Egberto FromColombiansong

FROM COLOMBIAN »NATIONAL« SONG TO »COLOMBIAN
SONG«: 1860–1960
EGBERTO BERMÚDEZ
In December 1957 the Colombian branch of Shell, the English-Dutch oil multi-
national corporation, that had a substantial share of national oil exports and the
local market of oil-derived products, decided to offer as a Christmas gift to his
clients an LP entitled Album Shell de ritmos colombianos that featured a very signifi-
cant variety of Colombian songs and instrumental pieces. It was mainly a sample
of popular music newly orchestrated and arranged that embodied – in cutting edge
sound and high-tech – the main trends of what since the last decade of the 19th
century was identified as Colombian »national music«. The move was a response
to competitors who were exploring the visual arts and cultural radio, and an ag-
gressive move to consolidate through the media their expansion plan that since
1954 had promoted Shell to the national leader in oil service stations.1 Champion-
ing the safeguard of Colombian musical heritage while fostering cultural national-
ism (obviously a less dangerous type) was a clear strategy on the part of multina-
tional companies to neutralize dissident voices concerning their presence in the
country. As we shall see below, it was not something altogether new, because in the
1940s Colombian industrialists had used the same strategy for similar purposes.
The recording project ran uninterrupted through the following decade leaving an
interesting corpus of what the media (mainly newspapers and radio), the phono-
graphic industry and – following them – the general public endorsed as Colom-
bian culturally representative music.2
1 Lámpara, a cultural magazine sponsored by Esso and directed by poet Alvaro Mutis ap-
peared in 1954. The magazine attracted intellectuals and artists and channeled publicity
to cultural radio. See: http://cvc.cervantes.es/actcult/mutis/cronologia/1944_1958.htm
(all internet references in this article were controlled in 3/2008).
2 Album Shell de Ritmos Colombianos, Bogotá: Shell, 1957–1967, 10 LPs. About the history
of Shell operation in Colombia see Sol A. Giraldo, 60 años de Shell en Colombia, 1936–
1996, Bogotá: Compañías Shell de Colombia, 1996.
Lied und populäre Kultur / Song and Popular Culture 53 (2008)

Egberto Bermudez
At the end of the 1950s Colombia lived in an overtly optimistic climate brought
about by the decision of the two main political parties to share power in turns for
sixteen years (the length of four presidential terms) thus ending several decades of
political confrontation. This came after a short but significant period of military
rule that started in June 1953 when General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla took power with
the hope of ending a period of political crisis and social unrest (almost a civil war)
known in Colombian history as LA VIOLENCIA. After leaving power to a military
Junta in May 1957 populist General Rojas Pinilla was forced to exile in Franco’s
Spain. The following year – also in Spain – Conservative Laureano Gómez and
Liberal Alfonso López Pumarejo met and agreed to install the FRENTE NACIONAL,
recognized by Robert H. Dix in a broader sense as »elite accommodation«.3
This essay looks back one century and examines historically the main musical
trends within Colombian song concentrating in MÚSICA NACIONAL and later
MÚSICA COLOMBIANA as established during the last decades of the 19th century.
Inevitably, this discussion also includes classical or art song, insofar as during the
last part of the period covered here, its style was also mainly nationalistic and in
the popular vein, although it had much less cultural importance and only marginal
representation in the record industry and the mass media.
Introduction
Early accounts of the main trends in Colombian »National song« and its relation-
ship to art song and popular music are given in 1915 by Santos Cifuentes (1870–
1932), a Colombian composer living in Buenos Aires; in 1927 by Victor J. Rosales
(c.1890–c.1928), a recording artist who lived for a while in the United States; and
in 1932 by Emirto de Lima (1881–1970), a pianist and composer émigré from
Curazao living in Barranquilla. The merit of these publications notwithstanding
their schematic scope, is having located Colombian music and songs in the inter-
national musicological literature. During the same period, Guillermo Uribe Holguín
(1880–1971), composer and director of the National Conservatory of Music pro-
voked controversy in articles and conferences referring to MÚSICA NACIONAL. In
3 Amongst others, general historical reference works on Colombia are: Frank Safford and
Marco Palacios: Colombia: País fragmentado, sociedad dividida. Bogotá: Norma, 2002;
Marco Palacios: Entre la legitimidad y la violencia. Bogotá: Norma, 1995 and Hermes To-
var Pinzón: Colombia: imágenes de su diversidad (1492 a hoy). Bogotá: Educar, 2007; Ro-
bert H. Dix: »Consociational Democracy: The Case of Colombia«, Comparative Politics,
12, 3 (Apr., 1980), pp. 304–306.
168
From Colombian »national« song to »Colombian song«
1936, Daniel Zamudio (1887–1952) composer and music educator, contributed

(in a work that remained unpublished until 1949) with a first attempt to an ana-
lytical survey of Colombian popular music structures.4 However it was not until
1951 that Jorge Añez (1892–1952) a composer, performer and radio entrepreneur,
offered the first historical narrative of the development of Colombian song com-
bining personal experience and a critical appraisal and intending the first systema-
tization of the vast repertoire current before 1950. His idea was to be comprehen-
sive but – promising other studies – he finally centered on Bogotá. Alas, he died
shortly after the publication of his work.5 At about the same time, music historian
José I. Perdomo Escobar discussed patriotic songs and popular music in the Inde-
pendence period.6 Elsewhere I have attempted to sketch a brief survey of Colom-
bian song and its main trends before 1938 and to study the repertoires of MÚSICA
DE DESPECHO and MÚSICA DE PARRANDA consolidated in the 1950s and 60s.7
From 1971, Hernán Restrepo Duque (1927–1991) – a direct participant in the
expansion of Colombian radio, entertainment and recording industries – published
over the years several studies adding valuable first-hand information, attempting to
establish discographies and placing the Colombian repertoires in a wider Latin-
4 »Hacia el Americanismo musical: La música en Colombia«, El Correo Musical Sudamericano,

Sept. 22, 1915 and »La música en Colombia y sus cultivadores«, Boletín de la Unión Panameri-
cana, (mayo 1927), pp. 454–57. Zamudio’s »El folklore musical en Colombia« was delivered
orally as a conference in 1936 and later published in Revista de las Indias, (1949). All these texts
are included in Textos de Música y Folklore, Eds. Hjalmar de Greiff and David Feferbaum, Bo-
gotá: Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1978, I, pp. 33–47 (Cifuentes); pp. 282–91 (Rosales)
and pp. 398–421 (Zamudio). E de Lima, »La chanson populaire en Colombie«, Acta Musico-
logica, IV, 3, (1932), pp. 28–29 and »La canción popular colombiana (c.1930)«, and »Un con-
curso interesante (1942)«, in Folklore Colombiano, Barranquilla: [Author’s edition], 1942,
pp. 20–23, 200–204. Uribe Holguín’s conference »Sobre la música nacional« is included in his
Vida de un músico colombiano, Bogotá: Librería Voluntad, 1942, pp. 127–42.
5 Canciones y recuerdos, Bogotá: Ediciones Mundial, 1951, pp. 217–9. His other work, that
he claimed was advanced at the time but never appeared, would cover Antioquia, Caldas,
Bolivar and Santander.
6 »La música popular y la Independencia«, Hojas de Cultura Popular Colombiana, 6, (1951) and
»La canción patriótica y política en la historia de Colombia«, Radiotelevisora Nacional de Co-
lombia. Boletín de Programas, XXI, 214, (julio 1962) both incorporated in his Historia de la
Música en Colombia, Bogotá: Biblioteca de Historia Nacional, 1963, Ch. XVII, pp. 178–94
7 Historia de la Música en Santafé y Bogotá, Bogotá: Fundación de Musica, 2000, pp. 60–65,
with 2 CDs; »Del humor y el amor. La música de parranda y la música de despecho en
Colombia«, Part I, Cátedra de Artes, 3, (2006), pp. 81–111; Part II, 4, (2007), pp. 63–89.
169
Egberto Bermudez
American perspective.8 In the same years our knowledge about Colombian song
increased thanks to the works of Heriberto Zapata Cuencar (1910–1980) concen-
trating mainly on composers and performers and their discographies and chronol-
ogies including a valuable anthology of popular song devoted to Antioquia, pub-
lished posthumously.9 In recent years – and mainly based on the works of Añez,
Restrepo Duque, Zapata Cuencar, Ruiz Hernández and others – Jaime Rico Sala-
zar offers a collector’s view, adding minute biographical information about com-
posers, lyricists and performers and advancing previous efforts in establishing dis-
cographies and their chronologies.10 Alfonso de la Espriella’s attempt to view Co-
lombian music history through popular music songs – specifically the bolero –
deserves due attention, as well as the curious (and often useful) details discovered
by Ofelia Peláez. However, their works share with Rico Salazar’s its non-disciplina-
8 Lo que cuentan las canciones, Bogotá: Tercer Mundo, 1971, A mi cánteme un bambuco,
Medellín: Autores Antioqueños, 1986; Las cien mejores canciones colombianas y sus autores,
Bogotá: RCN/Sonolux, 1991 and his posthumous Lo que cuentan los boleros, Centro Edi-
torial de Estudios Musicales, 1992. An interview given around 1986 is also very valuable
in synthesizing his ideas: Ana M. Cano, »Hernán Restrepo Duque: La voz de la música
popular«, Boletín Cultural y Bibliográfico. Biblioteca Luís A.Arango, XXIII, 6, (1986),
pp. 15–29. The supplementary source to these works is the collection of recordings (LPs
and CDs), started c. 1972 by Restrepo Duque as Producciones Preludio and continued to-
day by Manlio Bedoya as Colecciones Preludio of Discos Preludio Ltd. See Producciones
Preludio. Catálogo general: La linda música de ayer especial para coleccionistas de la discoteca
de Hernán Restrepo Duque, Medellín: Producciones Preludio, n.d., 46 pp. See also:
http://www. discospreludio.com. (Industrially made CDs).
9 Cantores populares de Antioquia, Medellín: [Author’s Edition], 1979 and Antología de la
canción en Antioquia, Medellín: Autores Antioqueños, 1995. He is also author of a pio-
neering encyclopedic compendium on Colombian composers, Compositores Colombianos,
Medellín: [Author’s Edition], 1962, where he deals with his material regionally. Later he
published separate regional studies: Compositores Vallecaucanos, Medellín: Author’s Edi-
tion, 1968, Compositores Antioqueños, Medellín: [Author’s Edition], 1973 and Composi-
tores Nariñenses, Medellín: [Author’s Ed.], 1973.
10 La canción colombiana: Su historia, sus compositores y sus mejores intérpretes, Bogotá: Norma,
2004, with CD collection Joyas de la canción colombiana, 24 vols., published by Club Interna-
cional de Coleccionistas de Discos and the magazine Nostalgias Musicales, started in 2006
(Home made CDs). See also Rico Salazar, pp. 782–807. Additional valuable sources are Alva-
ro Ruiz Hernández, Personajes y episodios de la canción popular, Barranquilla: Luz Negra Edi-
tores, 1983 and Mariano Torres Montes de Oca [Mariano Candela] (ed.), Tertulias musicales
del Caribe Colombiano, Barranquilla: Universidad del Atlántico, I, 1998; II, 2000.
170
ry quality, especially in his carelessness in the treatment of sources.11 Orlando Mo-

ra’s reflections on Colombian song texts are perhaps unique on the subject, as is
Fabio Betancur’s preoccupation for understanding the international context of Co-
lombian songs and artists.12 The works of Hernando Tellez B. and Reynaldo Pare-
ja are the main sources for information on radio and TV during this period.13
In general Latin-American song has received limited attention in the musico-
logical literature.14 However, Chase’s contribution to the collective volume edited
by D. Stevens in 1960 identifies its basic elements: a) its highly nationalistic and
popular character and b) the low relevance of the separation between the popular
song and art song spheres. H. Nathan – in his historical treatment of song reper-
toires in the United States – A. Jacobs writing on the British Isles – and Chase –
examining the Spanish case – arrive basically at the same conclusions and stress the
fundamental role played by stage or theatrical songs in the development of popular
song, something Carlos Vega has previously remarked in his studies of Latin
American songs and dances.15 These studies also propose the existence of a very
widespread aesthetic preference (and market) for popular sentimental songs, very
different to the canonic LIED or art songs erected as a paradigm by 19th-century
scholarship. The ROMANCE in France, the VOLKSLIED in Germany as well as ex-
11 Historia de la música en Colombia. A través de nuestro bolero, Bogotá: [Author’s Edition],

2005, 2nd. Ed.; Ofelia Peláez, Verdades, mentiras y anécdotas de las canciones, sus creadores e
intérpretes, Medellín: Discos Fuentes, 2002.
12 Orlando Mora P., La música que es como la vida, Medellín: Autores Antioqueños, 1989;
Fabio Betancur Alvarez, Sin clave y bongó no hay son: Música afrocubana y confluencias mu-
sicales de Colombia y Cuba, Medellín: Editorial Universidad de Antioquia, 1993.
13 Reynaldo Pareja, Historia de la radio en Colombia, Bogotá: Servicio Colombiano de Co-
municación Social, 1984 and Hernando Téllez B., Cincuenta años de radiodifusión colom-
biana, [Medellín/Bogotá]: Caracol. Primera Cadena Radial Colombiana S.A., 1974.
14 An immense bibliography, not strictly musicological, exists around particular genres such
as tango, bolero, canción ranchera etc. For an introductory bibliography see Bermúdez,
»Del humor, I. Discussions on some Latin-American song traditions (Colombian vallena-
to, Peruvian vals, Paraguayan polka, Brazilian samba and Venezuelan patriotic song)« are
included in Gerard Borras (ed.), Musiques et Sociétés en Amérique Latine, Rennes: Presses
Universitaires de Rennes, 2000.
15 Gilbert Chase, »Latin America« in Dennis Stevens (ed.), A History of Song (1960), New
York: W.W. Norton, 1970, Revised Edition, p. 306; Hans Nathan, »United States of
America«, id., p. 415; Arthur Jacobs, »The British Isles«, id., p. 152 and G. Chase,
»Spain«, p. 383; Carlos Vega, »Los bailes criollos en el teatro«, Música Sudamericana, Bu-
enos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1946; Las danzas populares en Argentina (1952), Buenos Air-
es: Instituto de Musicología Carlos Vega, 1986, 2 vols.
171
Egberto Bermudez
amples from Russia suggest a stronger presence of the popular trend and a more
satisfactory explanatory context for the Latin-American and Colombian cases.16
The first anthology of Colombian songs is part of Añez’s work of 1951. It only
considers the repertoire of BAMBUCOS, PASILLOS, DANZAS and VALSES excluding
Costeño music (PORROS, GAITAS, PASEOS, MERENGUES, CUMBIAS, etc.) that at
that very moment were gaining momentum in the Colombian media. Añez in-
cludes the texts of around five hundred songs and twenty-nine scores, presented
with an ingenious index of first verses presuming, correctly, its use as a practical
songbook (CANCIONERO).17 It can be said that Añez’s publication is greatly re-
sponsible for the canonization of that repertoire and its mechanic identification as
»Colombian music«. In his selection, he includes several canciones (art-songs) and
other genres such as Cuban GUAJIRAS, PETENERAS, etc. by Colombian composers.
In 1991, almost half a century later, and at the moment when transnational re-
cording companies fully entered the Colombian market as a product of economic
aperture, Restrepo Duque publishes a selection of one hundred songs considered
to be the most important from a historical point of view. His selection follows a
series of concerts (II Encuentro de la música colombiana) sponsored by one of the
first national radio networks (RCN Radio) and their associate recording company
(Sonolux) that since its establishment in 1949 has specialized in »national« or »Co-
lombian« music.18 In his work, he gives song texts and biographies of composers
and interpreters, in a first attempt of systematization of the repertoire notably
modifying Añez’s balance by including twenty-six pieces from the Costeño reper-
toire (PORROS, CUMBIAS, PASEOS, MERECUMBE and FANDANGO) but maintain-
ing the primacy (58%) of the canonic »Colombian repertoire« of BAMBUCOS, PA-
SILLOS and DANZAS19. Thus Restrepo Duque acknowledges the presence of Cos-
16 David Cox, »France«, in Stevens, p. 200; Gerald Abraham, »Russia«, id., p. 338.
17 Henceforth for Colombian regional origins we will use Antioqueño, Bogotano, Caucano,
Costeño (Atlantic northern coast), Llanero (eastern lowlands) and Pastuso (Pasto south-
ern region bordering Ecuador).
18 The »II Encuentro« took place between 1 April and 3 June 1991. Since 1973 and 1974
respectively, both networks have belonged to the »Organización Ardila Lülle«, the third
Colombian business conglomerate.
19 The breakdown is: 36 bambucos, 14 pasillos, 12 porros, 7 cumbias, 5 vallenato paseos, 4
guabinas and llanero pasajes, 2 valses and Cuban criollas, and the rest represented by a
single bolero, torbellino, merecumbé, fandango, rumba criolla, son paisa, and danza. Sev-
eral pieces are identified generically but its proper identification does not change the bal-
ance shown. This is the case of Con la pata pelá identified as porro but really a fandango
and Cartagena presented as canción but really a bolero.
172
teño or »música bailable« repertoire as inserted in the media and phonographic

