How Harlem and Jamaica Inspired the Music of Harry Belafonte

How Harlem and Jamaica Inspired the Music of Harry Belafonte

The cultivation of sweet-tasting foodstuffs has shaped Caribbean history for five hundred years. And in the late 1800s, after slavery’s end in the British islands, sugar was joined by another cash crop for which a market was fast emerging up north. At the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, some inspired mind seized on the idea of selling pieces of brown-speckled yellow fruit from the tropics, wrapped in foil, for a dime. Bananas were a …