Harry Belafonte Television and Video Archive
May 27, 2023
#harrybelafonte #belafonte
Harry Belafonte - Mama Look A Booboo, excerpt from
"Harry Belafonte in Concert (Japan, 1960)". Recorded live at Sankei
Hall, Tokyo, 18 July 1960. This song was first released as a single in 1957.
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Edited by Azizi Powell
Latest revision- September 8, 2025
This is Part II of a two part pancocojams series about the Calypso song "Boo Boo Man" (also known as "Mama Look A BuBu" and most widely known as "Mama Look A Boo Boo".
This post showcases a YouTube video of Harry Belafonte singing his version of the Calypso song "Mama Look A Boo Boo" at his 1960 concert in Japan.
This post also presents information about Harry Belafonte as well as information about and the lyrics for Belafonte's version of "Mama Look A Boo Boo".
Click __ for Part I of this pancocojams series. That post showcases a YouTube sound file of Lord Melody's 1955 Calypso song "Boo Boo Man" ("Mama Look A Bubu"/ "Mama Look A Boo Boo").
That post also presents information about Lord Melody. Information about and lyrics for Lord Melody's song "Mama Look A BuBu" are also included in this post.
The content of this post is presented for historical, socio-cultural, entertainment, and aesthetic purposes.
All copyrights remain with their owners.
Thanks to Trinidadian composer/singer Lord Melody for composing this song. Thanks to Harry Belofonte for his musical and cultural legacy. Thanks to all those who are quoted in this post and thanks to the publisher of video on YouTube.
-snip-
The song "Boo Boo Man/"Mama Look A Bubu" which is most often given as "Mama Look A Boo Boo" reminds me of the current (2025) Labubu doll craze.
Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2025/09/the-labubu-dolls-trend-videos.html for Part I of a three part pancocojams series on Labubu dolls.
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INFORMATION ABOUT HARRY BELOFONTE
Excerpt #1
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Belafonte
"Harry Belafonte (/ˌbɛləˈfɒnti/ BEL-ə-FON-tee; born Harold
George Bellanfanti Jr.; March 1, 1927 – April 25, 2023) was an American singer,
actor, and civil rights activist who popularized calypso music with
international audiences in the 1950s and 1960s. Belafonte's career breakthrough
album Calypso (1956) was the first million-selling LP by a single artist.[1]
Belafonte was best known for his recordings of "Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)", "Jump in the Line (Shake, Senora)", "Jamaica Farewell", and "Mary's Boy Child". He recorded and performed in many genres, including blues, folk, gospel, show tunes, and American standards.[2] He also starred in films such as Carmen Jones (1954), Island in the Sun (1957), Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), Buck and the Preacher (1972), and Uptown Saturday Night (1974). He made his final feature film appearance in Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman (2018).
Harry Belafonte considered the actor, singer, and activist Paul Robeson to be a mentor. Belafonte was also a close confidant of Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and acted as the American Civil Liberties Union celebrity ambassador for juvenile justice issues.[3] He was also a vocal critic of the policies of the George W. Bush and first Donald Trump administrations.
Belafonte won three Grammy Awards, including a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, a Primetime Emmy Award,[4] and a Tony Award. In 1989, he received the Kennedy Center Honors. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1994. In 2014, he received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the academy's 6th Annual Governors Awards[5] and in 2022 was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the Early Influence category.[6] He is one of the few performers to have received an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony (EGOT), although he won the Oscar in a non-competitive category.
Early life
Belafonte was born Harold George Bellanfanti Jr.[7] on March
1, 1927, at Lying-in Hospital in Harlem, New York City, the son of
Jamaican-born parents Harold George Bellanfanti Sr. (1900–1990), who worked as
a chef, and Melvine Love (1906–1988), a housekeeper.[8][9][10] There are
disputed claims of his father's place of birth, which is also stated as
Martinique.[11]
His mother was the child of a Scottish Jamaican mother and an Afro-Jamaican father, and his father was the child of an Afro-Jamaican mother and a Dutch-Jewish father of Sephardic Jewish descent. Harry Jr. was raised Catholic and attended parochial school at St. Charles Borromeo.[12]"...
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Excerpt #2
From https://www.npr.org/2023/12/29/1221394980/harry-belafonte-remembrance-caribbean "Island Man : How Harry Belafonte's Caribbean roots
helped him change America" December 29, 2023 by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
"Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is the author of the books Island People, Names of New York and a forthcoming book on Harry Belafonte, part of Penguin Press' Significations series edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. This remembrance of the singer and Civil Rights icon, who died in April, is based on his research and interviews with the artist."
"The village of Aboukir, in the green hills that line
Jamaica's north coast, is a scattering of humble homes. It's in St. Ann Parish,
a part of the island best known for being where Columbus first landed in
Jamaica in 1494, and for a pair of native sons who became world famous much
later. One of these is Marcus Garvey, the jazz-age activist who grew up in St.
Ann before he went to New York and, as a founder of the Universal Negro
Improvement Association, popularized the idea of the "African diaspora."