industries since the late 1930s. Rico Salazar assumes that Colombian song is basi-
cally the canonic repertoire and in his anthology, BAMBUCOS, PASILLOS, DANZAS
and valseswaltzes represent 74% of the total five hundred songs included.20
After the examination of these song repertoires – through scores and recordings
– it is difficult to adhere to the regional approach that permeates Colombian music
studies in recent decades and that has been reinforced by the growth of regional
and local powers as clients of the central government and their cultural policies. As
we shall see, the mass media became a unifying and leveling factor since the 1940s
and by the end of the last millennium, Colombian regional musical cultures – with
very few exceptions – weakened by the endemic disastrous social and economic
situation and the growth of social strife and drug trafficking, are almost a thing of
the past. The main lines along which the paragraphs that follow will run are: i)
songs, politics and religion, ii) songs in private and public entertainment and iii)
songs and the mass media and the cultural industry. The enormous size of the re-
pertoires – especially of the 1940s and 50s – makes it very difficult to maintain the
balance between context and music analysis; therefore, a deeper treatment of this
later aspect would be the subject of a separate publication.
Part One: Hymns to God and the People
I.
Religious and patriotic songs are very similar in their main traits, but most of all,
in their essentially functional character and restricted and hardly flexible perfor-
mance contexts. As a clear heritage of the blurred boundaries of the function of
Hispanic villancico, where the style of theatrical and amorous songs permeated
the religious sphere, in 19th-century Colombia – as well as in Europe and the
United States – the aesthetics of opera and song also permeated church music.
On the other hand the changes brought along by the French revolution and the
emergence of nationalism boosted the appearance of patriotic song as a separate
musical genre and as part of the construction of the »national«, along with terri-
tory, language and religion.21 The fever of French »revolutionary« songs covered
20 Rico Salazar’s anthology is included as the third part of his work (pp. 440–781).
21 The classic discussions are Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflection on the
origins and spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1991 and Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and
173
Egberto Bermudez
all grounds from liberty, equality and fraternity to anything the Convention
considered adequate. Masters such as Gossec and Méhul were – as J. H. Elliot
states – drawn »into the vortex« as the former’s many hymns and patriotic works
very well corroborate, being dedicated to nature, monuments, funerals, victories,
etc. His Hymne à l’Etre suprême (»Hymn to the Supreme Being«) for band and
choir, using octaves, unisons and simple chords joins the two spheres by invok-
ing religiously: »Père de l’univers, suprême intelligence« (»Father of the Un-
iverse, supreme intelligence«).22
Revolution and extreme politics reconcile with God and also arrived in Ameri-
ca. North-American patriotic songs also seem to reveal a stylistic combination of
hymnody and popular song.23 The only known examples in our area (Venezuela)
seem to be the revolutionary Carmañola Americana, an adaptation of Spanish
words to the French tune of 1792 and the Canción Americana (1797) by the Vene-
zuelan composer Lino Gallardo (c.1773–1837), also the author of his country’s
national anthem. Unfortunately, we do not have traces of other »canciones subver-
sivas« (subversive songs) sung by »exaltados patriotas« (angry patriots) mentioned
in historical documents.24
In Colombia, José J. Guarín (1825–1854) is the author of large-scale works for
choir and orchestra that illustrate the two styles here discussed. In Bogotá on Inde-
pendence Day 1849, the orchestra and (four part) mixed choir of the Sociedad Fi-
larmónica performed at a grand concert both his set of Lamentaciones de Jeremias
and his Himno al aniversario de la Independecia. Exactly two years earlier, Henry
Price (1819–1863) – the Society’s British founder – premiered a »Canción Na-
cional« along with the orchestral overture »El 20 de julio«, both especially written
for the occasion. The engraved vocal score of Guarin’s anthem was later included
in the voyage narrative of Miguel Maria Lisboa, Portuguese-Brazilian envoy to Bo-
gotá in 1853. Coming back to the relationship between patriotic and religious
songs, it is symptomatic that the same evening of 20 July 1849 the public also
Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, London: Canto/Cambridge University

Press, 1997, 2nd. Ed.
22 J. H. Elliot, »The French Revolution: Beethoven and Berlioz c.1770–c.1850«, Choral Mu-
sic. A Symposium, Ed. Arthur Jacobs, Harmodsworth: Penguin Books, 1969, pp. 201–204.
23 Nathan, pp. 410–11.
24 Alberto Calzavara, Historia de la Música en Venezuela. Periodo hispánico con referencias al
teatro y la danza, Caracas: Fundación Pampero, 1987, pp. 137–39, 159, 267–70. See also
Veronique Hebrand, »Pratiques musicales et chansons patriotiques au Venezuela«, in G.
Borras, pp. 212–13.
174
heard an anonymous Himno a Pio IX, dedicated to Pope Pius IX, renowned for his
liberality.25 The following month in a »concierto extraordinario« the Society per-
formed another CANCIÓN NACIONAL by Guarín, this time for women’s voices
only, and in the following year, on Bolivar’s birthday, Lino Gallardo’s song (with
words by José M. Salazar) was included in a concert prepared by Nicolas Quevedo
Rachadell (1803–1874), Venezuelan composer and aid to the late Libertador, a
permanent resident in Bogotá since the mid-1820s.26
Caicedo Rojas and Perdomo Escobar offer information on several attempts in
search for a Colombian national song or anthem. Spanish dramatist Francisco Vil-
laba’s Himno Patriótico of 1837 was also performed at Independence Day and on
the same occasion in 1869, the recently composed Himno Nacional of Daniel Fi-
gueroa (?–1887) opened the theatrical performance of the day.27 Four years later,
Figueroa set to music verses from Villalba and other notable Colombian poets and
performed the resulting anthem at the Plaza de Bolivar employing two military
bands and a massive children’s choir.28 Caicedo Rojas’s comments on the current
Colombian national anthem – premiered in 1887 with music by Italian émigré
and opera singer Oreste Sindici (1837–1904) and lyrics by politician and amateur
poet Rafael Nuñez (1825–1894) – are worth paraphrasing. Without mentioning
its authors, Caicedo refers to »recent efforts in composing a national anthem« as
vain compared to Villalba’s setting whose text was »simple and the music very
simple, essential conditions for a work of this kind«.29 Its »elevated music«, Caice-
do continues, will make the new anthem »fall out of grace« and ironically warns to
keep »polished and recherché verses« for other genres, in a direct allusion to Núñez’s
25 Concert Programs in María V. Rodríguez and Jesús Duarte, »La Sociedad Filarmónica y
la cultura musical en Santafé a mediados del siglo XIX«, Boletín Cultural y Bibliográfico,
XXIX, 31, (1992), pp. 46–47; Perdomo Escobar, Historia, p. 122; Miguel Maria Lisboa,
Relaçao de uma viagem a Venezuela, Nova Granada, e Equador, pelo Conselheiro Lisboa,
Brussels: A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven e Cia, 1866, Chap. XII, pp. 259–60. For Guarín’s
Lamentaciones, see Bermúdez, Historia, CD 1, 23.
26 Concert program in Perdomo Escobar, Historia, plate p. 137.
27 Concert program in Lamus, p. 75.
28 José Caicedo Rojas, »Articulo XXV«, Recuerdos y Apuntamientos (1891), Bogotá: Biblioteca
Popular de Cultura Colombiana, 1950, pp. 193–94, Perdomo Escobar, Historia,
pp. 152–54; Anon., »Viejos Himnos de Colombia«, Boletín de Programas. Instituto Na-
cional de Radio y Televisión, XXII, 231, (Sept. 1966), pp. 32–33. The number given in
this article is 1200 voices.
29 The text is in Canción Nacional en memoria del 20 de julio de 1810, 1º de la libertad, Bo-
gotá: Nicolás Gómez, 1836, »Viejos himnos […]«, pp. 29–30.
175
Egberto Bermudez
ultra distilled poetry.30 Unfortunately none of the above mentioned scores (but
Guarín’s and Sindici’s anthems) survives. Neither Guarín’s anthem complies with
Caicedo Rojas requirements, alternating a solo with a chorus that includes an an-
tiphonal section. And to what would have been Caicedo’s total dismay, its solo and
chorus both showing a very high tessitura. Only in 1920 was Sindici’s anthem ac-
cepted as national, although unofficially it fulfilled this function from 1887 onwards.
In 1899 its vocal score was published in the fashionable Revista Ilustrada urging the
government for its official recognition and reporting that on the previous 20 July it
had been sung at Bogotá’s main square by a choir of 1,500 children from the city’s
public schools (those for the lower classes). The anonymous writer states that the
choir was assembled by the local Education Secretary and praised its lofty goal of
inspiring »love for the fatherland« amongst »the sons of the people«.31 Such popul-
ism had been reinforced since the suffocation of the popular revolt of 1893 and
would become a key element in recruiting the same »sons of the people« to defend
the government in the bloody civil war that broke two months later.32
The spirit of AMERICANISMO also found space in the limited Colombian musi-
cal life of the first years of the 20th century and composers like Santos Cifuentes
(1870–1932) believed – along with the ideologues of literary modernism – that
Latin America was the »refuge and safeguard of world civilization« and proposed
the development of musical nationalism as a starting point and contribution to his
doctrine. He had already been one of the first composers to rework national
themes into a symphonic score (Scherzo sinfónico) from 1894 and observed that
songs (BAMBUCO and TORBELLINO) were the main potential source for such ob-
jectives.33 Apparently, Cifuentes was not alone and in 1908, at the height of Gen-
eral Rafael Reyes regime, the 1st Infantry Battalion Band performed at the Presi-
dential Palace a programme that included (along with works by Verdi, Rossini and
Leoncavallo) a Himno Lationoamericano by an intellectual and amateur composer
of Panamanian descent, Carlos Vallarino.34
30 Caicedo Rojas, »Artículo XXV«, pp. 194–95.

31 Revista Ilustrada, I, 15, (agosto 1899), pp. 234–37.
32 On the 1893 revolt see David Sowell, »The 1893 Bogotazo: Artisans and public violence in late
Nineteenth Century Bogotá«, Journal of Latin American Studies, 21, 2, (1989), pp. 267–82.
33 In De Greiff and Feferbaum, p. 38–39, 46, Bermúdez, Historia, p. 139.
34 Concert program in Diego Roldán Luna, Jerónimo Velasco: Recortes musicales de su vida,
Cali: Alonso Quijada Editores, 1985, p. 17. For »Americanismo musical« in later decades in
Colombia see E. Bermúdez, »La Universidad Nacional y la investigación musical en Co-
lombia: Tres momentos«, Miradas a la Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 3, Bogotá: Uni-
versidad Nacional de Colombia, 2006, pp. 22–50.
176
It is worth mentioning that following Spanish colonial traditions, songs were

part of public festivities during the Republican period and during the war of Inde-
pendence. American native history and the Indian as a symbol – systematically
used until the 1830s – were elaborated visually, poetically, dramatically and musi-
cally during the long process of nation-building.35 The texts of patriotic and politi-
cal songs mentioned by Perdomo Escobar – unfortunately without any indication
to its sources – seem to be linked to amateur composers and poets, and most prob-
ably were set to popular melodies and cyclical improvisation schemes (see below).
They are mostly COPLAS and cover a long period, focusing in late civil wars such as
those of 1885 and 1899–1902.36 Specific examples are rare but some COPLAS
(whose unmistakable hymn-like style strongly suggests they were meant to be
sung) appear in a soldier’s memoir of the events of the decisive battle of La Huma-
reda, the end of the civil war of 1885.37 Probably related to the same war was the
anonymous song El Soldado (PASILLO?) composed for its namesake historical dra-
ma of 1892 by Adolfo León Gómez (see Part Two, II). The drama’s second edi-
tion of 1903 may have suggested its association with the civil war of 1899–1902.38
In domestic anecdotes – the favorite context for the performance of this type of
songs – we find information that throws light on the highly eclectic character of
contemporary musical taste. Luis M. Mora recalls dancing and singing on the Con-
servative side in the THOUSAND DAYS WAR (1899–1902) with local musical string
instruments. On the other hand Max Grillo (1868–1949) poet and literary critic
who fought on the Liberal side, recalls in his memoirs the singing of La Marsellaise
to regain morale after the defeat at Palonegro that ended the fierce and bloody
northern campaign.39 Nevertheless, it was not only intellectual and rather snobish
35 Hans J. König, En el camino hacia la nación. Nacionalismo en el proceso de formación del estado y
de la nación de la Nueva Granada, 1750–1856, Bogotá: Banco de la República, pp. 247–52.
36 Perdomo, Historia, pp. 182–88.
37 Rudesindo Cáceres, Un soldado de la República en la Costa Atlántica, Bogotá: Imprenta de
Fernando Pontón, 1888 quoted by Gonzalo España, La guerra civil de 1885. Nuñez y la
derrota del radicalismo, Bogotá: El Ancora, 1985, pp. 187–88.
38 Héctor Orjuela, Bibliografía del Teatro Colombiano, Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1974,
p. 106. Title-page in Lamus, p. 80; Añez, pp. 319–20 text attributed to Julio Garavito; Perdo-
mo, Historia, pp. 185–86; Ellie Anne Duque, »Música en tiempos de guerra«, in Gonzalo
Sánchez and Mario Aguilera (eds.), Memoria de un país en guerra. Los Mil Días 1899–1902, Bo-
gotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia/IEPRI/UNIJUS/Planeta, 2001, pp. 265–66.
39 Luís M. Mora, »A la lumbre del vivac«, Croniquillas de mi ciudad, Bogota: Editorial ABC,
1936, p. 114; Grillo, Emociones de la guerra: Apuntes tomados durante la campaña del Norte en
177
Egberto Bermudez
to do so, because the famous patriotic song and national anthem was known to the
public since the 1880s as it appears in a manuscript song anthology compiled in
Bogotá in the same years.40 There we find it in a Spanish phonetic rendition of the
French text with an unaltered melody with guitar accompaniment. During the
same war, when Liberal artists and intellectuals from Bogotá were retained in the
local prison under conspiracy charges after the coup of July 1900, they organized
in October a celebration of the uprising with speeches, poetry, songs and instru-
mental music (flute, BANDOLAS and TIPLES) where as a central act they sang a
Himno Liberal composed by Emilio Murillo on a text by Julio Florez, two of the
distinguished prisoners.41 E. A. Duque is surprised at the absence of other songs
related to that war but discusses several instrumental piano pieces related to it;
amongst them two – equally sonorous and vigorous – composed to celebrate Lib-
eral victory at Peralonso (a PASILLO by Carmen Manrique Garay) and later the
Conservative victory at Palonegro (a BAMBUCO by José Eleuterio Suarez).42
We know very little about the songs that vented public dissent or were used by
those who opposed or defended the governments before and in the worst years of
LA VIOLENCIA. However, during the Conservative hegemony (1886–1930) we
have some references to music used in urban social mobilizations such as the PA-
SILLO El Boycoteo (»The Boycott«) by the singer and composer Alejandro Wills
(1884–1943). It was created in 1905 on the occasion of the students’ and the
people’s boycotting of the mule trams owned by an American company that even-
tually handed them over to the local government and left the country. Four years
before, Wills and his duet partner Arturo Patiño were asked to participate in a civic
parade of craftsmen and workers so that – wrote one of the organizers, the com-
poser Emilio Murillo – »the musical instruments that had nursed the sons of the
people can have its due representation on this feast of Democracy«.43
Coffee – as an asset and economic symbol – seemed to have acquired a qua-
si-religious and mythical status in the central Colombian coffee-growing regions
la guerra civil de los tres años, Bogotá: Imprenta de La Luz, 1903, quoted by Rafael H. More-
no Durán, »Ficción y realidad en la Guerra de los Mil días«, Sánchez and Aguilera, p. 284.
40 Biblioteca Luis A. Arango, Bogotá, Colección Perdomo, Ms. MI 1453, f. 25v. (The folia-
tion is mine).
41 Adolfo León Gómez, »Los presos políticos de la guerra (1905)«, in Sánchez and Aguilera,
pp. 233–34. Eduardo Domínguez reports other aspects of the same anecdote in 1927,
quoted in E. A. Duque, Música, p. 263.
42 Duque, Música, pp. 252, 264–65.
43 Wills’ personal memoir and concert bills album quoted in Restrepo Duque, Lo que cuen-
tan, pp. 20–22. El Boycoteo was possibly an instrumental piece.
178
especially during its initial period of widespread international presence in the

