‘Sing Your Song’ Opens in Theaters on 13 January

Sing Your Song‘s focus on political activism — its relationship to celebrity, whether a star owns it or not — mirrors that of its subject. As Harry Belafonte recalls here, his inclination to activism was ignited early, as a boy whose mother worked as a domestic, and who sent him and his brother to live with relatives in Jamaica: “Almost all the songs that I later came to sing,” he says, “were songs that I heard among the people, the peasants, my family, at the time.” The film shows photos of Jamaican workers, children and the shoreline, as he credits his mother for making him believe “There was nothing in life that I could not aspire to.” Belafonte took Paul Robeson as a model, and the notorious official efforts to suppress Robeson’s “song” — the blacklisting, the FBI and CIA surveillance, and the revocation of his US passport in 1950 — hover over Belafonte’s story, along with Robeson’s advice to him: “Get them to sing your song, and they’ll want to know who you are.” Belafonte used his popularity — his appeal to “white teenyboppers” along with other fans all over the world — to show the intersections of art and politics.

See PopMatters‘ review.