The other is Bob Marley, who was born and later laid to rest here, in a hamlet
that's now frequented by sandal-clad tourists in thrall to the reggae legend's
music and memory.
Aboukir, a few hilltops over from Marley's hometown, isn't a place that any tourist comes. But the village has its own claim to fame: It's where a third son of St. Ann's hills who became a global figure in the 20th century, Harry Belafonte, spent a formative chunk of his boyhood.
Since Belafonte's death earlier this year at 96, tributes to his monumental life have been dominated by his legacies in the United States. This is the country where he was born and left his deepest marks: by releasing an album of ersatz Caribbean folk tunes, in 1956, that became one of the first LPs by a solo artist to sell a million copies; by being the first Black man to become a sex symbol for mainstream America; by using his resulting royalties and fame to bankroll Martin Luther King's movement for Civil Rights; by acting as an crucial conduit, as an intimate of Robert Kennedy, between King's movement and the federal government. And that was just his heyday.
[…]
But it's impossible to understand Belafonte's larger
meaning, as not merely an American figure but a diasporic and global one,
without understanding his Caribbean roots. The Jamaican village where he stayed
with his grandmother as a boy, amid St. Ann's old plantations, was an
out-of-the-way corner of a region to whose islands were trafficked the majority
of the 10 million enslaved Africans who, between Columbus' arrival and the
1800s, endured the Middle Passage — but also a place, like communities across
this region "where globalization began," that's been shaped for
centuries by cultural mixing, long-distance trade and the worldly outlook of
its people.
Belafonte was born in Manhattan in 1927, to a young Jamaican
immigrant who grew wary, as she tried to make rent as a domestic in the
Depression, of the trouble her hot-tempered son was finding on New York's
streets. She sent him to her home island for "safekeeping," as he'd
later describe it, on one of the banana boats that the boy's father, traveling
between the West Indies and the States, worked on as a cook. The village where
his mum had grown up, and where her own mum still lived, was named by Jamaica's
old British owners for the town in Egypt where Horatio Nelson defeated
Napoleon. But its moniker is pronounced "Ah-boo-ka" by locals who are
descended from those the British brought to populate this corner of their
empire: enslaved Africans, mostly, but also Scottish overseers and laborers
like the forebears of Belafonte's white grandmother.
[…]
More complex still was Belafonte's relationship with the island — Trinidad — where calypso was born, and whose music bore only a glancing relation to the sounds on his album Calypso, whose success prompted thoughts that a "calypso craze" would supplant U.S. teens' love for rock and roll ("Warning: Calypso Next New Beat; R.I.P. for R'n'R?" trumpeted Variety in 1957). Belafonte corrected reporters who called him the "King of Calypso": That was a title reserved for victors in Trinidad's annual Calypso Monarch competition, during the island's famous yearly carnival. (Some on the island called him a phony; others were grateful for the attention he brought them.) But he befriended a few greats of the form, among them Lord Melody, the calypsonian whose "Mama Look a Boo Boo" he transformed into an American hit. Harry also helped Melody tour the U.S., as he later would singers like South Africa's Miriam Makeba."...
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INFORMATION ABOUT THE SONG "MAMA LOOK A BUBU" (most often given as "MAMA LOOK A BOO BOO")
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_Look_at_Bubu
" "Mama Look at Bubu" (later retitled "Mama
Look a Boo Boo") is a song written by Trinidadian calypsonian Lord Melody,
and performed by Harry Belafonte featuring Bob Corwin's Orchestra & Chorus
featuring Millard Thomas, Franz Casseus and Victor Messer on guitars. Although
Belafonte gets co-writing credit on his 1957 release, the song first appeared
on Lord Melody's single "Mama Look a Boo Boo" in 1955 (with slightly
different lyrics), and his debut album "Calypso Fiesta – Limbo In
Trinidad" in 1956 (retitled "Boo Boo"), with solo writing credit
to Lord Melody (real name Fitzroy Alexander).[1]
First heard by Belafonte in the West Indies while filming "Island in the Sun", Boo Boo was an unprecedented hit in Trinidad, the land of calypso.[2] The Belafonte version later swept the U.S. as well. Belafonte's cover reached #10 on the U.S. R&B chart and #11 on the U.S. pop chart in 1957.[3] It was featured on his 1957 album The Versatile Mr. Belafonte.[4]"...
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LYRICS - MAMA LOOK A BOO BOO
(composers Lord Melody, Harry Belafonte)
[Intro]
I wonder why nobody don't like me
Or is it the fact that I'm ugly?
I wonder why nobody don't like me
Or is it the fact that I'm ugly?
[Verse 1]
I leave my whole house and home
My children don't want me no more
Bad talk inside de house dey bring
And when I talk they start to sing:
[Chorus]
Mama, look a boo-boo they shout
Their mother tell them shut up your mouth
That is your daddy, oh no
My daddy can't be ugly so
Shut your mouth, go away
Mama, look a boo-boo dey
Shut your mouth, go away
Mama, look a boo-boo dey
[Verse 2]
I couldn't even digest me supper
Due to the children's behavior
John (Yes, pa), come here a moment
Bring de belt, you're much too impudent
John says it's James who started first
James tells the story in reverse
I drag my belt from off me waist
You should hear them screamin' 'round de place
[Chorus]
Mama, look a boo-boo they shout
Their mother tell them shut up your mouth
That is your daddy, oh no
My daddy can't be ugly so
Shut your mouth, go away
Mama, look a boo-boo dey
Shut your mouth, go away
Mama, look a boo-boo dey
[Interlude]
Hey! I kill mother's son!