1920s and 1930s, when coffee exports trebled from one million sacks in 1910 to
three million in 1930.44 According to some references we know that in the Anti-
oqueño countryside coffee was celebrated in songs such as one – at the same time
patriotic, romantic and religious – reported to have been sung as a child by the
Colombian ex-president Belisario Betancur, who has always made a point of being
proud of his rural background. The lyrics read: »Colombian coffee, filled with am-
brosia/Colombian smooth tasting coffee/from the Virgin Mary’s home-
land/Coffee, Colombian coffee/sovereign nectar!«.45
In 1924, a privately published Bogotá songbook included satiric and politically
critical texts that were sung to tunes such as the Mexican hit La Cucaracha and the
famous tango-canción Mi noche triste (1916). Pedro A. Rebollo, their author,
called these versions PLAGIOS (»plagiarisms«) and sometimes included the original
text of the songs.46 Additionally, we have some references to urban political COP-
LAS (sung to the tune of a popular Mexican hit of the moment) reflecting the op-
timism of Tolima’s liberals in 1930 and criticizing President Eduardo Santos, and
a few coplas related to the guerilla groups in the Llanos in the early 1950s, possibly
intented to be sung.47 In the same years, an official version of the Colom-
bian-Peruvian conflict, Los sucesos de Leticia (Victor X–1000) labelled »canción
patriotica«, was recorded by Jorge Añez with orchestra and small choir in New
York just before his return to Colombia in 1933.48
There are other examples (direct, almost crude, and to the point) as the poems
and COPLAS recited and sung by peasants and artisans such as those recorded in a
newspaper in 1937 in relation to the government repression of colonists and
smallholders who were in direct conflict with big landowners in central Colombia,
or the satirical COPLAS improvised on the participation of both political parties in
the defeat of the socialist-revolutionary rebellion in El Libano, Tolima (central Co-
lombia, northwest of Bogotá) in 1929. During the same period, the poems (ROM-
ANCES) of Jorge Ferreira on the realities of coffee cultivation and the social condi-
44 Luís F. Molina, p. 13.

45 Testimony of Belisario Betancur (1923) in »El orgullo paisa en la espalda« (2003), Las
voces de la memoria. Conversatorio fiestas populares de Colombia 2002 y 2003, Tomo II,
Bogotá: Fundación BAT, 2004, p. 218.
46 Pedro A. Rebollo, Cancionero santafereño (Plagios y coplas), Bogotá: Editorial Nuevo Mundo, 1924.
47 James D. Henderson, Cuando Colombia se desangró. Un estudio de la violencia en metrópoli y
provincia, Bogotá: El Ancora, 1984, p. 95; Palacios, Entre la legitimidad …, pp. 222, 226.
48 Spottswood, IV, p. 1709.
179
Egberto Bermudez
tions of its manpower contrast sharply with the naive and ethereal romanticism of
the BAMBUCOS composed in the same region (see Part Three, II) or with Betan-
cur’s religious childhood recollections.49
This ethereal quality was absent from some Mexican popular music especially
the CORRIDOS. But unlike their counterparts in their revolutionary heyday, most
new CORRIDOS were the product of urban middle-class composers. However,
popular CANCIONES RANCHERAS and CORRIDOS of the mid-1940s and early
1950s began to have great resonance in Colombian rural and low-class urban cul-
ture. In the mid-1940s, cinema and radio teamed with the expansion of
coin-operated automated electric music machines (Rock-Ola, Wurlitzer, Seeburg
and AMI jukeboxes) that, as a result of the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, began its
»golden age« during which 300,000 units were in use all over the United States by
1939. Its presence in our region in the following decade helped to disseminate es-
pecially the Mexican, Cuban and other recorded song repertoires.50 Tovar Pinzón
takes the opening lamenting lines of the CANCIÓN RANCHERA Cuatro milpas
(c.1920) (»only four patches of corn have remained of my destroyed ranch«) as
fitting to Colombian rural social and political reality. Yet, in the analysis one can-
not overlook the overtly romantic and non-political essence of the song, composed
by the military musician Belisario de Jesús García (1892–1952) and made popular
in Latin America as part of the sentimental musical comedy (Las Cuatro Milpas,
1937), a film starring Pedro Armendáriz and featuring the Trio Calavera.51 How-
ever, the Mexican connection existed and it is possible that eventually we can trace
songbooks with texts written in the areas (southern Tolima, Caldas, northern Valle
del Cauca) where – around 1958 – Jacobo Prias Alape, a communist guerilla leader
calling himself »Charro Negro« and his government-financed enemy Jesús María
Oviedo, chose »Mariachi« as a combat name.52
The heritage of satirical and topical songs of African and Caribbean origin
(discussed in Part Three, II) explains why, in the texts of the Atlantic Coast,
49 Gonzalo Sánchez, »Las ligas campesinas en Colombia (1977)«, Ensayos de historia social y
política del siglo XX, Bogotá: El Ancora, 1984, pp. 121–22; Gonzalo Sánchez, »Los bol-
cheviques del Líbano (1976)«, Ensayos, pp. 44–47 and 95–97.
50 Although invented around 1889 and electrified in 1927 these automated phonographs
gained universal popularity in the 1940s. See Samuel S. Brylawski. »Jukebox.« Grove Mu-
sic Online. Oxford Music Online. 4 Aug. 2008 <http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com>.
51 Tovar Pinzón, pp. 278–79.
52 E. Bermúdez, »Del tequila al aguardiente«, Horas. Tiempo Cultural, 3, (February 2004), p. 39
and www.ebermudezcursos.unal.edu.co/bibrew.htm and Henderson, pp. 273–77.
180
dance-music repertoires (PORRO, PASEO, MERENGUE) we find direct allusions to

political events from the 1930s up to the 1950s.53 The region was a Liberal Party
stronghold so partisanship is ever-present in texts ranging from acclaim at electoral
triumphs, to fears – later confirmed – of dirty war and official violence when the
Conservative opponents seized power (as in La chulavita, a MERENGUE by Chico
Bolaño).54 Texts like these did not penetrate deeply into the industry and pose an
interesting aesthetic paradox, the incongruity of setting topical and political texts
to musical genres that were basically understood and bought commercially as
dance music. The equivalent, caricaturizing, of having denounced Nazi extermina-
tion camp’s atrocities to the tune of Glenn Miller’s Chattanooga Choo Choo, a
dance hit of 1941–1942.
Songs about real events are rare in our repertoires and one of the very few that
can be documented fully is Alban fly’ to Colon, a foxtrot about Captain Alban
McLean and a group of San Andrés islanders who were rescued and taken to
Colón (Panamá) by an American hydroplane after their schooner, the »Resolute«,
was sunk by a German submarine on June 1942.55 As we had just mentioned, in
the texts of PORROS, PASEOS and MERENGUES we also find references to Colom-
bian current affairs of the 1940s and 50s. A notable example is the MERENGUE
that Guillermo Buitrago composed on the curfew (El toque de queda) imposed all
over the country after EL BOGOTAZO, the popular insurrection that followed the
assassination, on the 9 April 1948, of the Liberal Party chief and presidential can-
didate Jorge Eliecer Gaitán.56
Along with political allusions comes censorship. Several circumstances sur-
round reports of censorship of El Caiman or Se va el caimán (»The caiman goes«) a
porro attributed in the early 1940s to José M. Peñaranda (1907–2006) and rec-
orded for the first time (as El hombre caimán) in Buenos Aires in 1945.57 Appar-
ently the song was used in Panamá to voice anti-American feelings when the
Filós-Hines treaty (that guaranteed the permanence of American troops in strategic
53 For a general overview see Julio Oñate, El abc del vallenato, Bogotá: Taurus, 2003,
Ch. 22, pp. 207–37.
54 Oñate, pp. 214–15. Apparently this piece was never recorded commercially.
55 Nodoby Business but my Own: Traditional and Popular Music from Old Providence, Bogotá:
Fundación de Musica, (1996) 2007, MA–TCOL 002, CD, 12. On the liner notes (p. 12)
the date is given incorrectly as 1943. See David Bushnell, Eduardo Santos y la política del
buen vecino, 1938–1942, Bogotá: El Ancora Editores, 1984, pp. 130–31 and Thomas J.
Williford, Laureano Gómez y los Masones, 1936–1942, Bogota: Planeta, 2005, p. 206.
56 Ruiz Hernández, »La guitarra de Guillermo Buitrago«, in Personajes, p. 20.
57 Oñate, p. 466, CD, 6.
181
Egberto Bermudez
places to protect the Canal) was signed in 1947 but finally was not approved by
the National Assembly and President Enrique A. Jimenez, a supporter of the treaty
‘did not go’ until the following year. On the other hand, also in 1947, Quiñones Kommentar [XH1]: Le sens du reste de
la phrase est obscur
Pardo reports that the song was being used – with different words – by anti-Franco
activists in Spain.58 Apparently in those years Franco kept giving confusing signals
about his permanence in power while he negotiated and announced the future res-
toration of the monarchy. It was also a period (1946–1948) of intense internation-
al isolation: most Western diplomatic representatives were retired and the regime
counted only on the support of the Argentinian dictator Juan D. Perón. But as in Kommentar [XH2]: Cette prhase est
incompréhensible
Panamá, neither Franco ‘did go’ until 1975. In his recent work on radio music
censorship in Spain José M. Rodríguez shows that the censored version of Se va el
caimán was that of Paraguayan singer Luis Alberto del Paraná.59 Censorship of this
type affected the discs themselves that were scratched or engraved physically to
render them useless. For different reasons (being against public morality) another
Colombian song was censored in Spain around 1956, this time Bésame morenita
sang by the Colombian tenor Régulo Ramírez.60 It is interesting that in 1947
Quiñones Pardo does not quote any author for El Caimán and states that it already
had gained currency in Latin America and in Europe. While Peñaranda was very
unclear in interviews with the details about »his« song, other specialists made ef-
forts to locate its genealogy based on the oral tradition (see Part Three).61
The meaning and practice of democracy was one of the pillars of Gaitán’s ar-
guments and political struggle and undoubtedly it was democracy that received the
major of blows after his assassination in 1948. In the same year a non-commercial
recording entitled La democracia (SON) by Pacho Rada – performed by Abel Anto-
nio Villa with Bovea y sus Vallenatos – appeared in Barranquilla. However its text
– a quasi-incoherent mix of love stanzas – had nothing to do with democracy. Per-
haps the answer to such a paradox is that the song starts with a spoken commercial
advertisement for vinegar that presumably sold a lot that year.62 The opportunistic
58 Octavio Quiñones Pardo, »El porro«, in Interpretación de la poesía popular, Bogotá: 1947, p. 177.
59 Un caballero del Paraguay, 10’’ LP, c.1946, A, 1.
60 José Manuel Rodríguez, Una historia de la censura musical en la radio española años 50 y 60,
Madrid: RTVE-Música, 2007, 2 CDs. Se va el caimán, CD 2, 4. Bésame Morenita, CD 1, 4.
61 Torres Montes de Oca, I, pp. 151–55; Guillermo Henríquez Torres, »La música en el
Magdalena Grande en el siglo XIX. Eulalio Melendez«, Historia, identidades, cultura popu-
lar y música tradicional en el caribe colombiano, Velledupar: Unicesar, 2004, Eds. Hughes
Sanchez, Leovedis Martínez, pp. 104–09.
62 Oñate, CD, 9.
182
producer and the naive buyer (and possibly the needy musicians) all shared their
low grasp of the meaning of democracy and they all contributed to transform a
dear – and from April that year – frustrated social aspiration, into a commodity.
II.
Robert Stevenson argues how at Bogotá’s Cathedral, the extant liturgical music of
early-19th-century chapel master Juan de Dios Torres (c.1795–c.1844) – whose
father was a theatre musician – shows a totally different style to the previous reper-
toire using very few voices (one or two singing in thirds), simple melodic lines and
very straightforward harmonic accompaniment. However, Stevenson considers it
»rudimentary« and conservative historians such as Perdomo Escobar glossed his
comments to conclude that this adaptation to new international schemes was a
sign of »decadence« and »degeneration«.63 Drew E. Davies has shown how the
adoption of an international melodic opera »galant« style by some composers in
18th century Mexico also has been seen as a sign of »contamination« by nationalist
Mexican musicology, refusing to accept its modernity and the existence of a re-
fined international taste.64
Decades later in Colombia, that melodic simplicity and clear popular vein is
found in the vocal music of professional local musicians such as Tiburcio Hortúa
(c.1818–c.1880), represented by a very simple Responsión (Response) for voice and
guitar composed for the Feast of the Conception of the Virgin and contained in
the manuscript song collection mentioned above. The same could be concluded
from Los Negritos, a Christmas VILLANCICO by Manuel M. Rueda (?–c.1881) –
Quijano’s antecessor as chapel master – that presents a fusion of the old tradition,
following all the conventions of the colonial VILLANCICO DE NEGROS, with the
accompaniment of guitar and bandola, two of the typical companions of popular
songs, this time set to the hemiolic rhythmic structure of the BAMBUCO. Rueda is
also the author of a set of Lamentations based on the waltz (Aire de Valse).65 In ear-
ly 1829, canon Manuel M. Mosquera (General Tomás Cipriano’s brother) de-
63 Perdomo Escobar, »La música colonial en Colombia«, Revista Musical Chilena, 81–82,
(1962), pp. 170–71; El Archivo Musical de la Catedral de Bogotá, Bogotá: Instituto Caro y
Cuervo, 1976, pp. 69, 115.
64 Drew E. Davies, »México galante: Hacia una historiografía precisa de la música italianiza-
da en la Nueva España«, paper presented at Coloquio Internacional de Musicología. Casa de
Las Américas, La Habana, Cuba, 14–18 April, 2008.
65 Ms. MI 1453, ff. 40, 54; Bermúdez, Historia, pp. 31–33, 171 and CD 2, 5 and 7.
183
Egberto Bermudez
nounced in a letter the intrusion of »very obscene dances« into the previous
Christmas religious services. But as early as 1783 church authorities tried to ban
VILLANCICOS and CANCIONES PROFANAS (secular songs) from Christmas func-
tions.66 That they were not very successful is implied in references to the BAMBU-
CO, TORBELLINO and other SONES POPULARES being sung and played at churches
near and in Bogotá from 1845 to 1864 during Christmas, and to waltzes, mazur-
kas, Cuban DANZAS and PASILLOS played on the piano during Holy Week in
1867 and 1876.67 The presence from 1892 of foreign chapel masters, the Spanish
Lorenzo Elcoro and later the Italian Egisto Giovanetti would signal the disman-
tling of this tradition, which – at least in the opinion of some – incarnated
old-fashioned aesthetics. As we shall see below, in the first half of the 20th-century
song composers such as Gonzalo Vidal (1863–1946), Guillermo Quevedo Zorno-
za (1886–1964), Luis A. Calvo (1882–1945), Adolfo Mejía (1905–1973) and José
Rozo Contreras (1894–1976) amongst others, contributed to religious music and
to a vast repertoire of anthems dedicated to various private and public institutions
and to many Colombian cities and regions.68
The popularity of festival choirs and the emergence of a market for oratorio
can be seen as a result of the democratization of European social and cultural life,
which also had a positive impact on the improvement of music printing and the
growth of musical literacy, sometimes through the invention of simplified systems
of notation.69 To a certain extent, we find a similar situation in mid-19th-century
Colombia where, from 1851 onwards, a few theory books and a new system of
music notation catered for a very limited demand. In the Latin-American context,
however, oratorio never competed with opera and ZARZUELA but interesting mid-
way solutions between the religious and the popular were found, such as the ZAR-
ZUELA MÍSTICA (»religious zarzuela«) Quevedo Rachadell assembled a company for
that purpose in Bogotá in 1857 and in the manuscript song-collection of around
1880 one section of a Venezuelan ZARZUELA MÍSTICA is to be found.70 Decades
later, popular song also made its way to one of the very few oratorios composed in
66 Perdomo Escobar, El Archivo, pp. 115–16.

