HARRY BELAFONTE - “Mary’s Boy Child”
(22nd November 1957)
Elder statesman of Caribbean music he may be but Belafonte is still best known in Britain for this and the “Banana Boat Song”. I’ll give a pass to most music at Christmas but this arrangement is too slow and syrupy to really enjoy, despite the richness of Belafonte’s voice. He has a proud record as an anti-racist activist - perhaps ironically, Belafonte’s biggest record shows perfectly the acceptable limits of ‘blackness’ in British pop of the time. You can hear a Jamaican tint to his accent throughout the song, but the enunciation is always perfect, finickity almost, even when the lyrics bear traces of patois. “Them find no place to born she child”, for instance is sung with all the pace and vigour of the Queen’s Speech.
The effect is an odd, antique one. Almost ten years after the Windrush passengers arrived, this cosy exoticism was clearly Britain’s preferred version of black pop. But with another four decades passed, Belafonte’s curious delivery seems patronising to its origins and - more slyly - to its white audience. A comically genteel version of how those funny colonials talk, yes yes, but doesn’t that careful consonant-counting remind you of how Brits tend to speak - Ver-y. Slow-ly. In. Eng-lish - whenever they meet Johnny Foreigner? And what does that say about the record’s large and eager audience and which end of the stick it got? 3
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wichita lineman on August 17th, 2008
I’d never thought of it like this, gently patronising one and all. It’s a good point. But I’m not sure this wasn’t a preferred clipped, enunciated style of singing that extended to Johnny Mathis, then Arthur Lee. It can also be heard in Jamaican recordings like Derrick Harriott’s Do I Worry from some years later.
Tom, I’m intrigued to know if you’ve revised yr opinion on this ‘report’ as you have on other 45s from the 50s. I think it has a tangible festive magic worth a 7, and certainly find it better than Boney M’s slouchy, joyless version.
DJ Punctum on August 18th, 2008
Pretty patronising to suggest, without substantive evidence and particularly in view of Belafonte’s subsequent political activities, that he was singing like this deliberately. You might as well say that Nat “King” Cole was pandering.
wichita lineman on August 18th, 2008
I think yr right, and I think Harry sings it quite beautifully. Nat’s odd pronunciation has often baffled me, “a blassom fell”, “are you rill mona lisa?” etc. What’s that all about?
DJ Punctum on August 18th, 2008
It’s those Alabama vowels, I guess…