“La Paloma” by Sebastian Yradier [1863], performed by La Banda de Zapadores de Mexico on Edison Gold Moulded cylinder 18734 [1905]

Highlights of Latin Music in the U.S., Day 2

Yesterday I wrote that the habanera rhythm was the first form of Latin music exported from any of the Latin American nations to international audiences. Yesterday’s example, the “Habanera” aria from the opera Carmen, showed the music’s expansion into western Europe (Bizet was a French composer). Sebastian Yradier, a Spaniard, had actually composed the melody Bizet used after he visited Cuba in about 1860. Yradier composed another important habanera around the same time. “La Paloma” (“The Dove”) became especially popular in Mexico, where Emperor Maximilian (of Habsburg lineage) supposedly loved it. (Perhaps his connection to Old World relatives helped popularize the song in Germany, where it first appeared in 1865.) 

Some forty years later, the song was apparently still relevant when Thomas Edison recorded a Mexican band on one of his early commercial cylinders. Two things are of note for our purposes. First, the Cuban habanera rhythm supports the song throughout. Second, the instrumentation and the band’s name give this away as a typical turn-of-the-century military band. To be in the band’s repertoire, “La Paloma” must have carried national significance (despite its history as a Spanish interpretation of Cuban music).  

It is easy speculate on the connections between the music of imperial Mexico (and Spanish Caribbean world in general) and the music of New Orleans, the first and foremost American melting pot. That’s where we’ll follow the story of Latin music in America tomorrow. As for “La Paloma,” the song refuses to die. Artists from around the world have recorded interpretations in many genres in every decade since the 1890s.

For anyone interested in the variety of music performed in the early years of recorded music, check out this wonderful, descriptive website that explores fifty early recordings. 

“Mano Cruel” by Carlos Gardél [1928]

A hundred years ago, twenty-something couples would not head to the movies for a Friday evening date (large-scale cinema was still years away). Instead, as people had done for centuries, they’d often go dancing. Whether a street dance or a ball, in the 1910s and ’20s the dance of choice was the tango. A sultry Afro-Latin dance from Argentina, the tango fad swept through every class and spread throughout the western world in the 1910s, and carried through the ’20s on the back of stars like Carlos Gardél.

Raised in Buenos Aires, Gardél was destined for big things. His very first recording of a tango in 1917 sold thousands of copies and began the long association of the genre with tales of tragic love. By 1928, the year “Mano Cruel” was released, he was touring Europe, selling 70,000 records in Paris alone. When cinema finally took off, the singer used the medium to showcase his vocal talents (though his acting was lacking).

“Mano Cruel,” the tango posted above, is characteristic of Gardél’s style. Two guitarists accompany the singer as he croons a typically tragic love story: Lower-class narrator fell in love with a girl he met down the street. She reciprocated and everything seemed perfect… until a sweet-talking rich dude swept in and stole her away. Now she lives in a nicer part of town, worn out, unhappy and longing for the boy and the neighborhood she abandoned so many years before.

Makes you want to go to an old-fashioned Latin dance this weekend, doesn’t it?