67 Davidson, I, pp. 423–24.
68 See Stella Bonilla de Páramo, Compositores Colombianos.Vida y Obra. Catalogo No. 1, Bo-
gotá: Instituto Colombiano de Cultura/Centro de Documentación Musical, 1992.
69 Theodore M. Finney, »The Oratorio and Cantata Market: Britain, Germany, America
c.1830–c.1910«, in Jacobs, Choral, pp. 217–30.
70 José M. Cordovez Moure, Reminiscencias de Santafé y Bogotá, Bogotá: Gerado Rivas Edi-
tor, 1997, p. 918; Ms. MI 1453, f. 44v.
184
Colombia in the first half of the 20th century. Andrés Rosa (1911–?), Italian priest
and composer, included the widely popular Guabina Chiquinquireña (1925) by
Alberto Urdaneta (1895–1953) in his Marian oratorio Reina y Madre, premiered
in 1946.71
We have seen how the REGENERACIÓN CULTURAL project showed interest in
children’s songs and produced some educational publications that included Sindi-
ci’s settings of poems by Pombo. A new paradigm would be proposed by the Min-
istry of Education of the Alfonso López Pumarejo Liberal administration (1934–
1938) as part of their most ambitious cultural project, the Biblioteca Aldeana de
Colombia that included a CANCIONERO ESCOLAR72. Notwithstanding that Marce-
lino de Castellvi, a Catalonian Capuchin missionary who was a linguist and a mu-
sician, took an active part in the project, only two of its ninety-two songs are reli-
gious and in his prologue, López de Mesa (Lopez’s first Education Minister)
evokes the »brilliant cultural period between 1870 and 1875« referring to the con-
troversial education policies of the Liberal radical governments that finally pro-
voked the Civil War of 1876–1877 and the ultimate demise of Radicalism.73 The
contents of the CANCIONERO aim at being universal, including the works of Eu-
ropean and Latin American composers and poets, as well as many Colombian ex-
amples: amongst them are five of Castellvi’s own compositions along with some
works by E. Murillo, L.A. Calvo, S. Uribe and, besides the national anthem, also
Sindici’s songs of the 1880s. The Colombian material includes a short song allud-
ing to Amerindian culture (INDIO) and as the only example of regional affirmation
has Los Antioqueñitos – difficult to know if an homage to López de Mesa or his
imposition – a tune that combines martial hymn and HABANERA rhythms and
glorifies work, freedom and rural life.74 Christmas songs and carols (VILLANCICOS)
were another preoccupation in those years and from the opposite camp, Alberto
Urdaneta published in 1951 a collection for one or two voices with piano accom-
paniment, almost all of them dedicated to prominent church figures.75
71 Octavio Quiñones Pardo, »El Himno folklórico de Boyacá«, Revista de América, (1947),
pp. 72–80 reprinted without musical examples in Interpretación, pp. 167–76.
72 Carlos Gamboa, La alegría de cantar (análisis de un cancionero), Bogotá: Universidad Dis-
trital Francisco J. de Caldas, 2004, Master’s Dissertation, 2004. I thank Carlos Gamboa
(Bogotá) for kindly supplying me with a copy of his work.
73 Luis López de Mesa, »Escuela, canto y nacionalidad«, in Cancionero Escolar, Bogotá: Bi-
blioteca Aldeana de Colombia, n.d., p. i.
74 Cancionero, pp. 25, 32–33.
75 Alberto Urdaneta, Nueve villancicos originales, Bogotá: Ed. Iqueima, 1951.
185
Egberto Bermudez
III.
The decades at the turn of the 20th century witnessed the emergence in Colombia
of what could be called »heraldic« or »emblematic« songs. In the first years of the
new century songs that exalted regional values or geographic localities begin to ap-
pear and by the end of the 1940s were already recognized as »regional anthems«.76
Zamudio was the first to recognize their artificiality and to describe them as new
and not as traditional compositions.77
Political and economic regionalism consolidated during the years of the federa-
tive union of states that existed since 1855 (known as CONFEDERACIÓN GRANA-
DINA in 1858 and ESTADOS UNIDOS DE COLOMBIA in 1863) and James W. Park
maintains that such regionalism had geographic, racial, political and cultural as-
pects.78 The debilitating effect of regionalism was one of the themes brandished as
necessary by Rafael Núñez and his followers in their efforts to dismantle the 1863
Federal Constitution. Their overwhelming victory in the civil war of 1884–1885
opened the way for the triumph of the centralist, presidential and catholic republic
of their wishes. Hermes Tovar argues that the failures of radicalism and federalism
were also evident to the common people. Already in the writings of publicists from
1868 onwards such shortcomings were denounced and the radical regime came to
be considered an »aristocratic republic«, with an »educated« minority that alie-
nated and manipulated the »ignorant masses«.79
However, as we have already pointed out, cultural and musical regionalism oc-
cupied that space, recognized by the elite as a harmless species compared to the
menaces of regional political and armed activism. The legitimization of these em-
blematic or heraldic songs came through power, politics and the media and threw
confusion on the ground of Colombian emergent musicology that at the same
time was slowly beginning to get acquainted with traditional, peasant and rural
musical genres. Researchers found that by the mid-1950s, those heraldic songs –
because of their political significance – had already displaced traditional patterns as
representatives of regional musical cultures.
In Núñez’s REGENERACIÓN and its project of nation building we find the ini-
tial and – as we will see – highly ambiguous context for the growth of Colombian
76 Colombia had been administratively and politically subdivided into Provinces (until
1858), States (1858–86) and Departments (1886 to today).
77 Zamudio, pp. 22–23.
78 James William Park, Rafael Nuñez and the Politics of Colombian Regionalism, 1863–1886,
Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1985, Ch. I, pp. 7–35.
79 Tovar Pinzón, pp. 195–218.
186
emblematic or heraldic song. La borinqueña, one of the Cuban-style HABANERAS

contained in the manuscript anthology already mentioned marks the entry – as an
emblematic regional song – of this Caribbean musical genre into the Colombian
canonic national repertoire.80 The manuscript is labelled as DANZA CARTAGENE-
RA, perhaps as an allusion or direct homage to Núñez himself, a native of that city
and probably the most important politician since the 1870s. Núñez was the main
ideologue and leader of the Regeneración and – after having been in power once –
became president of the new centralized republic in 1886. In this context, the
DANZA CARTAGENERA was meant to represent musically the Colombian coastal
area neighbouring Panamá. However, La Borinqueña (already a Cuban HABANE-
RA) was an emblematic song from another region, the insular Spanish colony of
Puerto Rico. Composed in 1867 by the Catalonian Felix A. Astol (1813–1901) as
a romantic song following the topical tradition of artistic homage to local feminine
beauty, it was adopted one year later as a national patriotic song after the Lares
insurrection. Furnished with a new text by the local poet and patriot Lola
Rodríguez de Tió, in the following years it became widely known all over the
Spanish Caribbean.81 In our context, the CANCIÓN HABANERA reinforced local
acquaintance with the instrumental DANZA CUBANA, known in Bogotá since the
early 1850s.82 Along with the BAMBUCO, the DANZA (as it continued to be called
in Colombia) established itself in the 1880s as the second pillar of the »national«
song repertoire.
One of the first emblematic songs to appear is the BAMBUCO Brisas del Pam-
plonita (the name of a river in Norte de Santander, the border region with Venezu-
ela in northeastern Colombia), perhaps the earliest of all, composed by Elias M.
Soto (1858–1944) in 1894.83 One of the last is Feria de Manizales, a PASODOBLE
by Juán M. Asins (?–2006), a member of the famous Spanish comic-taurine Va-
lencian band »El Empastre«, composed in 1956 and dedicated to one of the most
important Colombian fairs and bullfighting seasons, created just a few years be-
fore. Manizales was the epicenter of the powerful coffee-growing region that cultu-
rally opted for exalting its »Spanish« background and it was also the home of poli-
80 Ms. MI 1453, f. 63v; Bermúdez, Historia, p. 122, CD 2, 9.

81 Zoila Lapique, Música colonial cubana. I (1812–1902), La Habana: Ed. Letras Cubanas,
1979, pp. 276–80.
82 Harry Davidson, Diccionario Folklórico de Colombia, Bogotá: Banco de la República, 1970,
II, pp. 186–88.
83 Lucio Pabón Nuñez, »El himno del nortesantandereano«, Muestras folklóricas del Norte de San-
tander, Bogotá: Biblioteca de Autores Colombianos, 1952, pp. 149–50 includes score n.p.
187
Egberto Bermudez
ticians and economic leaders who showed unashamed sympathies for FALANGISMO
and Franco’s Spain.84 In those years, for instance, the Recollect Augustinian friars
from Manizales published handsomely in their press the vocal score of Cara al sol,
the Falangist hymn (Himno de la Falange Española).85
Ancient regional musical genres, dances and instruments had played an impor-
tant role in regional literary COSTUMBRISMO, one of the most powerful currents in
Spanish and Latin American culture in the second half of the 19th century. This
trend was successively permeated by romanticism and realism and in its last phase,
manifested particularly in short plays and musical theatre, especially in Cuba, Ar-
gentina and México (see Part Two).86 As part of their aim to be representative and
to exhibit regional authenticity, some of the songs under discussion were based on
traditional musical structures, but being conceived as songs, these traditional pat-
terns always required a high level of alteration. Traditional forms – as they survive
today – are for the most part cyclical and consist of harmonic schemes that provide
the basis for a limited variety of instrumental and vocal melodies. The superimpo-
sition of a binary structure brings along harmonic alteration that in some cases can
go as far as accepting modulation and complex formal schemes.
Several GUABINAS, dedicated to different Colombian regions are perhaps the
more numerous experiments of this type. The word (a name for a variety of river
fish) appears associated with music and dance in Colombia (Antioquia) in the
mid-1860s but is documented in Cuba six decades earlier.87 Nowadays in
east-central Colombia there exists a a musical genre based on a repetitive harmonic
scheme (I–IV–V) used to improvise COPLAS at intervals in free rhythm.88 Zamu-
84 The text is credited to local poet Guillermo González Ospina. See Peláez, p. 203. See also:
www.colombia.com/turismo/ferias_fiestas/2003/feria_manizales.asp, José Soler Carnicer, Valencia
pintoresca y tradicional, Vol. 1, Valencia: Carans Editors, 1997, pp. 272–75, see also: http://books.
google.com.co/books?id=NVdC6UGLUt0C&dq=el+empastre&source=gbs_summary_s&cad=0;
José Angel Hernández, »Los Leopardos y el fascismo en Colombia«, Historia y Comunicación
Social, 5, (2000), pp. 221–27 see also: http://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=619070
85 Himno de la Falange Española de las J.O.N.S., Manizales: Tip. San Agustín, c.1955. The
score has a color cover with a portrait of Franco and the coat of arms of the Falange.
86 Clara Rey de Guido and Walter Guido (Eds.), Cancionero Rioplatense (1880–1925), Caracas:
Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989; Carlos Vega, Las danzas populares argentinas (1952), Buenos Air-
es: Instituto de Musicología Carlos Vega, 1986, 2 vols; Rine Leal, La Selva Oscura. Historia
del teatro cubano, La Habana: Letras Cubanas, 1982, 2 vols; Yolanda Moreno Rivas, Historia
de la música popular mexicana, México: Alianza Editorial/Conaculta, 1979, pp. 65–74.
87 Davidson, II, p. 252; Leal, I, p. 214; II, p. 169.
88 E. Bermúdez, Por mi Puente Real de Vélez, Bogotá: Fundación de Musica, 1997, »Notes«
pp. 13–14, 20–22 and CD 2, 7 and 8.
188
dio discusses this pattern (the TORBELLINO) and finds it equivalent to the Cuban
GUAJIRA instrumental accompaniment, signaling especially the tempo alteration
necessary when the singing starts, a feature shared by the Colombian genre.89
The GUABINAS here discussed all differ from that scheme and are songs that
generally alternate COPLAS and refrains (AB) maintaining a simple harmonic tran-
sition (I–V). One of the earliest is the Guabina Tolimense (1915) by Alberto Cas-
tilla (1878–1937),90 followed by the Guabina Santadereana (1918) by Lelio Olarte
(1882–1940) recorded in 1927.91 They refer respectively to Tolima and Santander,
regions quite different in their economic, social and cultural profiles, a contrast
that also occurs in the case of the other two areas said to be represented by them,
Boyacá and Huila, located in central and southwest Colombia respectively. The
pieces are the Guabina Chiquinquireña (1925) by Alberto Urdaneta,92 and the Gu-
abina Huilense (c.1930) by Carlos E. Cortes (1900–1967).93 The first employs
verses from Daniel Bayona Posada (1887–1920) who belonged to a family of poets
and writers from Bogotá and who specialized in »rustic poetry« imitating the col-
loquial language of peasants from central Colombia.94 This trend – that emerged
in the 1860s – would become very important for the textual choices for songs in
the decades to come (see Part Three).
Both Cartagena and the porro Carmen de Bolívar (1944) could be considered
good examples of the Atlantic Coast cultural participation to this trend. It was com-
posed by Luis E. »Lucho« Bermúdez (1912–1994) as homage to his birthplace in the
department of Bolivar and became one of his greatest hits in Bogotá when he worked
with his and other orchestras in the capital’s main dance venues.95 In Buenos Aires he
would later compose Danza negra (1946) another hit and emblematic song, one of
the first vocal CUMBIAS and – according to the composer – composed out of nostalgia
and in homage of the black population of the northern Colombian coast.96 Danza
negra – also known as La cumbia colombiana – is perhaps the first and best example
89 Zamudio, pp. 12–14.

