In his early life, the Harlem-born singer developed a close friendship and alliance with Atlanta’s native son, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and played a key role in the civil rights movement.

Yet Belafonte, now 84, lived long enough to fall out of favor with the King family, and in 2006 he was disinvited to Coretta Scott King’s funeral at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia.

The hurt still festers.

“The flaw and the impairment or impediment within that family is beyond the capacity of mere mortals to heal,” Belafonte said in a telephone interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week.

These are among the sharp and poignant details covered in “My Song,” which chronicles the singer’s rise from the streets of New York and the hills of Jamaica, to the political activism that defined his life.

The book is a long look in a rearview mirror at a career that spanned more than 50 years, then a sharp glance forward at what lies ahead.

Belafonte’s voice is like gravel now, rutted in spaces. But that voice was smooth, easy, with only a whisper of huskiness around the edges when he made a splash on the music scene in the mid-1950s. His album of Caribbean folk songs, “Calypso,” was the first album to sell a million copies. That voice and his good looks helped him become a matinee idol.

Born to Jamaican parents, his plan was to become an accomplished stage actor. He went to theater school with some of the best, including Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis, Bea Arthur and Walter Matthau.