Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)

The story

"Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)" is a traditional Jamaican folk song with mento influences, though it is usually classed as calypso. It probably arose around the beginning of the 20th century, when the banana trade in Jamaica was growing. Dock workers loaded bananas onto the ocean-going cargo ships called banana boats at night, to avoid the heat of the day. It is a call-and-response work song in their voice: when daylight came their shift was over, and they waited for their boss to tally the bananas so that they could go home.

The Trinidadian singer Edric Connor and his band the Caribbeans made the first recording, "Day Dah Light", on the 1952 album Songs from Jamaica, and Louise Bennett recorded it in 1954. In 1955 the American songwriters Lord Burgess and William Attaway wrote a version of the words for The Colgate Comedy Hour, where Harry Belafonte sang it. Belafonte, who based his version on Connor's and Bennett's recordings, recorded it for RCA Victor; it came out in 1956 on his album Calypso and as a single, reached number five on the Billboard charts in 1957 and became his signature song.

In the same year the folk singer Bob Gibson, who had heard the song in Jamaica, taught his version to the folk band the Tarriers (Erik Darling, Bob Carey and Alan Arkin). Their recording joined it to the chorus of another Jamaican call-and-response song, "Hill and Gully Rider", and did better than Belafonte's on the pop charts; the Fontane Sisters, Sarah Vaughan and Steve Lawrence in 1956 and Shirley Bassey in 1957 all had hits with that version. In Japan, Michiko Hamamura became famous as the "Banana Boat Girl" in 1957.

In a 2011 interview with Gwen Ifill on PBS NewsHour, Belafonte described it as a song about struggle, about Black people in a colonised life doing the most grueling work, and said he had made it into an anthem the world loved. Its call and response has lived on: Freddie Mercury of Queen improvised his famous exchange with the crowd at Live Aid in 1985 from its opening, and its chorus is used in many Major League Baseball stadiums. It has been parodied, sampled and used in advertising many times, and Belafonte's 1956 recording is heard in the 1988 film Beetlejuice.

What it says

The song speaks for dock workers at the end of a night shift loading bananas: day has come, their work is done, and they want it counted so that they can go home. Its call and response carries the weariness of hard labour and the longing for rest.

The words

The words of this song are in the public domain, but no free, reliable edition of them has been found yet to import them from, and the Institute never types a song’s words from memory. “What it says” above tells what they are about.