90 Añez, pp. 156–58; Rico Salazar, p. 353.
91 Pinilla, p. 317, Rico Salazar, p. 340, Joyas, 8, 8.
92 Quiñones Pardo, pp. 73–80.
93 Pinilla, pp. 135–36.
94 Restrepo Duque, Lo que cuentan, pp. 14–14; Rogelio Echavarría, Quien es quien en la
poesía colombiana, Bogotá: El Ancora/Ministerio de Cultura, 1998. See also:
www.lablaa.org/blaavirtual/literatura/quien/quien0.htm
95 José Portaccio Fontalvo, Carmen tierra mía. Lucho Bermúdez, Bogotá: [Author’s Edition],
1997, p. 77; Rico Salazar, p. 257.
96 Portaccio, Carmen, pp. 79–80; Betancur Alvarez, Ch. XIX, pp. 225–58.
189
Egberto Bermudez
of musical Colombian negrismo, an echo of the »African«, »Cuban« or »slave laments«

(LAMENTOS) common in Cuban popular music since the 1920s.97 Their main musi-
cal characteristic is pretended »primitivism« portrayed in its use of pentaphonic scales
and a modal harmonic atmosphere. Bermúdez himself insisted on this aspect claim-
ing his composition as »representative […] of what a black feels, in musical poetry,
without polemics, without anything else, what the sea is, the sound of the human
voice in music«.98 The sources of Bermúdez’s primitivism and naturalism were purely
musical, taken from Cuban models, far from the intellectual and literary polemics
propelled by the Costeño elite to conquer space at the national centers of power.99
However, the real historical roots of black music in Colombia were to be ma-
nipulated rather than being recognized. BUNDE was a term employed since the
1730s in Colombia’s northern coastal region to refer to dance-songs among the
black and mixed-blood population and since the 1850s it has been documented
amongst the population of African descent in Antioquia and in other disparate
Colombian areas such as the capital itself and also Boyacá, Huila, Cauca, Chocó
and Tolima.100 The dance was very popular in COSTUMBRISTA literature and in
that context we can locate the composition of the Bunde Tolimense (1914), by Al-
berto Castilla, a composer of Antioqueño descent who was born in Bogotá but
spent most of his political and musical life in Ibagué (Tolima) the region that his
song claims to represent.101 Castilla’s piece can be an example of »selective identi-
ty«, in which only one of the various regions in which a music genre can be docu-
mented is chosen to identify with it. Furthermore, nowadays the music structure
named BUNDE is documented amongst communities of African descent in Pa-
97 See Emilio Grenet, Popular Cuban Music. 80 Revised and Corrected Compositions. Together
with an Essay on the Evolution of Music in Cuba, Havana: Secretary of Agriculture, 1939,
»Essay«, p. xliii and pieces by Grenet, Lecuona and Arsenio Rodríguez. See also Robin D.
Moore, Nationalizing Blackness. Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920–
1940, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997, pp. 135–46.
98 Interviewed in Portaccio, Carmen, pp. 80, 270.
99 These debates are analyzed in Peter Wade, Music, Race and Nation. Música tropical in
Colombia, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000, pp. 39–47.
100 E. Bermúdez, »Poro-Sande-Bunde: vestigios de un complejo ritual de Africa Occidental
en la música de Colombia«, Ensayos. Historia y teoría del arte, Instituto de Investigaciones
Estéticas, VII, (2002–2003), pp. 9–56, Eladio Gónima, »Apuntes para la historia del tea-
tro en Medellín (segunda parte) (1897)«, in Historia del Teatro en Medellín y Vejeces, Me-
dellín: Biblioteca de Autores Antioqueños, 1973, p. 65; Davidson, II, pp. 48–73.
101 Añez, pp. 149–59; Rico Salazar, p. 352.
190
namá, the Colombian Pacific coast and the north of Cauca but musically, it is very
different to the emblematic piece, being – contrary to it – in duple meter.
A similar case of fabrication comes with the invention of a new musical genre, the
Sanjuanero Huilense (1938) by Anselmo Durán (1907–40), labelled more commonly
a JOROPO SANJUANERO combining two terms, the first from the »Llanos Orientales«
and the second, a neologism to refer to music played at the San Juan (24 June) festiv-
ities, traditional in the upper Magdalena valley region of Huila and Tolima.102
Amongst other heraldic pieces, an interesting case is that of La Guaneña, an in-
strumental BAMBUCO – recorded in New York in October 1937 – and an example
of recent cultural and historical fabrication. On unknown historical grounds it was
recognized as a »war hymn« and adopted as the musical identity emblem of Na-
riño, a department in the southernmost region bordering Ecuador. No traces of it
were found before this recording (Columbia 5643–X) by the Colombian group of
Ernesto Boada, attributed to local composer, band musician and director Julio Za-
rama and symptomatically it does not appear in any of the works on Colombian
national music before the 1960s (Zamudio, De Lima and Davidson).103 Its official
history began with an article in 1969, then sanctioned by local historians and con-
secrated in a symphonic arrangement by Raul Rosero (1948), a local composer,
conductor and at the time president of »SAYCO«, the powerful and sole Colom-
bian composers’ and authors’ association.104 The arrangement was premiered in
1989 to celebrate the 450th anniversary of the foundation of Pasto, the capital city
of the department.105 Its present text was probably added in the 1960s and recent
choreographic additions, endorsed by the local government in official acts, show
women dressed in local 19th century peasant attire dancing with wooden rifles and
national flags.106 There is debate over the date of Pasto’s foundation and a plausible
102 Restrepo Duque, Las cien, pp. ; Rico Salazar, p. 310–11.

103 Spottswood, IV, p. 1680. On Zarama, documented from 1905 to 1941, see Marcos A.
Salas Salazar, Banda departamental de músicos de Nariño, Pasto: Fondo Mixto de Cultura,
1998, pp. 70, 93, 101, 113. See also Restrepo Duque, Las cien, pp. 135–36.
104 There is a previous orchestral arrangement (c.1959) by Lubin Mazuera, director of the
Department’s band. See Salas, p. 123.
105 Neftalí Benavides Rivera, »Biografía de la Guaneña«, Cultura Nariñense, 1, (julio 1968),
p. 63; Restrepo Duque, Las cien, pp. 135–36; Rico Salazar, p. 325 and Juan Bastidas
Urresty, Son sureño, Bogotá: Ed. Testimonio, 2003, pp. 23–28.
106 CiudadSorpresa.com, Video Foro, La Guaneña, see: www.ciudadsorpresa.com/Videos-de-
Narino/Videos/Video-Foro-La-Guanena.html
191
Egberto Bermudez
explanation for the 1937 recording is that it can be considered »heraldic«, accord-
ing to those who maintain that 1537 was the real date.107
Other song genres such as the BAMBUCO, the BOLERO and the RUMBA CRIOL-
LA were also used as emblematic songs about local feminine or natural beauty such
as Antioqueñita (1919) by Pelón Santamarta, Cartagena (1935) by Adolfo Mejía
and Bogotanita querida (c.1936) by Emilio Sierra (1891–1957), claiming to
represent Antioquia, Cartagena and Bogotá.108 The first, based on a text that main-
tains the late colonial seguidilla scheme, exalts – as many of these songs do – idea-
lized local beauty.109 Perhaps Antioqueñita should be considered as the first Co-
lombian BAMBUCO we find in this context because the already-mentioned Brisas
del Pamplonita does not show its typical accentual dislocations and rhyth-
mic-melodic contours. Soto’s composition shares its characteristics with Venezu-
elan BAMBUCO from the border states of Táchira and Mérida. According to
Ramón y Rivera (a musicologist, composer and a native of that area), Venezuelan
BAMBUCO is different because of the rhythmic patterns in the accompaniment, its
phrase accentuation and finales.110 Another musical homage to local beauty is
Campesina santandereana a BAMBUCO by José A. Morales (1910–1978) recorded
in 1950.111
Mejia’s Cartagena is one of the first Colombian boleros and its text, by amateur
poet and radio presenter Leonidas Otálora, is a good example of Hispanidad of the
late 1920s where lyrics – as in many other songs of that period – glorify the Span-
ish colonial cultural legacy.112 HISPANIDAD gained momentum with Colombia’s
significant musical participation in the Seville Ibero-American Exposition of
1929–1930 inaugurated simultaneously with the Spanish-American Marian Con-
gress and that also included the Tropical and Subtropical Coffee Agriculture Con-
gress (»Congreso de Agricultura Tropical y Subtropical del Café«) and the Spanish
107 The other date is 1559 when the Spanish Crown granted Pasto the city’s title.
108 Rico Salazar, p. 299
109 Zapata Cuencar, Centenario, pp. 43–44. De la Espriella (p. 6) suggests that the author of
the text is Miguel Agudelo Zuluaga, a local poet.
110 Ramon y Rivera, La música folklórica venezolana, Caracas: Monte Avila, 1969, p. 221.
111 Rico Salazar, p. 344.
112 Restrepo Duque, Las cien, pp. 131–34. The term Hispanidad was coined in the late 1920s
by Zacarias de Viscarra (1880–1963) and Ramiro de Maeztu (1875–1936), two Basques
living in Argentina. Its doctrine was based on the defense of Hispanic and Catholic values
and traditions and eventually led to changing the name of Columbus Day (»Dia de la Ra-
za«) for Day of the Hispanidad (»Dia de la Hispanidad«). In Spain it fostered a kind of na-
tionalism that was instrumental in the foundation of the Falange Española.
192
Ultramarine Trading Congress (»Congreso de Comercio Español en Ultramar«),

events patronized by the decaying Primo de Rivera dictatorship and highly signifi-
cant to the conservative Colombian government of Abadia Mendez. The Colom-
bian delegation included musicians and composers Jerónimo Velasco, Emilio Mu-
rillo, Francisco Cristancho and the »Wills y Escobar« duet. The duet performed
disguised in peasant attire – as did the sculptor Rómulo Rozo – while Murillo lec-
tured on Colombian Indian music and he and Velasco premiered their respective
Fantasia and Rapsodia on vernacular themes. Afterwards, Cristancho remained in
Spain until the outbreak of the Civil War of 1936 and – following the vogue of
music nationalism – is the author of a series of instrumental BAMBUCOs that bear
names belonging to the Muisca aboriginal mythology of Central Colombia.113
These instrumental pieces tried to be the musical counterpart to INDIGENISMO in
the visual arts, represented by Rozo and recognized as the main creative trend in
painting and sculpture at that time.114 Alberto Urdaneta, the author of Guabina
Chiquinquireña joined the delegation in Spain and had his song recorded in Barce-
lona by local CUPLÉ singers. On the other hand, the only Colombian musical allu-
sion to the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic in April 1931 is the song
recorded in New York by Jorge Añez and Guty Cardenas (1905–1932), Yucatan’s
celebrated composer and singer. The CORRIDO La República en España (Columbia
Co 4504–X) composed by Cardenas himself, was recorded in that very same
month and in due style narrates the events, praising »civil action« and the triumph
in the elections that deposed the Monarchy.115
The Galerón Llanero (1936) by Alejandro Wills (1887–1943) is another of
these emblematic songs. It was recorded in 1936 by the author and a recently
formed group named »Los Llaneros«.116 Besides the standard tiple, bandola and
guitars the ensemble used percussion and in some of their arrangements the ban-
dola plays melodic sequences in imitation of the harp, the most representative
musical instrument of that region.117 Finally, as happened with the guabinas,
Wills’s GALERÓN does not follow the already-described galerón’s traditional har-
monic pattern and – as recorded in 1936 – is basically a song that alternates a re-
113 Roldán Luna, p. 36. Rico Salazar, pp. 100, 150, 263–64.
114 Alvaro Medina, El arte colombiano en los años veinte y treinta, Bogotá: Colcultura, 1995, pp.
45–59.
115 Spottswood, IV, p. 1744. Musical excerpts in: http://digital.library.ucla.edu/frontera/
116 Retrepo Duque, Las cien, p. 130, Rico Salazar, p. 135, Joyas, 13, 14.
117 The deficient quality of the recordings makes it very difficult to identify the instruments,
the best candidates are the maracas or a tubular rattle (named locally chucho).
193
Egberto Bermudez
frain with strophes based on coplas. As we have said, in the 1860s the GALERÓN
was recognized as a fundamental musical genre in the Llanos Orientales, the sa-
vannas that Colombia shares with Venezuela.118 It survives nowadays in Colombia
as a repetitive scheme (I–V) to accompany simple instrumental or vocal melodies,
while in Venezuela it preserves a complex poetic form and a harmonic sequence
identical to the Colombian torbellino (I–IV–V).119
Race and racial descent also became themes for heraldic songs. The champion
of this style was Luis Carlos Gonzalez (1908–1985) a poet from Pereira (one of the
urban centers of a zone of Antioqueño colonization) who for his numerous hits
(see Part Three) teamed up with composers like Enrique Figueroa (1903–1977)
and José Mazo Martínez (1912–2003), a.k.a. José Macias.120 In his BAMBUCO Mi
casta (c.1950) as in some others Gonzalez glorifies – self representing it – the eth-
nically white and »courageous, prolific, sexually potent, harsh, humble and labo-
rious« Antioqueño »caste« whose ancestors he calls »Don Quixotes of the moun-
tains«, proudly declaring his Spanish ancestry in another poem, where he portrays
his father as a man of »white hair, white skin/and with green eyes like a tiger«.121
However, not only the local and the regional were considered apt to become
musically emblematic, also local and regional symbols themselves became, in songs,
musical symbols. Such is the case of several of the markers of Antioqueño culture,
the machete and the ax, the CARRIEL and the RUANA, AGUARDIENTE and even the
FONDA (rural trading and socializing spot) of the coffee-growing regions, all sub-
jects of poems and song texts by Gonzalez.122 Perhaps the most famous of all is the
BAMBUCO La ruana (c.1951) dedicated to one of those regional symbols whose
text states that the garment is at the same time: »a shelter for the macho, the blan-
ket of cradles, a faithful shadow of our grandparents and a national treasure«. Its
authenticity as a symbol rests on having »[…] double ancestry/from Don Quixote
118 Vergara y Vergara, loc. cit.

