Friday, October 21, 2011

Calypso, by Harry Belafonte (June, 1956)


Dad's Take:

It can be argued that Belafonte's classic album really belongs to Exotica genre. In the mid-fifties, people apparently developed a taste for travel via hi-fi, maybe due to the new pictures that came to them over their new television sets.

Belafonte's classic, "The Banana Boat Song,"aka "Day O," has been forever changed for me by Stan Freberg's equally classic send-up of the song. It really is a great song, but I can't listen to it without inserting Freberg and Peter Leeds as the calypso singer and the bongo player. Or the Muppets.

My mom used to listen to Harry Belafonte when I was small, so it has sentimental meaning to me. "Jamaica Farewell" was one of my early favorite songs, and it still sounds great. I also like "The Jack-Ass Song," if only because it gives me a reason to say, "Don't tie me donkey down dere." And then there's one about Santa building a houseboat. What? It's Hosanna who build de houseboat? OK. If you say so. I could have sworn it was "Oh Santa."And I can't forget the beautifully sentimental "Come Back Liza." The album ends with a couple of social statements. "Brown-Skinned Girl" is a poignant look at the babies left behind by American sailors. Finally we get one of popular music's earliest feminist songs, the very funny (and true) "Man Smart (Woman Smarter)."

Harry Belafonte was a great performer, with a voice as smooth as the white sands of Jamaica. But the album suffers from the same problem a lot of reggae and other records have to deal with: there's a sameness that sometimes overwhelms the quality of the songs. It doesn't help that the same song is on here twice, with very slight changes to the lyrics ("The Banana Boat Song" and "Star-O"). It's a fun record. It might never be one of my favorites, but it deserves its place in our list like it deserved its then-record 31 weeks at the top of the American charts.

Brad's Take:
Welp, now I know who originally sung the song from the dinner scene in Beetlejuice that always cracks me up.

Side A of "Calypso" starts with "Day-O" and then side B starts with "Star-O." I was listening to the album straight through so I didn't realize that it was split into two parts. I forget that that's how it was back then... So I wondered why he'd put those two songs on the same album because they are basically the same exact song, but it made a lot more sense when I realized that the album was divided into two parts like that. My poor young naive self.

"Calypso" is not an album I thought I'd ever listen to. Harry Belafonte's name hardly even sounded familiar to me. This isn't something I'd listen to on an average day, but for what it is, I enjoyed it. It's actually pretty fun to listen to. I even caught myself singing along with the final chorus on "Dolly Dawn."

All of the songs have the same Jamaican folk beat and sound so it's a little hard to tell one song from another, but sometimes the same of one thing is good if it's a good thing to begin with (which it is, in this case.)

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