Wild About Harry

Into Detroit's cavernous Riviera Theater one evening last week trooped well-heeled symphony patrons alongside wide-eyed teen-agers and hep college students. While the brasses and strings shimmered and the drums rolled, the man they had come to see strolled from the wings in V-necked shirt and snug blue slacks. When the hard white lights burst on him, Harry Belafonte hunched his shoulders and launched his husky baritone into the exuberant Muleskinner Blues:

I like to work, well I'm rollin' all the time I like to work, rollin' all the time I can pop my initials On that mule's behind.

Bone-Deep Showmanship. Sometimes reaching for a phrase with his hands, sometimes swaying or relaxed or snapping rigid, Belafonte husked his way through the folk songs of half a dozen countries, e.g., work songs from the U.S. and Caribbean, an old English love song, an Israeli march, a partisan song from France. Sometimes he sang with the orchestra and a twelve-man chorus, sometimes to the accompaniment only of Millard Thomas' guitar. Always he displayed a bone-deep sense of showmanship. At one moment he would have his audience roaring with him, as in Matilda ("Everyone sing the chorus, including intellectuals"); at another he would mesmerize them as he slid with eyes closed into one of his meticulously articulated versions of an old favorite:

And like the blue gentian gleaming On the hillside by the shalin Purple blue in the sunlight Are the eyes of my Mary.

The audience applauded the two-and-a-half hour show to the rafters. After it was over, Belafonte was mobbed for an hour by autograph seekers of both the bobby-sox and the sequined-spectacles variety.

Belafonte's Detroit appearance, following a vastly successful Pittsburgh opener and a one-night stand in Cleveland, seemed to prove what he has long contended: that there is a broader audience for folk music in the U.S. than anyone realized, if it is presented "with a certain level of maturity" and "without distorting the ethnic values." To reach that audience. Belafonte decided this year to cut down nightclub dates, form his own touring company. "Belafonte Presents, Inc." will tour the country all summer, perhaps go to Europe, Africa and Asia next year.

Finding the People. Harry Belafonte is currently one of the briskest-selling items in show business. He has signed a ten-year, $10,000-a-year contract with RCA Victor, is negotiating a three-picture deal with 20th Century-Fox and a contract with NBC to do four TV spectaculars a year for five years. He has also teamed up with Ed Murrow to produce a See It Now show on the quiet pools of native culture that have survived the intrusions of modern life, e.g., remote hamlets of the Appalachians, tiny islands off the Georgia coast. But whatever else he does, Belafonte knows that he wants to go on touring the country. Says he: "I've got to get to Hays, Kansas, Salt Lake City, Buffalo, Wichita, farming and industrial areas. It's the only way to find out what people are accepting and rejecting. I don't want to hear some character on Madison Avenue tell me what the pulse of the nation is. He doesn't even know his own pulse."

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