119 E. Bermúdez, Música tradicional y popular colombiana, 4. Llanos Orientales. El Taparito, Bogotá:
Procultura, 1987, p. 52, LP, B, 4; Isabel Aretz, »El folklore musical de Venezuela«, Revista Mu-
sical Chilena, XXII, 104–5, (abril-dic. 1968), pp. 71–72 and Ramón y Rivera, pp. 52–59.
120 Rico Salazar, pp. 705–708.
121 »Con verdes ojos de tigre/cana testa, cuero blanco«. Héctor Ocampo Marín, El poeta de
la ruana y su memoria de Pereira, Bogotá: Banco de la República, 1985, pp. 39–41.
122 Ruana (woollen or linen poncho); carriel or guarniel (all-purpose carrying ornamented
leather bag); aguardiente (distilled sugar cane liquor (white rum) flavored with aniseed).
Ocampo Marín, pp. 25–27, 81–82, 112, 121–22,
194
and the Quimbaya Indians« that allowed to cut »a ruana from Antioquia/out of a
Castilian cape«, a clear example of highly-distilled poetic demagogy.123
Yet the paroxysm of such a style comes undoubtedly when the very country
and nationality become the subject-matter of the song. Perhaps the two most
widely-recognized as emblematic are Soy Colombiano (c.1960) a BAMBUCO by Ra-
fael Godoy (1907–1973) and the CUMBIA Colombia tierra querida (c.1958) by
Lucho Bermúdez. In the latter piece, composed in Medellín in the heyday of his
recording career, Bermúdez takes advantage of the structural responsorial style of
afro-Colombian song to built an animated nationalistic dialogue between soloist
and chorus, repeating over and over again: »I will live forever singing/Colombia
my beloved land! «124
Another important Antioqueño symbol, and a very important one for that
matter, was coffee. Monopolized by Antioquia because of its control of Fedecafe,
throughout this period became a Colombian icon and its corresponding heraldic
song is El camino del café by Jorge Monsalve (1919–1986) and recorded by »For-
tich y Valencia« in Buenos Aires around 1948–1950, and again by Mexican tenor
Genaro Salinas, another resident of the city.125 Monsalve’s exotic symbiosis of BO-
LERO, afro-lament and PORRO fits very well into the experiments in musical ex-
oticism being made in that city in those years such as Lucho Bermúdez’s DANZA
NEGRA and Moises Vivanco’s Peruvian »Indian« music recordings with his wife
Yma Sumac.126 It was also the heyday of »Mr. Coffee« (Manuel Mejia) president of
»Fedecafe« that was reaching sustained record exports by 1953 and had a perma-
nent office in Buenos Aires since 1946.127
In the 1940s Godoy, a native of southern Tolima, lived in Barrancabermeja
(east central Colombia) the centre of Colombian oil industry and became very in-
123 La ruana music by José Macias, recorded by Obdulio y Julian and other duets c.1951.
»Porque tengo doble ancestro/de don Quijote y Quimbaya/hice una ruana antioqueña/de
una capa castellana […] Abrigo de macho macho/cobija de cuna paisa/sombra fiel de mis
abuelos/y tesoro de la patria«. Restrepo Duque, Las cien, p. 17.
124 »Cantando, cantando yo viviré/Colombia tierra querida!«. Portaccio, Carmen, p. 292.
125 »Fortich y Valencia« in Nostalgias Musicales, Bogotá: Club Internacional de Coleccionistas
de Discos, 2, 5. Home made CD; Genaro Salinas in Joyas, 19, 12; Rico Salazar (pp. 406,
796) gives both 1948 and 1952 as the dates for Salinas’ recording.
126 E. Bermúdez, »La cumbia dentro y fuera de Colombia«, paper presented at VIII Congreso
IASPM-AL, Lima, 18–22 June 2008.
127 Manuel Mejia, »Informe. 20 años de la Federación Colombiana de Cafeteros, 1937–57«,
in Don Manuel: Mr. Coffee, Bogotá, Fondo Cultural Cafetero, 1989, II, pp. 74, 136; »In-
formes a Congresos Cafeteros«, pp. 183–84.
195
Egberto Bermudez
volved in worker’s politics as trade union leader until political pressure made him
emigrate to Venezuela in 1947 where some years later he composed his famous
BAMBUCO and lived for the rest of his years. In Part Three we examine its text in
the light of economic nationalism but no doubt ambiguity comes to mind hearing
its bottom line, glorifying: »Girls, music and liquor/from our highlands or our sa-
vannahs/How proud do I feel to be a good Colombian!«128 Is it, once again, the
continuity of naïve and romantic nationalism? Or on the contrary, is it a successful
assimilation of the functional and demagogic character of the nationalism of real
politics?
Some of these songs were conceived originally as instrumental pieces and later
furnished with verses appropriate to their heraldic quality and although they fall out
of the scope of this work it is worth mentioning that also served an emblematic and
heraldic purpose. Amongst many others, along with some already-mentioned exam-
ples, we have the PASILLO Adios a Popayán (c.1919) by Efrain Orozco (1897–1975)
and the BAMBUCO El sotareño by Francisco Diago (1867–1945), both referring to
the Cauca region in southwestern Colombia, the latter using music scales typical of
indigenous and peasant music of the region.129 An emblematic GUABINA that – on
the other hand – aimed at being part of the classical symphonic repertoire was Ci-
priano Guerrero’s Guabina ribereña No. 1, composed while he was a member of the
orchestra of the »Asociación Filarmónica de Barranquilla« in the mid-1930s.130 The
importance of the river and the idea – amongst others – proposed by Orlando Fals
Borda (1925–2008) at the Colombian Constitutional Assembly of 1991 of creating a
territorial and cultural region covering the mid-Magdalena river basin must have
been in the mind of Guerrero and others at that time.
Pride and courage, heroism, racial purity, MACHISMO and the romantic exalta-
tion of local feminine and natural beauty were themes very often used in the texts
of heraldic songs. A central place is also occupied by the concepts of race, racial
purity and Spanish HIDALGUÍA at the expense of references to the Amerindian and
African heritages. Musically the BAMBUCO features predominantly but we should
note the attempts to create and use new genres or the equivalents of today’s »fu-
sions«. Thus runs the construction of songs as musical symbols or emblems: how
they became part of Colombian mass culture is the subject of Part Three.
128 »Muchachas, música y trago/de la sierra o de mi llano/Ay que orgulloso me siento de ser
un buen colombiano!«. See Restrepo Duque, Las cien, pp. 27, 55–56.
129 Rico Salazar, p. 285. Diago’s score is in Lubin Mazuera, Orígenes históricos del Bambuco y
Músicos Vallecaucanos, Cali: [Author’s Edition], 1957, pp. 22–23.
130 De la Espriella, p. 279.
196
Part Two: The Stage, Tertulias and Balconies
I.
Songs seem to have been very important in Bogotá’s musical life since the early
decades of the 19th century and early references point to the existence of significant
ties with other Latin-American capitals involved in the strong pro-independence
cultural and military movements. A newspaper advertisement of 1825 announces a
performance »of music and songs« at the local theatre including La Venus and
another song said to be from the »Rio-de-la-Plata«, apparently both compositions
of Juan Antonio Velasco (?–1859), a military musician returning from the Ecuador
and Perú campaigns and who had to be the impresario of his own concerts.131 As
we have mentioned in the Introduction, Carlos Vega stressed the important role
played by the theatre and theatrical-musical performances in the consolidation of
Latin American CRIOLLO expressive culture. What he observes for Lima, Santiago
and Buenos Aires seem to be replicated in Bogotá, where in the 1830s local aficio-
nados led by Lorenzo M. Lleras (1811–1868) struggled to conform a theatrical
company where music and songs kept their important role. In 1833 Lleras pro-
posed a plan that – according to him – followed the example of Italy, France, Eng-
land and »even the United States« where actors were trained since childhood to
possess »vast knowledge« of local and foreign literature, »vocal music and poetry«.
Besides insisting on the educational value of these recreations, Lleras’s intention
was also to raise the cultural and social level of local actors and actresses aiming at
idealized extreme cases such as that of English nobility that »often elevate to the
rank of their spouses actresses and singers that on stage had conquered their hearts
and gained public applause«.132
Between 1838 and 1840 two Spanish and Latin-American companies (one of
which began visits to Colombia in 1833) merged and performed Spanish and
French works (in translation) of renowned popular playwrights. It also included
probably the first Spanish operatic piece to be heard in Bogotá, Quien porfía mucho
131 Gaceta de Colombia, 10 de julio 1825, Bermúdez, Historia, p. 99 and Jaime Villa Esgue-
rra, 100 años del Teatro de Cristóbal Colón, 1892–1992, Bogotá: Teatro de
Colón/Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1993, p. 94. On Velasco see Bermúdez, Histo-
ria, pp. 32–35.
132 Gaceta de la Nueva Granada, Nos. 70, 72, 1833, in Humberto Triana y Antorveza, »La
temporada teatral de 1833 en Santa Fe de Bogotá (1964)«, Materiales para una historia del
Teatro en Colombia, Eds. Maida Watson, Carlos J. Reyes, Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano
de Cultura, p. 138.
197
Egberto Bermudez
alcanza (1802) by Manuel García (1775–1832), an example of early Spanish ope-

retta with sections based on local traditional music such as the JOTA, POLO, BOLE-
RAS, SEGUIDILLAS, etc.133 A good showpiece of García’s style is the famous Polo del
contrabandista included in countless anthologies. The piece has two eight-bar sec-
tions and contrasts a minor one (i–V) repeated, with a major based on the
so-called Andalusian cadence (III–VI), with long virtuoso trills and an operatic
bravura ending.134
It is not surprising that after the »Sociedad Filarmónica« was founded in Bo-
gotá in 1846, Italian arias and choruses, songs and hymns were an integral part of
its public concerts during the following decade.135 Its founder, the English busi-
nessman, amateur painter and musician Henry Price (1819–1863) was the author
of several songs, amongst them one duet with words by Lleras and another, Donosa
señora (Gifted Lady), that became part of a comedy performed at the »Teatro del
Espíritu Santo« in 1850.136 One of his émigré countrymen, George Henry Isaacs
(c.1800–c.1861), kept a guitar and several mid-18th century song scores in his
country house near Cali.137 Likewise, in the same years (1848–1849) newspapers
and magazines began publishing musical scores, a repertoire consisting mainly of
piano pieces but also including a few songs and some guitar, flute and violin
works.138 These songs tend to be of the »sentimental genre«, borrowing an expres-
sion used by José Caicedo Rojas (1816–1889) to refer to works performed in
theatrical activities in Bogotá in his day.139 Perhaps the best example is El Barquero
(»The Boatman«) by Joaquin Guarín (1825–1854) on a text by Spanish poet and
dramatist Francisco Luis de Retes (?–1901), a typical melancholic BARCAROLE,
one of the most widely popular song and piano genres of Romantic music.
Guarín’s El Pescador (»The Fisherman«), a setting of a poem by José de Espronce-
da (1808–1842) is also a »sea song«, a variety clearly recognized in songsters in vo-
133 Johnson, p. 151. James Radomsky, »García, Manuel«, www.groveonline.com

134 Manuel García, Yo que soy contrabandista y otras canciones, Sevilla: Centro de Documenta-
ción Musical de Andalucía/Almaviva, c.1995, CD, 22.
135 Ellie Anne Duque, »Instituciones musicales«, in E. Bermúdez, Historia, pp. 125–48.
136 Perdomo Escobar, Historia, pp. 73–75.
137 Now at the Museum-House of El Paraíso. He was the father of Jorge Isaacs (1837–95)
author of María (1867) the most important 19th-century Colombian novel.
138 Ellie Anne Duque, liner notes in El Neogranadino: La música en las publicaciones periódicas
colombianas 1848–1860, Bogotá: Fundación de Música, 1998, MA-HCOL002, pp. 4–16.
139 Recuerdos y apuntamientos, Bogotá: Also in Watson and Reyes, p. 210. Caicedo Rojas, writer,
musican, music historian and one of the key figures of 19th-century Colombian culture.
198
gue in England and the United States in the late 18th century.140 Sentimental
sea-songs (or boat-songs) seem to have also been popular in Spain judging by the
international acclaim of one of the top Spanish hits at that time, La Cachucha
(»The Small Boat«), well-documented in Colombia between 1829 and 1876 and
incidentally, a favorite tune of Colombian statesman and »caudillo« General
Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera (1789–1878) who dominated Colombian politics
for more than two decades and was president on three different occasions.141
Spanish songs and dance numbers were of course the most commonly used but
as Vega has shown, American local dance-songs became very rapidly an essential
part of musical-theatrical performances. From the first decades of the 19th century,
dance-songs like the CIELITO and MALAMBO began their theatrical careers and in
the 1830s a MINUÉ COLOMBIANO (Colombian minuet) is documented in Buenos
Aires.142 In the 1880s GAUCHISMO in the Rio de la Plata region offered a fertile
terrain for the renewal of those repertoires where tango and milonga began to ap-
pear, as do Afro-Cuban musical genres in the busy late 19th-century Cuban musi-
cal-theatrical scene.143 Within the same framework, in 1839 we have the first re-
port of a BAMBUCO (the dance) in a theatrical context, requested to be included in
the performances of the resident company by a Bogotá theatre commentator. Al-
most three decades later (in 1865) the BAMBUCO was announced as the main fea-
ture in a theatrical function, and months later its musical materials were reworked
by the Venezuelan composer (then living in Bogotá) Roman Isaza for the choruses
of the SPANISH ZARZUELA La Castañera.144
The most celebrated figure of 19th-century Colombian vernacular theatre was
José M. Samper (1828–1888), intellectual, academic, writer and politician, whose
140 El Neogranadino, CD, 21 and 28; H. Nathan »United States of America«, in Stevens, p. 413.
141 Harry Davidson, pp. 73–77. The observation concerning Mosquera is contained in a
letter from his granddaughter Adelaida Herrán Mosquera, dated New York, 20.1.1862.
Bogotá, BLLA, Archivo Tomás C. de Mosquera, Archivo Familiar, Carpeta 11. Cachucha
is modern Spanish for »cap« but was the name given to a small boat.
142 Vega, »Los bailes […]«, pp. 87–90.
143 Vega, »Los bailes[…]«, pp. 93–96; Guido and Guido (Eds.), pp. xlviii–lxi; Leal, Vol. II;
Moore, Chap. 2, pp. 41–61.
144 Davidson, I, pp. 461–62. It is probable that this could be an earlier version of the ZARZUELA
of that name premiered in 1868 by his fellow Venezuelan composer José Angel Montero
(1832–81). See Numa Tortolero, Compositores venezolanos románticos, in www.geocities.
com/athens/parthenon/3749/montero02.html. Jeroma La Castañera (1842) is a ZARZUELA
by Mariano Soriano Fuertes. See Sixto Plaza, »La zarzuela, género olvidado o malentendido«,
Hispania, 73, 1 (Mar., 1990), pp. 22–31.
199
Egberto Bermudez
comedies were acclaimed in Bogotá between 1855 and 1857. Amongst them, Un
alcalde a la antigua y dos primos a la moderna (»An old fashioned Major and Two
Modern Cousins«) from 1855 was praised by critics as paradigmatic.145 This and
others of his works such as Los Aguinaldos and Percances de un empleo (both from
1857) contain musical scenes with songs and dances that no doubt should have
been dutifully performed on stage.146 Un alcalde a la antigua was chosen as a basis
for an opera buffa by young composer José M. Ponce de León (1846–1882) and
performed as a private home entertainment for family and friends in 1865 with
piano accompaniment played by the composer. From its printed programme (the
score did not survive) we know that each of the arias (cavatinas, duets, trio and
quintet) as well as its overture, fugue and choruses were dedicated to important
musical figures of the day. The score included one ROMANZA and an unspecified
dance scene.147
Local ZARZUELA began to gain recognition in the late 1860s and 1870s but in
the meantime, songs to be danced (particularly Spanish) maintained their privi-
leged place in concerts and theatrical functions. In 1866 a duet from the ZARZU-
ELA El Tio Canillitas by Mariano Soriano Fuertes (1817–1880) was the final num-
ber of a soirée that included orchestral music, drama and operatic arias and the
following year, a performance of Lucia ended with a couple of orchestral waltzes
and the famous Spanish dance song La Caramba (also as a duet). The song was
recognized as »andaluza« and an anecdote tells that it was performed in MAJO and
MANOLA attire.148 The foreign (especially Italian) influence is also noticeable in the
same years when La Garibaldina was the song danced as a final number in a drama
performance or, when in 1846 a Tirolesa was introduced in the same context.
Some years later (1871) in Medellín, La Savoyana was used for the same pur-
pose.149 It this context it is not surprising to find La Marseillaise included in the
manuscript song collection mentioned above (See Part One, I).
145 Harold E. Hind Jr and Charles Tatum, »La comedia costumbrista de Samper, Un alcalde
a la antigua«, in Watson and Reyes, pp. 215–30.
146 José M. Samper, Colección de Piezas Dramáticas, originales y en verso, escritas para el teatro de
Bogotá, Bogotá: Imp. de El Neograndino, 1857.
147 Perdomo Escobar, La ópera en Colombia, Bogotá: Litografía Arco, 1979, pp. 36–38.
148 Perdomo Escobar, La opera, p. 24, Concert program, n.p.
149 Concert programs in Marina Lamus, »La búsqueda de un teatro nacional (1830–1890)«,
Boletín Cultural y Bibliográfico. Biblioteca Luis A. Arango, XXIX, 31, (1992), pp. 63, 72;
Perdomo Escobar, La opera, p. 101 and Villa, p. 103; Gónima, p. 72. See also Cordovez
Moure, pp. 30, 54.
200
Ponce de León’s ZARZUELA of 1876 El castillo misterioso (»The Mysterious

