Timber's Gotta Roll

Spotlighted in Los Angeles' Cocoanut Grove nightclub, cocking an ear to the tinkle of glasses, stood a tall (6 ft. 2 1/2 in.) Negro in an open-necked shirt. Suddenly he cut loose with a high, pained call of "Timber!" that froze drinkers' elbows in midair. Folk Singer Harry Belafonte, the newest nightclub hit on the West Coast, swung into a blue-noted work song:

Lord, this timber's gotta roll; I gotta pull this timber 'fore the sun go down, Get across the river 'fore the boss comes 'round.

Belafonte kept them listening with full attention for a good 40 minutes. With a guitarist strumming in the shadows behind him, he mimed to the words & music, gesticulating, jerking his shoulders, snapping and rolling his head as he sang. In a high baritone voice whose plainness he disguised by plaintive hoots and back-country hollers, he sang a repertory that ranged from a Negro preacher's passionate eulogy of Lincoln (Bury Me in the East), through such folkish songs as Shenandoah, Scarlet Ribbons and Hold 'Em, Joe, to an off-beat bit of calypso gibberish called Man Piaba. West Coast nightclub audiences have been packing the big (capacity: 650) Cocoanut Grove for this kind of program for a month, and have accepted Harry Belafonte, 26, as a folk singer to be ranked with Josh White and Burl Ives.

Jamaica Memories. Belafonte came to folk singing by a roundabout way. He was born in Manhattan, spent five years of his boyhood in Jamaica, and after a hitch in the Navy (storekeeper third class), studied acting at Manhattan's New School for Social Research. But that got him nowhere, so he went to work as a clothing dyer to support his wife and child. At 22, thanks to an audition, he got a few months of good nightclub work singing such workaday favorites as Blue Moon, Black Magic and Pennies from Heaven.

But Belafonte had no taste for being a second Billy Eckstine. "I was sick of that good-looking-boy-that-girls-go-for routine. I quit cold." He took his savings and, with a couple of friends, opened a short-order restaurant in Greenwich Village. There, while frying his share of the hamburgers, Harry did some thinking: "I recalled my boyhood in the West Indies and the songs I heard there and the things I heard in the South with the Navy, the broken-down bars and street singers."

Congressional Material. Belafonte and Guitarist Millard Thomas got to work on a folk-music routine. They combed the Library of Congress recordings for material, added their own touches, invented new lyrics, finally presented themselves to the public. Just over a year ago, they began to click in what the trade calls "smart" and "intimate rooms," i.e., small ones.

Today, Belafonte headlines at the biggest nightspots, is under contract to RCA Victor (his version of Gomen-Nasai was the label's second biggest seller last week), and he plays a supporting role in MGM's all-Negro movie, Bright Road, which is to be released next month.

Although there are still a lot of Belafonte favorites, e.g., somber chain-gang and railroad songs, that he has not been able to use on the nightclub circuit, he believes he has finally found himself. "The best thing about it," he says, "is that we are doing what we want to do and getting paid for it."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.