| "Banana Boat Song" | |
|---|---|
| Single by Harry Belafonte | |
| from the album 'Calypso' | |
| Released | 1956 |
| Format | vinyl record (7", 10") |
| Genre | Mento |
| Length | 3:02 |
| Label | RCA |
"Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)" is a traditional Jamaican mento folk song, the best-known version of which was sung by Harry Belafonte. Despite the song's mento influences, "Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)" is widely known as an example of calypso music. It is a song from the point of view of dock workers working the night shift loading bananas onto ships. Daylight has come, the shift is over and they want their work to be counted up so that they can go home.
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The song was originally a Jamaican folk song. Its popular version was adapted by Barbadian Irving Burgie.[1] It was thought to be sung by Jamaican banana workers, with a repeated melody and refrain (call and response), with each set lyric there would be a response from the workers but with many different sets of lyrics, some possibly improvised on the spot. The first recorded version was done by Trinidadian singer Edric Connor and his band "Edric Connor and the Caribbeans" in 1952, on the album Songs From Jamaica; the song was called "Day Dah Light".[2] Belafonte based his version on a 1954 recording by Jamaican folk singer Louise Bennett.[3] In 1955, singer/songwriters Irving Burgie and William Attaway wrote a version of the lyrics for the Colgate Comedy Hour in which the song was performed by Harry Belafonte.[4] This is the version that is by far the best known to listeners today, as it reached number five on the Billboard charts in 1957 and later became Belafonte's signature song. Side two of Harry Belafonte's 1956 Calypso album opens with "Star O", a song referring to the day shift ending with the first star seen in the sky. Also in 1956, folk singer Bob Gibson, who had travelled to Jamaica and heard the song, taught his version of it to the folk band The Tarriers. They recorded a version of that song that mixed in the chorus of another Jamaican folk song, "Hill and Gully Rider", and released it, spawning what became their biggest hit. It outdid Belafonte's original on the pop charts, reaching number four. This version was re-recorded by Shirley Bassey in 1957, and became a hit in the United Kingdom.[5] The Tarriers, or some subset of the three members of the group (Erik Darling, Bob Carey and Alan Arkin) are sometimes credited as the writers of the song, perhaps because their version of the song, which mixed in another song, was an original creation.