Castle«) on a libretto by Spanish diplomat and drama author José M. Gutiérrez de
Alba, contains a ROMANZA and a BOLERO. Existing separate copies for voice and
piano of one of his romanzas and the bolero from El Zuavo (another of his ZAR-
ZUELAs) suggests their circulation as individual songs.150 Also an undated (and per-
haps untexted) instrumental bolero by Pedro Morales Pino who, from artisan rural
social extraction arrived in Bogotá in 1878, testifies the currency of ancient theatri-
cal musical forms during the last decades of the century.151 Good examples of Co-
lombian ZARZUELA during those years are those of Juan Crisóstomo Osorio Ri-
caurte (1836–1887). In his Elixir de la Juventud (»The Elixir of Youth«) he follows
the Colonial poetic tradition of using ESDRÚJULOS (proparoxytone verses), with a
long association with comic and satirical scenes. The coplas of Los Grados, a comic
VILLANCICO by the early 18th-century chapelmaster Juan de Herrera (c.1665–
1738), constitute a previous and notable local example. Osorio’s work was per-
formed privately in 1881 at the country home of his brother-in-law and librettist,
future President José Manuel Marroquín (1827–1908).152
It was also very common to insert songs in opera performances, such as the
case of the famous and demanding vocal waltz Il bacio (The Kiss) by Luigi Arditi
(1822–1903), sung in Spanish by Assunta Mazzeti of the »Luisia-Rossi Guerra
Opera Company« in Medellín in 1865 and presumably also in Bogotá the pre-
vious year.153 This was one of the pieces that were customarily sung (along with the
Bolero of Vespri Siciliani) in the »music lesson« scene from Act II of Il barbiere di
Siviglia, a practice that transformed this section of the opera into what Richard
Osborne calls a »show-stopping cabaret«, a tradition to which no other than Ade-
lina Patti gladly contributed.154 Local South American »national dances«and »airs«
seem to have also been included in the aforementioned place in Il barbiere as sug-
150 Perdomo Escobar, La ópera, pp. 31–32; Lamus, pp. 81–82. Scores at Centro de Docu-
mentación Musical (CDM), Bonilla de Páramo, p. 22.
151 Bogotá, Biblioteca Nacional, Centro de Documentación Musical, n.s. 1 p.
152 Perdomo, La ópera, p. 80; Bermúdez, Historia, pp. 93–96 and CD 1, 14 and CD 2, 11.
153 Luis C. Rodríguez, Músicas para una región y una ciudad: Antioquia y Medellín 1810–1865
aproximaciones a algunos momentos y personajes, Medellín: Instituto para el Desarrollo de An-
tioquia, 22007, p. 182. According to Perdomo Escobar (La ópera, pp. 100–103) in Bogotá
the Company performed Romeo e Giulietta, Il Trovatore, and La Traviata. Cramer, Beale &
Wood published Il bacio in London in 1862 dedicated to soprano Marietta Piccolomini who
retired soon after 1860. See: http://www.biblioz.com/lp25762366154_292.html.
154 Richard Osborne, »Il Barbiere di Siviglia«, Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed 12
May 2008), http://www.grovemusic.com
201
Egberto Bermudez
gested by the mention of the ZAMACUECA being danced onstage by Rosina and
Figaro in 1830 during a performance in Santiago (Chile) by an Italian Opera
company.155
Throughout the last third of the 20th century, songs and dances were intimate-
ly related to ZARZUELA, operetta and opera and were manifested in the perfor-
mances of the Italian, Puerto Rican, Cuban and Spanish opera, operetta, ZARZU-
ELA and theatrical-musical (REVISTA MUSICAL, varieté) companies that visited Co-
lombia regularly. Some of them left musical traces in Bogotá, Medellín and coastal
cities like Lorica, Cartagena, Barranquilla and Riohacha.156 These companies –
mostly organized on a family basis – had Italian, Spanish and Latin-American art-
ists, and their families and descendants established roots in South-American soil
and performed from the 1870s to the 1930s covering a huge area from Cuba,
México, Panamá, Colombia and Venezuela to Ecuador, Perú and Chile. This
seems to have been quite an active, cosmopolitan and up-to-date musical scene, as
an illustrious English traveller recalls having had as a companion, navigating up the
Magdalena River, an operetta (ZARZUELA?) impresario »fluent and full of New
York slang and jokes».157
In our case this can be exemplified by members of the Zafrané and Del Dies-
tro-Cavaletti Companies active around the 1870s; and two decades later by those
of the Zenardo-Lambardi, Dalmau-Ughetti and Zimmerman-Ughetti (or Colón)
Companies.158 Ferruccio Benincore (1889–1951), Alfredo del Diestro Cavalleti
(1877–1951), Marina and Roberto Ughetti all acted and sang in opera, ZARZUELA
and operetta and in due time became recording artists and ventured into radio and
film in Colombia and abroad. Some instrumentalists from the Zafrané Company
established themselves in the 1870s in the Cartagena area and Enrique Zimmer-
155 C. Vega, Las danzas populares […], II, p. 67.

156 José Dolores Zarante, Reminiscencias históricas (recuerdos de un soldado liberal), Lori-
ca/Cartagena: Imprenta Departamental, 1933, pp. 381–84; María V. Rodríguez de García
and Jesús H. Duarte A, La vida musical de Santa Fe de Bogotá (desde los comienzos de la músi-
ca profana de 1780 hasta la fundación del Conservatorio Nacional de Música en 1910), Bogotá:
Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Dept. de Sociología, Monografía de Grado, 1985, p.
118, n 192; Rodrigo de J. García Estrada, »Extranjeros en Medellín«, Boletín Cultural y Bi-
bliográfico, XXXIV, 44, (1997); Perdomo Escobar, La opera, p. 79; Luís C. Rodríguez,
»María, la zarzuela de Gonzalo Vidal«, Revista de la Universidad de Antioquia. Facultad de
Artes, 5, 3, (enero-junio 2003), pp. 65–68.
157 Signed photograph in Villa, p. 73; Robert B. Cunningham Graham, Redeemed and other
Sketches, London: W. Heinemann Ltd., 1927, p. 181.
158 Villa, pp. 52, 56; Perdomo Escobar, La opera, p. 103. Rodríguez and Duarte, La vida, loc. cit.
202
man Ariza (1913–1982) singer, flute player and composer – son and namesake of
ZARZUELA and opera tenor father – lived in his hometown Riohacha, composed
and conducted a musical ensemble from the 1940s to the 1970s.159
In their frequent travels these companies also took abroad with them Colom-
bian musicians. Some time after the end of the »War of the Thousand Days«
another member of the GRUTA SIMBÓLICA, composer and pianist Martín A. Ru-
eda (?–1945) left Bogotá – where with his musical ensembles had worked in public
cafes around 1901 – possibly with the Ughetti-Del Diestro Company and settled
for more than twenty years in Cuba and México working in ZARZUELA and musi-
cal-theatrical productions to return home only at the end of 1928.160 His brother
Victor Manuel, flute player and composer, followed him around 1907 and died
abroad.161
After having implemented legislation in favour of stronger state control of the
musical profession, the inauguration concert of the new – unfinished – state-owned
»Teatro Colón« in 1892 combined orchestral, chamber and piano music; poetry,
operatic arias and show pieces such as the Spanish song La Jerezana, Carmen’s Ha-
banera, and a hymn to Columbus which was performed by an amateur choir with
music by Augusto Azzali (1863–1906).162 The choice of songs, hymn and indeed
the theatre’s name, are evidence of Miguel A. Caro’s government’s strong Hispanic
cultural predilections. Opera and ZARZUELA alternated at the »Teatro Colón and
Municipal« for the next five years. Of all the ZARZUELAs performed by these com-
panies in Bogotá and Medellín before the 1899–1902 Civil War, perhaps the most
memorable were El rey que rabió (1891) by Ruperto Chapí and La Marcha de
Cádiz (1896) by Joaquin Valverde Jr. and Ramón Estelles, the former premiered
in Medellín in 1894 and the latter in Bogotá at the »Teatro Colón« in 1897.163 As
we shall see in the next paragraphs its »hits« became standards amongst the Bogotá
– and possibly Medellín’s – vocal-music aficionados.
159 E. Bermúdez, liner notes in La Vieja Guardia de Riohacha, 1940–72, CD MA

HACOL007, Bogotá: Fundación de Musica, 2006.
160 Rodríguez and Duarte, La vida, p. 115.
161 In La Habana the future publication of his Poesías Musicales is announced in March
1907. El Figaro, XXIII, 12, 24 March 1907, p. 140. For more on the Rueda brothers see
Antonio José Gaitán, »Nacionalismo musical. Martín Alberto Rueda en Colombia su más
alto exponente«, Mundo al Día, No. 1813, Feb. 8, 1930, p. 21; Añez, pp. 102–103 and
Jaime Cortés, La música nacional popular colombiana en la Colección Mundo al día (1924–
1938), Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia/Facultad de Artes, 2004, pp. 92–93.
162 Rodríguez and Duarte, La vida, pp. 109–11; Concert programme in Villa, p. 51.
163 Gónima, p. 88; Villa, p. 74;
203
Egberto Bermudez
It is accepted that the creation of the artistic and intellectual séances of the
GRUTA SIMBÓLICA was an accident but also a byproduct of the absence of public
entertainment caused by the repression and censorship of the harsh administration
of Conservative War Minister Aristídes Fernández after the coup of Vice-President
Marroquín in July 1900 during the 1899–1902 Civil War. These private meetings
of young intellectuals, poets and musicians that eventually became known as the
GRUTA SIMBÓLICA (»Symbolic Grotto«) featured theatrical (satirical and often po-
litical) improvisations mixed with music and poetry. Songs were sung in two parts
to the accompaniment of guitars, tiples and bandolas, altough the flute, violin and
piano are also mentioned. The house of an upper-class intellectual was their head-
quarters, and according to eyewitnesses it was full of theatrical props and bizarre
gadgets such as a very long rubber snake used to dispense Caribbean rum.164
Members and friends also met outside for other entertainments where food, alco-
hol, instrumental music, songs and the extemporization of poetry were combined
in the relaxed atmosphere of restaurants, bars and brothels.165
The brothers Carlos and Manuel Castello, assiduous assistants to the Gruta ga-
therings were also amateur dramatic authors and composers. In 1913 Carlos wrote
the music for the ZARZUELA Que mujeres and in the same years Luis A. Calvo set
to music Una noche en París, an operetta by Manuel whose waltz-song Que calor!
was published separately for voice and piano.166 Newspapers report a ZARZUELA
night in May 1910 where the famous polka from Los Cocineros (1897) by Valverde
and López Torregrosa and Adoración a new song by Jerónimo Velasco (1885–
1963) sang by Esperanza and Marina Ughetti were scheduled besides the principal
work. The song was kept in the repertoire until the 1950s by »Obdulio y Julián«
(See Part Three).167 The impact of theatre and ZARZUELA on Colombian compos-
ers during this period can be measured also by the two piano pieces by Luis A.
Calvo that bear the names of theatrical pieces, Genio alegre (PASILLO) and Malvalo-
ca (DANZA). Both are dramatic works by the Spanish brothers Álvarez Quintero,
the first (written in 1906) was performed in Bogotá in 1908 and the second (from
1912) a few years later. Malvaloca (one of the most popular pieces by Calvo) was
164 José V. Ortega Ricaurte, La Gruta Simbólica y Reminiscencias del ingenio y la bohemia en
Bogotá, Bogotá: [Author’s Edition], 1952, p. 56; Luis M. Mora, »Los contertulios de la
Gruta Simbólica«, Croniquillas, pp. 181, 187.
165 Añez, Canciones y Recuerdos is the main source of information for those gatherings.
166 Orjuela, Bibliografía, pp. 47–47; Luís A. Calvo, Que Calor! Valse. Selección de la opereta
Una noche en París, Bogotá: G. Navia Editor, n.d.
167 Will’s personal album in Restrepo Duque, Lo que cuentan, p. 21; Roldán Luna, p. 25.
204
recorded as a song with an anonymous text in New York in 1921 by Colombian

