If you want to catch someone out with a good quiz question, especially if they think they know their music, ask them who had the first UK hit version of the Banana Boat Song. Or, you could ask them what was the title of Shirley Bassey’s first UK hit. There’s your answer, who would have guessed that? I wonder how many people reading this will remember who reprised the intro to that song at Live Aid in 1985? I do, I was there.
The song’s writing credits are a mystery because different labels have different things, but it’s believed this song originated in the early 20th century when it was sung by Jamaican dock workers who loaded bananas onto ships during the night. It was done at night because the heat was too intense during the day and would ruin the fruit. They didn’t have sophisticated refrigerated transport in those days. Back then, the chant was known as Day Dah Light (Banana Loader’s Song). It can be likened to the men working on a chain gang who would spontaneously burst into song. No one put pen to paper even if they had one. The loaders clearly weren’t very well rewarded hence the lyric, ‘Work all night on a drink of rum’ They probably did get a bit more than that.
By daylight, they had to wait for the tallyman to arrive so he could count the bananas, well presumably the crates rather than the individual bananas, before the dockers could go home for some well-earned rest – ‘Daylight come and me wan’ go home’.
The song was first recorded by Edric Connor & The Caribbeans. Edric was a Trinidadian singer who came to England in 1948 to record the album Song for Jamaica which was design for westerners to understand the culture and customs of the people from the Caribbean.
In the U.S the song was big business, probably because it’s nearer to the Caribbean than the UK is, many covered the song, firstly in 1954 by Louise Bennett and a couple of years later came versions by Sarah Vaughan whose was the first under the title Banana Boat Song, the Fontane Sisters, The Tarriers – whose was the first to make the Billboard Hot 100 reaching number four and number 15 in the UK. Harry Belafonte, who suited the song best because his mother was Jamaican and where he lived until the age of five and his father was from the West Indies, won the race taking the song to number two. The label credits Millar Thomas who was Belafonte’s resident guitarist and his version begins with the now-added Day-O in brackets and begins with Belafonte singing Day-O acapella which he wrote and hence gets a writing credit. The parody singer Stan Freberg based his comedy version on Belafonte’s and includes some amusing interruptions from Peter Leeds.
In 1979, Belafonte performed the song live on The Muppet Show and he was seen explaining to Fozzie Bear what the role of the Tallyman was. Some years later, he gave an interview to the Arts Journal blog Jazz Beyond Jazz saying, “The most important thing to me about The Banana Boat Song is that before America heard it, Americans had no notion of the rich culture of the Caribbean. Very few of them did, anyway, which made no sense to me. It made no sense to me back then that people in America would not respond to the Caribbean culture I knew in joyous, positive ways. But there were these cultural assumptions then about people from the Caribbean, that they were all rum drinking, sex-crazed and lazy, not they were tillers of the land, harvesters of bananas for landlords of the plantations. I thought, let me sing about a new definition of these people. Let me sing a classic work song, about a man who works all night for a sum equal to the cost of a dram of beer, a man who works all night because it’s cooler then than during the day.”
The song later inspired a transatlantic hit; The Miracles’ guitarist Marv Tarplin revealed that after hearing the song for the first time he used the same chord progression for the 1965 song The Tracks of my Tears.
Belafonte had the Christmas number one later that year with Mary’s Boy Child, the first UK number one to surpass the four minute mark. The following year he charted two top 20 hits with Little Bernadette and The Son of Mary and his final UK hit came in 1961 when he duetted with Odetta on the comedy song There’s A Hole In The Bucket which was a favourite on Junior Choice.
Belafonte’s version of the Banana Boat song reached number five in the States but was not the first calypso hit to make their chart, 12 years previous The Andrews Sisters, who were white, took the song Rum and Coca Cola to number one. That probably wouldn’t have happened in modern times because someone would have complained about three white sisters being racist and some other jobs-worth bod would have had the song banned on the radio citing that referencing Coca Cola was advertising.
In early 1985, after Harry Belafonte had heard Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas he had the idea that the Americans should record their own version and took the idea to Quincy Jones who loved it. He booked a studio, contacted Lionel Richie to write it and the rest is history. That same year at the Live Aid concert at Wembley, arguably the greatest and most memorable moment was when Queen took to the stage at approximately 19.50hrs and six minutes and 47 seconds into their set, Freddie Mercury had the 80,000 crowd replying to his acapella call and response set which he opened with, ‘Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayo’ Freddie was clearly impressed by the response because at the end of that 35 second set, he stared at the crowd and said, “Allllrrriiiiiiight”.
Belafonte was a supporter of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s and became good friends with Martin Luther King Jr as well as acting as one of his confidants. In 2016, he endorsed senator Bernie Sanders in the Democratic policies and said at the time, “I think he represents opportunity, I think he represents a moral imperative, I think he represents a certain kind of truth that’s not often evidenced in the course of politics.”
In 2004, Belafonte suffered a stroke which caused him to have ear-balance problems and in 2019 his health was in decline, but it didn’t hold him back from his civil rights campaigning. He died on heart failure at his home in New York on 25 April 2023 at the grand age of 96.