Jay Richard Kennedy, author, composer, and publisher, was an entertainer and civil rights activist. He also was Harry Belafonte's manager and agent from 1955 to 1956. Born Samuel Richard Solomonick of Jewish immigrant parents in the Bronx in 1911,...
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Jay Richard Kennedy, author, composer, and publisher, was an entertainer and civil rights activist. He also was Harry Belafonte's manager and agent from 1955 to 1956. Born Samuel Richard Solomonick of Jewish immigrant parents in the Bronx in 1911, Kennedy was a union organizer and the circulation manager of the Communist Party's
Daily Worker. He left the Communist Party after the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, and started a new career as a writer, entertainer's agent, and stock broker. For a ten-year period beginning in 1956, he provided information and analysis to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on Belafonte, the American Communist Party, and the Soviet Union. He died in 1991, in Los Angeles. Kennedy's Belafonte files are divided into Agent and Informant series. The Agent files include correspondence between Belafonte and his agents, Kennedy and Jack Rollins; contracts; legal briefs; financial reports; and a termination agreement between Kennedy and Belafonte, a dispute which lingered until 1960 over the control of Shari Music Publishing. Also included are original materials and several versions of the script for the musical drama
Sing Man Sing, with lyrics and music by Kennedy and Belafonte.
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