Banana Boat Song

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"Banana Boat Song"

Single by Harry Belafonte
Released	1957
Format	vinyl record (7", 12")
Label	RCA
Chart positions
#1

The Banana Boat Song is a traditional Trinidadian Calypso folk song, whose best-known version was sung by Harry Belafonte and is the most well-known calypso. 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 (this is the meaning of the lyric "Come, Mr. Tally Man, tally me banana/ Daylight come and we wanna go home.")

The song was used in the dinner scene in Tim Burton's Beetlejuice.

Belafonte's debut television performance of the song was in a famous muppet TV series, The Muppet Show.

[edit] Origins

The origins of the "Banana Boat Song" are often stated incorrectly. The song was originally a Jamaican folk song of unknown authorship; it was sung by Jamaican banana workers, with the familiar melody and the common refrain ("daylight come and we wanna go home"), but with many different sets of lyrics, some possibly improvised on the spot. The first recorded version was done by Trinidadian singer Edric Conner and his band "The Carribeans" in 1952, on the album Songs From Jamaica; the song was called "Day De Light". [1] It was also recorded by Louise Bennett in 1954. In 1956, singer/songwriters Irving Burgie and William Attaway wrote a version of the lyrics that was recorded that same year by Harry Belafonte; this is the version that is by far the best known to listeners today. 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. This version was re-recorded by Shirley Bassey in 1957, and became a hit in the United Kingdom. [2]

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.

[edit] Parodies

There have been a number of parodies of this iconic song over the years:

"Banana Boat (Day-O)" by Stan Freberg, produced in the 1950s, features ongoing disagreement between an enthusiastic lead singer and a bongo-playing beatnik who "doesn't dig loud noises".
German band Trio performed a parody where "Bommerlunder" (a german schnapps) substituted the words "daylight come" in the 1980s. In one rare coincidence, Trio and Harry Belafonte appeared in the same TV show with the latter watching Trio's act in disbelief.
The Flash animation "Osama Bin Laden Has Nowhere To Run, Nowhere To Hide", produced shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks, features a parody version of the song apparently performed by Colin Powell (with George W. Bush on bongos). The main refrain is "Come Mr. Taliban, turn over bin Laden! (Payback come then we drop the bomb)" [3]
Parodied as "Gay-O" in The Simpsons episode about gay marriage entitled There's Something About Marrying, season 16.
Musical comedy group Da Yoopers parodied the song as "It Was Eino" on their 1996 album We're Still Rockin'. Their version tells a story of deer hunting.
Country music artist Neal McCoy includes snippets of the Banana Boat Song in his "Hillbilly Rap", which can be found on his That's Life album.
The Firesign Theater parodied the Banana Boat Song on their 1985 album "Eat Or Be Eaten" as an ad for "Rastafarian Motors" auto repair shop ("You should be smoking, not your car!").