Music to Break the Chains

The career of Harry Belafonte has been marked by a graceful, intuitive approach that tends to mask the boldness of his moves. Defying conventional wisdom, he achieved massive U.S. success singing Calypso music, carved out a career as movie star with controversial works that tested racial sensibilities, and became a successful multimedia entrepreneur guided by a philanthropist’s compass.

One of his most intriguing projects has been largely unknown: Belafonte spent a decade assembling a survey of the musical life of African Americans, re-creating in a studio the ballads, chants, lullabies, minstrel tunes, street shouts and song games that, for generations, have accompanied the community’s life from rural roads to the shadows of skyscrapers.

“The Long Road to Freedom” was completed in 1971, but languished for years because of problems with the publishing company that was working on a companion book. Belafonte says he vowed not to revisit the project until he found a respectful partner to release it. Now, Buddha Records will release it Sept. 11 in a lavish boxed set. Belafonte reflects on the project’s own long road and the life rhythms he hears from past generations.

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From the historic shot fired at the Boston Massacre, killing Crispus Attucks, the first to fall in the American Revolution, to the current black rebellions in major American cities such as Cincinnati, blacks have consistently and persistently lived and died in a centuries-old struggle to uphold the greater declarations of American democracy.

Those of us who have always been committed to the struggle against racial oppression have often considered using whatever means possible in the fight. I have for three-quarters of a century found myself involved in any number of attempts to close America’s tragic racial divide--through community activism, through participation in mass movements across the nation or through my platform as an artist.

When the history of such activism is one day reviewed, it is perhaps the legacy of “The Long Road to Freedom: An Anthology of Black Music”--the collection of black songs my colleagues and I have produced--that will be the most lasting memory of our involvement.

The success of my 1956 album, “Calypso,” first inspired the idea to produce a volume of work that reflected defining elements in the history of black people in America. The fact that “Calypso” was the first album in the history of the record business to sell 1 million copies in one year had great resonance. For RCA Records, it was a new economic reality; for me, not only did it vigorously enhance my career, but perhaps most important of all, it drove a stake into the heart of the myth that music of another culture--in this case, the music of the Caribbean--would never find acceptance among American popular culture.

While America embraces artists of color at the forefront of the popular music scene, it distances itself from the recognition that we are a people well beyond how entertainment defines us. I have chosen to push the envelope of America’s vulnerability to culture by releasing “The Long Road to Freedom,” a five-CD historical anthology of black American music, thus further awakening white America to who we are as a people, while instilling in black Americans a greater self-awareness.

I believe the music in this anthology will alert listeners to the incontestable truth that those who have been most victimized in the history of this nation have also had the most effect on its cultural expression--from rock ‘n’ roll and musical theater to the songs of some of our greatest popular poets.

The most consistent telling of our history is in our music. Indeed, the greatest defining element in our history is in our music. Archived in the Library of Congress, this music has yet to touch the broad sensibilities of the public, although it has given a few privileged academics insight into its world. Therefore, getting representative portions of this music recorded in the electronic environment of the RCA studios at Webster Hall in New York was key in our attempt to reach a larger audience. Using what was then the most modern recording equipment, we were able to lend the music greater clarity, hoping to enable a new level of discovery and appreciation.

Two men who were instrumental in the selection process of the music in “The Long Road” were George Marek, then head of RCA, and choral composer, arranger and musicologist Leonard de Paur. Marek was a musicologist under whose reign RCA recorded the diverse musical power of Leontyne Price, Elvis Presley, Jefferson Airplane and this writer, to name just a few.

De Paur, whom I met shortly after my service in World War II, became one of our most valuable assets. He had led the Leonard de Paur Infantry Chorus, a group of black soldiers who had achieved such an astounding level of musical excellence that it was commissioned by the U.S. Army to heighten morale of the Allied troops on the front lines in both the Pacific and European theaters of war. My friend Martin Luther King Jr. spent many hours with us over the course of the project’s development, listening to the recording sessions, encouraging us on our journey and finally lending his voice for use in the closure to our offering.

When Marek, De Paur and I selected the repertoire for the set, we chose to introduce songs that had not enjoyed a great deal of popularity or visibility, leaving out more well-known songs, such as “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Go Down, Moses.” In this process, we found that what to include was easy; what to leave out was impossible. Choosing historical milestones helped direct us toward our final repertoire.

There is, for instance, “Amazing Grace” and “The Sermon.” No single component served more effectively to control the will of the slave than did the intervention of Christianity. The church became the organizing element in moving the slave to a Eurocentric order from which successive generations of African Americans have yet to fully extricate themselves. “Amazing Grace” documents the oppressors’ use of religion to ensure an enslaved mind.

Christianity is the central religious force in black life, the dominant embodiment of our sense of justice, our sense of spirituality, our redemption. Music--the song--sits at the dawning of the transference of Christian belief into the slaves’ psyche.

“Hark ‘E Angel,” and “Yonder Comes Day” are songs of great exuberance, passion and hope for the future. Yet this transference to Christian faith and Eurocentric traditions is tantamount to a distancing of African Americans from our pre-diaspora origins. “Miche Banjo” is the most extreme example in this volume of black Americans’ alienation from our African origins. The direct African link is far more present in the cultures of African descendants in other parts of this hemisphere--Brazil and the Caribbean, for instance--as evidenced in their instruments and religious blendings and terminology.

“Follow the Drinking Gourd” reflects a profound moment in our journey from bondage into freedom. “We Look Like Men of War” is the rallying cry around which black men in battle during the Civil War defeated the very force that had previously defeated them. Nothing is more inspiring than “The Colored Volunteer,” who was committed to freeing the slaves.

Central to my repertoire was music that came out of the prison experience of black Americans, in particular the songs of the chain gang. Here are some of our greatest metaphors: songs that inspired us to serve our wardens, our prison keepers, our conquerors--those who govern us, those who arrogantly choose to speak for us, those who choose to define us--as well as fueled our rebellion against them.

Nowhere is the pain and sorrow experienced by our women more clearly stated than in “Joe Turner Blues”: the loss of family; the loss of man; the loss of her man. And finally, “I’ll Never Turn Back No Mo”’ speaks of black resolve. We have always been at the forefront of our liberation. We are the ones who have always made the difference when others continually seek to treat us with indifference. Our journey commands that history pay attention. And when one listens to the voices in this volume, one hears the tale of our journey. It is a fact of history that the full meaning of American democracy lies at the doorstep of the black struggle.

The question is: How long will it take the oppressor to embrace this fact and yield to a higher moral force?

This anthology was never intended to be the final volume. It is but a thread that, when pulled, will hopefully begin to unravel the cloak of silence. At stake here is the liberation of not only black people but of all our people. But perhaps most enhanced by the embracing of this truth is white America. And “The Long Road to Freedom” is but a catalyst in opening wide the doors to wisdom, knowledge and beauty. *