Opinion: Harry Belafonte's voice will live on

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/29/ [login to see] /opinion-harry-belafontes-voice-will-live-on
"I spent a couple of years of my childhood living with my cousins, and the voice of Harry Belafonte. Or so it seemed. We had one side or the other of his two-record album "Belafonte at Carnegie Hall" playing before we went to school, while we raided the refrigerator after school and then before bedtime. We'd get up in the morning and sing "DAY-O!," the refrain from his famous song inspired by Jamaican banana boat workers; as a child, Harry Belafonte had gone back and forth between Kingston and Harlem.

Looking at it today, it may seem inauthentic for our Spanish-Jewish-Irish-Catholic family to belt out lines from Jamaican folk songs. But Harry Belafonte took us on a kind of world tour on that Carnegie Hall album, from Jamaica, to Ireland, the American south, the Holy Land, Mexico, Haiti and back again.

I learned both "Danny Boy" and "Hava Nagila" from listening to "Belafonte at Carnegie Hall." I told him that, the one time we met — at a concert, in Havana — and he laughed and said, "Hava Nagila means, 'Let us rejoice!' It's Jamaican in spirit!""