In a 2011 interview with this writer, American songwriter Irving Burgie recalled the first time he met Harry Belafonte, who died in New York City yesterday at age 96.

It was in New York City during the early 1950s, and they not only shared a love for music, but Caribbean heritage — Burgie having a mother from Barbados. Their second meeting later that decade was pivotal.

“I met him [Belafonte] again through Bill Hathaway, who was his writer. At the time, he was a jazz singer, but when he heard my songs he said, ‘Man, we’ve got to do something together,’ ” said Burgie.

That “something” turned out to be calypso, the groundbreaking 1956 album that made Belafonte a mega star.

Belafonte’s role as Joe in the movie Carmen Jones, two years earlier, had made him a star in the community, but calypso took him to different heights.

It contains the Burgie-written standards Day-O (The Banana Boat Song), Jamaica Farewell, and Island In The Sun. They reflected Belafonte’s West Indian roots — his father being from Martinique and his mother born in Jamaica.

Belafonte spent some of his youth in Kingston, attended Wolmer’s Boys’ School, and visited Jamaica regularly over the years.

His most popular screen roles in Jamaica were in Buck And The Preacher and Uptown Saturday Night. Both movies co-starred Bahamian-American Sidney Poitier, who also directed them.

Released in 1972, Buck And The Preacher was the first Western to feature a mainly black cast with Poitier as Buck, a civil war veteran who meets Reverend Willis Oaks Rutherford (Belafonte), a self-styled preacher with whom he shares a number of escapades.

Two years later came Uptown Saturday Night, which also starred Bill Cosby and Calvin Lockhart, who was from The Bahamas. Belafonte plays Geechie Dan Beauford, a gangster based on Don Corleone of The Godfather, who is in a turf war with Silky Slim, played by Lockhart.

Harry Belafonte was invested into the Order of Jamaica by the Jamaican Government among the national honours presented in 2018.