Harry Belafonte - Belafonte Sings the Blues

European Import

Harry Belafonte has never before sung on records as he does in this album. He is freer, more earthy, more exultantly identified with his material than ever before. He ha always communicated an often ferocious as well as lyrical sensitivity, but in this collection he achieves a unity of emotional strength in and understanding of his material that marks an important stage in his evolution as an artist.
"This is the area - the blues - with which I have the strongest identification," emphasizes Belafonte. It took a long time, however, before he was able to make this kind of a direct, basic blues album. By blues, incidentally, it is not meant that the songs are strict blues in terms of bar and chord structure, but that the feeling and the wryly unconquerable spirit of the blues pervade all the numbers.

"When I started singing," Belafonte explains, "I was involved with an enbironment that emphasized the modern school of jazz, and it was difficult for me to adapt the way I felt to the requirements of that kind of singing. But that was what I was exposed to at the time. I've always had a feeling for the basic blues, but it took several years of removing myself from the predominantly modern jazz environment and finding myself and my own set of balues before I had teh courage to attempt an album like this. Here I can just step out and sing wholly the way I feel."

Belafonte Sings the Blues was recorded over four sessions during the first half of 1958, and released by RCA later that year. The album features performances of numerous Billie Holiday, Johnny Mercer, and Ray Charles songs performed in a way that only Belafonte can.

The blues are close to Belafonte's heart and it shows in the way he delivers such tunes as "One For My Baby", "Cotton Fields" and "God Bless the Child" among others.

Recorded in New York, January 29, 1958, March 29, and in Hollywood June 5 and 7, 1958.

NB

The original album had 11 tracks - There are 19 on this CD.