” would have, and should have, put Belafonte on the same socially conscious pedestal that most put Bob Marley, the quintessential voice of Jamaica and hero of the salt of the earth.
A morally reprehensible sampling of the “six foot, seven foot, eight foot bunch” refrain was used by the extremely banal rapper Lil Wayne on his album Tha Carter IV as a front for another song about putting “bitches” in their place, getting money, etc.
Comments