[Verse 3]
So I began to question the mother
These children ain't got no behavior
So I began to question the mother
These children ain't got no behavior
They're making fun, my wife declare
You should be proud of them, my dear
These children were taught too bloomin' slack
That ain't no kind of joke to crack
[Chorus]
Mama, look a boo-boo they shout
Their mother tell them shut up your mouth
That is your daddy, oh no
My daddy can't be ugly so
Shut your mouth, go away
Mama, look a boo-boo dey
Shut your mouth, go away
Mama, look a boo-boo dey
[Outro]
Shut your mouth, go away
Mama, look a boo-boo dey
Shut your mouth, go away
Mama, look a boo-boo dey
Shut your mouth, go away
Mama, look a boo-boo dey
-snip-
Online Source- https://genius.com/Harry-belafonte-mama-look-a-boo-boo-lyrics
Genius Annotation
JadenTsai, 2018
"Harry Belafonte sings this comedic song about how he is made
fun by his kids because he is ugly. The original song was made a bit before,
titled Boo Boo Man by the Calypsonian Lord Melody."
-snip-
My guess is that the word "bubu" in Lord Melody's song "Boo Boo Man" ("Mama Look A Bubu"/"Mama Look A Boo Boo") means "someone or something grossly ugly".
That guess is supported by this quote that refers to Harry Belafonte's version of that Calypso song:
"mercanucaribe, 2006, https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/harry-belafonte-jamaican-song-whats-it-mean.1844053/ What does "Mama look a boo boo day mean?
"A boo boo is probably a ghost, a ghoul, or a goblin. "Day" means "there". So they are saying that Harry Belafonte is a ghastly goblin and he's over there."
Update- September 8, 2025
However, maybe the ghoul and goblin connection is more than a person's physical appearance. Read this section immediately below.
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THE MEANING OF "BOO" IN THE CALYPSO SONG "BOO MAN" (ALSO KNOWN AS "MAMA LOOK A BUBU" ("MAMA LOOK A BOO BOO") Added September 8, 2025
From https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/504982/why-do-ghosts-say-%E2%80%98boo%E2%80%99 By Lucas Reilly, Oct 2, 2024
"People
have screamed “boo,” or at least some version of it, to startle others since
the mid-16th century. (One of the earliest examples documented by the Oxford
English Dictionary appeared in that 1560s poetic thriller, Smyth Whych that
Forged Hym a New Dame.) But ghosts? They’ve only been using the word boo for
less than two centuries.
[...]
In 18th century Scotland, bo, boo, and bu would latch onto
plenty of words describing things that went bump in the night. According to the
Dictionary of the Scots Language, the term bu-kow applied to hobgoblins and
“anything frightful,” such as scarecrows. The word bogey, for “evil one,” would
evolve into bogeyman. And there’s bu-man, or boo-man, a terrifying goblin that
haunted man:"...
-snip-
Here's some information from Wikipedia about the term "bogeyman" (also given as "boogeyman" and "boo man":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogeyman
"The bogeyman, also spelled or known as
bogyman,[1] bogy,[1] bogey,[1] and, in US English, also boogeyman)[1] is a
mythical creature typically used to frighten children into good behavior.
Bogeymen have no specific appearances, and conceptions vary drastically by
household and culture, but they are most commonly depicted as masculine,
androgynous or even feminine monsters that punish children for misbehavior.[2]
The bogeyman, and conceptually similar monsters, can be found in many cultures
around the world. Bogeymen may target a specific act or general misbehavior,
depending on the purpose of invoking the figure, often on the basis of a
warning from an authority figure to a child. The term is sometimes used as a
non-specific personification of, or metonym for, terror – and sometimes the
Devil.[3]
Etymology
The word bogeyman, used to describe a monster in English,
may have derived from Middle English bugge or bogge, which means 'frightening
specter', 'terror', or 'scarecrow'. It relates to boggart, bugbear (from bug,
meaning 'goblin' or 'scarecrow' and bear) an imaginary demon in the form of a
bear that ate small children. It was also used to mean a general object of
dread. The word bugaboo, with a similar pair of meanings, may have arisen as an
alteration of bugbear.[4] Bogeyman itself is known from the 15th century,
though bogeyman stories are likely to be much older.[5]"...
-snip-
Thus, in the Calypso song "Mama Look A Boo Boo", perhaps the children were doing more than saying that their father was ugly. Maybe they were saying he looked like the bogeyman. However, this may not be the case, since those children didn't appear to be frightened of their father like they likely would be of the bogeyman.
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This concludes Part II of this two part pancocojams series.
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