Top Forty with their versions these range from rich and enveloping (the jazz singer Sarah Vaughn) to unsettlingly polite (the folk-pop band The Tarriers). Incredibly, in 1957, five more artists made it onto the U.S. “Day-O” is so suffused with joy and pathos-that age-old human mishmash-that almost anybody with an actively beating heart sounds awesome singing it. “Me wan’ go home” is perhaps as universal a plea for freedom as we’ve got. ![]() It is an infinitely applicable refrain, no matter what your metaphorical banana might be, or which cocktail seizes your imagination come quitting time. “Daylight come and me wan’ go home,” his chorus chants. Tally Man, tally me banana,” Belafonte implores. By 1890, the sugar trade in Jamaica had been toppled by an assortment of wars, acts of God, and political upheavals, and bananas had become the country’s primary export. It’s a call-and-response work song, likely concocted spontaneously by overnight dockworkers cramming bunches of bananas onto ships, hot-footing it away from loose spiders, and fantasizing about rum. The song was written sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, though to suggest that “Day-O” was formally composed in any sort of premeditated way might be overstating things. His voice bounces and echoes as it moves closer. The instrumentation is spare and creeping. Belafonte-who was born in Harlem in 1927, but lived with his grandmother in a wooden house on stilts in Aboukir, a mountain village in Jamaica, for a good chunk of his childhood-bellows the title in a clipped island pitch. Sixty-one years ago, in 1956, Harry Belafonte recorded a version of the Jamaican folk song “ Day-O,” for his third studio album, “Calypso.” It opens with a distant and eager rumbling-as if something dark and hulking were approaching from a remote horizon. A new anthology of the work of Harry Belafonte, pictured here in the nineteen-forties or fifties, reiterates his standing in American music.
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