Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)

"Day-O" redirects here. For the television film, see Day-O (film).

"Day-O"
Song

"Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)" is a traditional Jamaican mento folk song, the best-known version of which was sung by Harry Belafonte. Although it is really Jamaican mento, the song is widely known as an example of calypso music (calypso is Trinidadian). 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.

Origins

The song was originally a Jamaican folk song. Its popular version was adapted by Irving Burgie. It was thought to be sung by Jamaican banana workers, with a repeated melody and refrain (call and response), with each set lyric there would be a response from the workers but with many different sets of lyrics, some possibly improvised on the spot.

The first recorded version was done by Trinidadian singer Edric Connor and his band "Edric Connor and the Caribbeans" in 1952, on the album Songs From Jamaica; the song was called "Day De Light". It was also recorded by Jamaican folk singer Louise Bennett in 1954. Bennett's "Day Dah Light," as well as six other Jamaican recordings covered and made famous by Belafonte, who was raised in Jamaica by Jamaican parents, can now be heard in their original Jamaican versions on the "Jamaica - Mento 1957-1958" CD *[2].

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, as it reached number five on the Billboard charts in 1957 and later became Belafonte's signature song. Side two of Harry Belafonte's 1956 Calypso album opens with Star O, a song referring to the day shift ending with the first star seen in the sky. 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. It outdid Belafonte's original on the pop charts, reaching number four. This version was re-recorded by Shirley Bassey in 1957, and became a hit in the United Kingdom.

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.

Parodies and other uses

• The cry "Day-O!" by itself has become a frequently-used bit at baseball parks in late innings and in NBA arenas when the home team needs a rally, as spectators want to "go home".
• 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.

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 by Capitol Records, features ongoing disagreement between an enthusiastic lead singer and a bongo-playing beatnik (Peter Leeds) who "don't dig loud noises" and had the catchphrase "You're too loud, man". When he hears the lyric about the "deadly black taranch-la" [actually the highly venomous Brazilian wandering spider], the beatnik protests, "Don't sing about spiders, man! Like, I don't dig spiders". Stan Freberg's version was the basis for the TV advert for the UK chocolate bar Trio in the mid-1980s.
• In 1972, the Dutch artist & comic André van Duin used the melody for a song "Bananenlied" (Banana Song) exploring the question of why bananas are bent.
• 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 by cards-n-toons.com 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.
• The Firesign Theatre parodied the 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!").
• "The Crypto Song", a parody about Cryptography, Crooks, and Mr. Businessman
• The Capital Steps released a 1993 cover entitled "Day Care" ("Day care call and the mom go home").
• The 7-11 chain of provision shops in Singapore used the song as their advertisement jingle in the mid- and late 1990s: "Hey-O, hey-O / Seven-eleven it's a store and more".
• During the early years of The Rush Limbaugh Show, a parody of the song with lyrics skewering Sen. Ted Kennedy's philadering was used periodically.

Cultural references

• The song was used in the dinner scene in Tim Burton's Beetlejuice, when the hosts and dinner guests become possessed and begin to sing and dance to the song. It is also played faintly during the Geffen Enterprises logo. On the soundtrack it can be heard in the very beginning of Danny Elfman's theme composition for the film.
• In BBC Radio 4 comedy series Giles Wemmbley-Hogg Goes Off, Giles travels to New Zealand to stop his ex-girlfriend Arabella marrying a Mr Fonty, as then she would be Arabella Fonty, and everyone she was introduced to would sing this song at her.
• In more than one episode of Futurama, character Hermes Conrad (a Jamaican bureaucrat) has made references to the song. Most notably, in "The Cyber House Rules", the show's protagonist, Philip J. Fry, refers to Hermes as being a "rastafarian accountant", to which Hermes replies, "Tally me banana".
• On the July 2, 2009, airing of The Rush Limbaugh Show, Rush Limbaugh played the song, claiming it was "the new national anthem of the banana republic of the United States."

External links

• [4] English version of the text can be found at the bottom of the page.
• Who wrote the Banana Boat Song?
• The Originals: "Banana Loader's Song"
• "The Banana Boat Song: 'Daylight come and me wan' go home ...'", November 27, 2005, By Mark Roth, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.