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Features Disc of the day
Harry Belafonte
Belafonte Sings The Blues
(RCA Victor, 1958)
Tom Waits' favourite singer goes back to the source.
When Tom Waits guest edited MOJO 200 there was one piece he insisted needed to appear in the magazine: an interview with his hero Harry Belafonte. Singer, songwriter and producer extraordinaire Joe Henry was duly tasked with interviewing the great man, delivering an exemplary piece in the process. For the MOJO team, it was a journey of rediscovery into Belafonte's music, and this - his eighth album - proved territory well worth revisiting.
By 1958, Belafonte's glittering career - he was the first artist to sell a million records with 1956's landmark Calypso set - had seen him cut across genres and styles at will, taking in folk, country, spirituals, jazz as well as Caribbean-rooted music. Here, however, he found liberation in the blues.
Producer Ed Welker's skill ensured that covers of Leadbelly's Cotton Fields (subsequently a bop-blues live staple in Harry's set), Ray Charles's A Fool For You and Billie Holiday's God Bless The Child ("the greatest song ever!" enthused the interpreter in the album's sleevenotes) are stirring, warm and utterly exquisite. On release, Belafonte Sings The Blues was his lowest-charting LP to that point. Today this 10-track set sounds like a stone cold classic.
Phil Alexander
Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 10:53 PM GMT 06/09/2010
Further Listening
Harry Belafonte – Calypso (RCA Victor, 1956)
Nat King Cole – After Midnight (Capitol, 1957)
Harry Belafonte – Belafonte At Carnegie Hall (RCA Victor, 1959)
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