tenor Joaquin Forero.168 The same theatrical mood and Spanish CUPLÉ flavour are
evident in Amapola, amapolita (or Amapola del camino) composed in 1915 by
Quevedo Zornoza on a text by Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jimenez and recorded
several times between 1919 and 1938.169 Quevedo showed an early interest in
ZARZUELA and his first one, Revelatorum, received an amateur performance in Zi-
paquirá (his home town) in 1904.170 Later he maintained his theatrical activities
and premiered several ZARZUELAs, La vocación (1912), El duende gris (1921) and
another version of the previously discussed El elixir de la juventud. Quevedo also
distinguished himself as a song composer, particularly of the theatrical genre with
many BAMBUCOS, HABANERAS, CUPLÉS, waltzes, a choral barcarole, one military
CUPLÉ and a CUPLÉ COREABLE (choral cuplé).171 Urdaneta, also a song composer
(see Part One, III) ventured into ZARZUELA and operetta and had his Sacarse el
clavo and El tinglado de la farsa premiered in 1925 and 1932 respectively.
Opera and ZARZUELA seem to have flourished in Medellín as direct conse-
quence of growing industrialization and the development of the mass media and as
Restrepo Duque indicates – unlike other postulate without any factual evidence –
their activities run side by side with popular music. In 1943 an opera company was
established around local figures such as Alba del Castillo (1923–1971) and Gonzalo
Rivera, who – as we see below – in the same years would also venture as film stars.172
At least two opera companies had been established in Bogotá in the 1930s and 40s
also with local singers who – as happened in Medellín – combined their operatic
careers with ZARZUELA and popular music.173 Undoubtedly Carlos Julio Ramírez
(1914–1986) is the most important of all and his career starts at the time when
radio, cinema and phonographic prospects were opening for Colombian artists. In
1934 in a festival concert in his homage at the prestigious »Teatro Faenza«, Rami-
rez sang along with other members of the company, sharing the stage with recently
168 Villa, p. 99; Añez, p. , Spottswood, IV, p. 1887, Rico Salazar, p. 172.
169 Añez, p. 191, Rico Salazar, p. 291.
170 Añez, p. 191.
171 Bonilla de Páramo, pp. 55–57. Villa, p. 75; Perdomo Escobar, La opera, p. 81.
172 Restrepo Duque, A mi cánteme, pp. 296–300. There is no certainty about the dates for
Libia Agudelo a.k.a Alba del Castillo. Pinilla (pp. 38–40), who interviewed her before she
died and Rico Salazar, after him, give 1935 and 1971. On undisclosed evidence, the web-
page of the Fundación Pro Musica Andina Colombiana (FUNMUSICA) proposes
1923, a more plausible birth date but incorrectly gives 1973 for her death. See:
www.geocities.com/Nashville/Opry/3107/alba.html.
173 Villa, p. 60.
205
Egberto Bermudez
returned Jorge Añez, Cuban »Trio Matamoros «and Brazilian »Orquesta Riogran-
dense«. The heterogeneous repertoire heard that night included operatic arias,
BAMBUCOS, TANGOS, cuban SONES and GUARACHAS, possibly BAIAÕS, SAMBAS
and Uruguayan items,174 another good example of how artificial the barrier bran-
dished by some critics and commentators between classical and popular music is.
In Bogotá, theatrical activities intensified and broadened their scope with the
work of playwright and pianist Luis Enrique Osorio (1896–1966) a descendant of
19th century ZARZUELA composer Juan C. Osorio Ricaurte. Having experimented
with plays, ZARZUELAs and musical comedies in the 1920s and after some years in
Paris, he founded the »Compañía Bogotana de Teatro« in the 1940s, that worked
mainly at the »Teatro Muncipal«, took its plays to marginal areas of the city and
travelled extensively around the country. Combining talents as author, stage man-
ager and entrepreneur his productions obtained popular favour thanks to its musi-
cal »finales« (FIN DE FIESTA) based on the performance of popular songs and
dances including foreign genres (TANGO and RANCHERA) besides the standard
Colombian repertoire. The venue where Osorio’s team performed was also the
scene of the VIERNES CULTURALES, cultural and political soirées held under the
tutelage of socialist-populist leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitán that rapidly became an
important landmark for the city’s working class and middle classes. So associated
was the locale with Gaitan’s ideas that after his assassination and the riots that fol-
lowed in April 1948, the building, left untouched by the fires, was demolished
shortly afterwards, perhaps to erase it as a symbol.175 An itinerant popular musical
theatre company (revista musical), based – as were Osorio’s plays – on vernacular
comedy, political satire but this time including musical VARIETÉS, began to ac-
quire popularity amongst the working- and middle-classes in the late 1940s led by
the actor and singer Carlos Emilio Campos (1902–) a.k.a Campitos. Duets such as
»Garzón y Collazos« (Tolima) and »Espinosa y Bedoya« (Antioquia) and singers
Luis Carlos Meyer (1916–1998) and Isabel Bulla (1915–?) actively participated,
performing all over the country many of their hits, mainly BAMBUCOS, PASILLOS
174 Publicity poster in Rico Salazar, p. 684. The Oquesta Riograndense had been performing
in Bogotá since the previous year and included
175 Ernesto M. Barrera, »Algunos aspectos en el arte dramático de Luis Enrique Osorio«, in
Watson and Reyes, pp. 263–72; Carlos J. Reyes, »Cien años de teatro en Colombia«,
Nueva Historia de Colombia, VI, Bogotá: Planeta, 1989, pp. 224–25; Marina Lamus,
»Luís E. Osorio«, Biografías, Gran Enciclopedia de Colombia, Bogotá: Circulo de Lectores,
1993. Orjuela, Bibliografía, pp. 140–47. See also: http://www.lablaa.org/blaavirtual/
biografias/osorluis.htm.
206
and PORROS. In the following decade, Campitos would concentrate on political

satire and even reached Venezuela in his tours. In late 1950, news reported that
Chilean diva Isabel Romay was about to join the company.176
A Colombian pioneer on this genre (TEATRO DE REVISTA, REVISTA MUSICAL)
was Martin A. Rueda, who – as mentioned above – worked in Cuba and Mexico.
In the Hispanic world a REVISTA MUSICAL was a theatrical performance that in-
cluded dialogue, song, music and dance threaded together by a light argument and
divided in CUADROS (scenes). Unfortunately it is poorly documented although
further research could unveil the presence of national and foreign companies such
the choreographic-musical company that performed in Bogotá in 1863 – when
commentators advised women to refrain from attending – or the Mexican compa-
ny announced at the Teatro Municipal in December 1923 performing the ZAR-
ZUELA El Túnel (»The Tunnel«) and the revista musical Su majestad el Shimmy
(»His Majesty, the Shimmy«).177 In the 1940s based on his Hollywood experience,
actor and dancer Jacinto Jaramillo organized (with Cecilia López and later Chela
Jacobo) staged ballet-style performances of local song dances, such as the BAMBU-
CO, the GUABINA and the TORBELLINO.178
The appeal of stage songs is corroborated years later by the popularity of Se va
la lancha, a song still current in Colombia in the early 1970s and based (in its
second section) on the modified melody of Zerlina’s mournful romanza of Da-
niel-François Auber (1782–1871) opera Fra Diavolo (1830), parodied in 1933 as
The Devil’s Brother, the first feature and musical film (and one of the most success-
ful) of Laurel and Hardy.179 Auber’s Fra Diavolo was performed in Bogotá in May
1893 but it seems that the real source for the song is a tango composed and pub-
lished by Hector Artola and Edgardo Donato in 1928.180 In this piece, Auber’s
melody is used only in the refrain, the first section being different and shortened in
the Colombian version, apparently an arrangement of Camilo García (1910–
1993), composer, second voice and guitar player of the DUETO DE ANTAÑO,
176 Anon., »Campitos, actor cómico«, Cromos, 2239, May 23rd 1960 also available in:
http://www.colarte.arts.co/colarte/conspintores.asp?idartista=14767; Reyes, Cien años, p.
222; Restrepo Duque, p. 316; Rico Salazar, p. 544.
177 Rodríguez and Duarte, La vida, p. 29; El Tiempo, Bogotá, Monday, Dec. 3rd, 1923, p. 7.
178 Restrepo Duque, A mi cánteme, p. 320.
179 See: http://www.imdb.com, and http://www.laurel-and-hardy.com/. Baritone Tito Gobbi
(1913–84) sang the romanza in the Italian version of the film. See: http://www.
parlandosparlando.com/view.php/id_152/lingua_0/
180 Perdomo Escobar, La ópera, p. 101. For Artola and Donato’s tango see:
www.todotango.com/spanish/main.html
207
Egberto Bermudez
formed in 1941.181 The taste for opera and operetta even reached songwriters of
dance (BAILABLE) music as Lucho Bermúdez, who based on a combination of
musical motifs from Carmen’s Escamillo song and the overture of Dichter und Bau-
er (1846) by Franz von Suppé (1819–1895) composed his instrumental Porro
operático (Operatic porro, Silver 1299A) in 1945.182
Besides Bogotá and Medellín, Barranquilla also had an intense musical life on
those decades. Most opera, ZARZUELA and operetta companies we have mentioned
also performed in Barranquilla from the early 1890s, the case of the Azzali, Lom-
bardi, Bracale and Ughetti companies. Orchestral and chamber music, piano clas-
sical and salon pieces, operatic arias, ZARZUELA and operetta songs and choruses
alternated with poetry and dance in the performances of national and foreign artists
in the city’s theaters during the 1910s and 1920s. An international atmosphere
permeates the city’s musical activities where hit songs such as I Love by Tito Mattei
(1841–1914) and The Swallows (1895) by the British-Jamaican composer Frederick
Cowen (1852–1935) described as the »English Schubert« were applauded side by
side with new songs by the Italian émigré Pedro Biava (1902–1972), who would
later organize a local opera company. In 1933 the »Asociación Filarmónica de Bar-
ranquilla« (a symphonic orchestra) was organized where composers and noted local
songwriters as Pacho Galán, Alejandro Barranco, Antonio M. Peñaloza, Cipriano
Guerrero and Angel M. Camacho y Cano actively participated and some ventured
into the composition of classical nationalist instrumental pieces.183 Barranquilla and
neighbouring Cartagena were also the starting point for the development of Co-
lombian radio (»HKD«, 1929) and phonographic industries (»Discos Fuentes«,
1934 and »Tropical«, 1945) and were also the hometowns of performers like Sarita
Herrera, Federico Jimenez, Luis C. Meyer and Esther Forero (See Part Three).
The advent of Colombian cinema – through Panama and Barranquilla – and
particularly of musical films opened new possibilities for former stage and theatri-
cal songs and connected the new art form to previous and contemporary local
theatrical and ZARZUELA experiences. In the earlier years of the century, Colom-
bian cinema pioneer Arturo Acevedo Vallarino (1875–1950) had taken part in the
181 Pinilla, pp. 217–19, Rico Salazar, pp. 511–15. Another related piece is an earlier piano
pasillo Se va la barca (1908–10) by Jeronimo Velasco. See Ellie Anne Duque, »Música en
las publicaciones periodicas«, in Bermúdez, Historia, p. 165. A vocal reworking of that
piece, with a text by Climaco Soto Borda, was recorded in 1939 by Sarita Herrera.
Spottswood, IV, p. 1972. Text in Añez, p. 338.
182 Portaccio, Carmen, pp. 289–90.
183 De la Espriella, Ch. VI, pp. 257–80.
208
Gruta Simbólica gatherings and in 1909 established – with Manuel Castello – a

small theatrical company (and due to Castello’s presence, possibly musical) that
tried to compete with foreign theatrical, ZARZUELA and opera companies visiting
the city.184 Films and music were part of public performances as happened at the
»Salon Olympia« in Bogotá in 1915 where the popular duet »Wills y Escobar«
premiered Cocotero, a DANZA CANTADA and Idilio campestre along with Morales
Pino’s Lira Colombiana and before leaving the country in 1919, participated in a
similar event premiering songs by Wills and J. Velasco.185
In 1922, Isaac’s María (1867), the Colombian »emblematic« romantic novel
before the publication in 1924 of La Vorágine by Jose E. Rivera, was chosen as the
theme for the first local experiment in silent feature films. The Canción de las Hadas
by Jeronimo Velasco is a musical setting of the song text Las Hadas (»The Fairies«)
included in Isaacs’ novel and conceived as incidental music for Maria premiered in
the same year and directed by Máximo Calvo. Alfredo del Diestro Cavaletti, actor
and ZARZUELA composer and impresario, was the artistic director and with his
brother Juan was also a member of the the cast.186 In 1924 the same year Italian
(resident in Colombia) opera and ZARZUELA singer and actor Ferruccio Benincore –
who recorded several songs for »Victor« in 1914 – was part of the cast of Aura o las
violetas, based on J. M. Vargas Vila famous novel and in La tragedia del silencio, of
the same year, the musical score was commissioned to songwriter Alberto Urdaneta.
Amongst the silent films that followed, Alma provinciana (1926) included mu-
sic scenes such as the dance of the TORBELLINO at a peasant marriage featuring an
ensemble of violin, bandola, tiples and guitar that almost surely would have per-
formed songs.187 In Bajo el cielo antioqueño (1925) – an exaltation of Antioqueño
184 Cira Ines Mora and Adriana M. Carrillo, »Los Acevedo«, Cuadernos de Cine Colombiano,
Nueva Epoca, 2, (2003), pp. 6–7. Another possible associate to Acevedo could have been
amateur composer and relative Carlos Vallarino (see Part One).
185 Publicity bill in Rico Salazar, pp. 138–39.
186 María, Barcelona: Ed. Ramón Sopena, 1935, Chap. XXIII, pp. 75–76; Roldán, p. 30; Mora
and Carrillo, »Los Acevedo«, p. 8; »Entrevista con Máximo Calvo« (1960) in Salcedo Silva.
Alfredo’s wife Mexican actress Emma Roldán was part of the cast of the famous Alla en Ran-
cho Grande (1936); Fernando González Cajiao, »Adiciones a la Bibliografía del Teatro Co-
lombiano de Héctor H. Orjuela, 1978«, in Watson and Reyes, p. 698. Alfredo composed a
zarzuela in 1902. The names of Juan and Alfredo del Diestro are repeated in documents over
a long span of time; it is possible that a third person under one of those names also existed.
187 Rito Alberto Torres, Jorge Mario Durán, Alma Provinciana de Félix J. Rodríguez, 1926.
Versión restaurada, Bogotá: Fundación Patrimonio Fílmico Colombiano, c.2002, pp. 5,
22, in www.patrimoniofilmico.org.co/docs/c-almaprov.pdf
209
Egberto Bermudez
industrial and bourgeois society – we find early references to the acceptance of tan-
go by Medelín’s high society and glimpses of the existence of distinct rural and
marginal urban subcultures. We know about the epoch-making ball organized at
the Club Union to celebrate the premiere but nothing about the incidental music
of the film is known.188 This production is an early example of how new technolo-
gies and media (discs, film, radio, TV) showed great potential for commercial, so-
cial and political propaganda.
Quiñones Pardo, Añez and Restrepo Duque coincide to report that the Guabina
Chiquinquireña (1925) by Urdaneta (see Part One, III) was part of the soundtrack
of a Hollywood Spanish film where – Restrepo Duque adds – Colombian actor and
choreographer Jacinto Jaramillo also participated. In 1949 the song was featured
again in La Voragine by Miguel Zacarías, a film version of the famous novel by José
E. Rivera.189 But with Amapola, amapolita by Quevedo Zornoza, we confirm that
cinema was an attractive and excellent medium for the dissemination of Colombian
song abroad. It became very popular in Mexico after it was included as the theme-
song in the film of the same name, a »ranchero« musical drama starring the actor-
singer Tito Guizar (1908–1999), premiered in 1937 only one year after Allá en el
rancho grande started this local tradition that became a widespread Hispanic world
phenomenon.190 Dubbed as CANCIÓN, CANCIÓN CRIOLLA or PETENERA, Amapola,
amapolita exhibits the rhythmic and melodic traits of most stereotyped Spanish songs,
present in numerous ZARZUELAs and the recorded repertoire of that period.191 Kommentar [XH3]: Il manque le
numéro de page de la référence dans la note
188 Jorge Nieto, Bajo el cielo antioqueño. Arturo Acevedo Vallarino, 1925. Versión restaurada,
Bogotá: Fundación Patrimonio Fílmico Colombiano, pp. 7, 18 in
www.patrimoniofilmico.org.co/docs/bajo-cielo-ant.pdf
189 Quiñones Pardo, »El himno«, p. 79; Añez, p. 219; Restrepo Duque, Las cien, p. 64. The
film name given by all three is La Divina Aventurera. However, the films where Jaramillo
was part of the cast were El Valiente (1930) by Richard Harlan (a Spanish translation of
The Valiant (1929) by William K. Howard) and La Cautivadora (1931) by Joseph Lever-
ing and Fernando C. Tamayo. See The Internet Movie Database, http://us.imdb.com
190 See Moreno Rivas, pp. 186–87; Claes af Geijesrtam, Popular Music in México, Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1976, pp. 59–70 and http://cinemexicano. mty.itesm.mx/.
For the influence of Mexican musical films in Chile and Argentina see Juan Pablo González,
Claudio Rolle, Historia social de la música popular en Chile, La Habana/Santiago: Casa de las
Américas/Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 2005, pp. 426–37.
191 Añez calls it a petenera, information that is reproduced by Rico Salazar, p. In their recor-
ding, the Dueto de Antaño is identified as a CANCIÓN CRIOLLA in El Dueto de Antaño
[…] y de siempre, LP, Zeida LDZ 20113, c. 1960, B, 3. At least another arrangement is
attributed to Garcia (A, 4) in this production.
210
Songs (and particularly BAMBUCOS and PORROS) were also fundamental in the
development of Colombian cinema in the 1940s and 50s. Al son de las guitarras
(1938) included several songs by »Los Mochuelos« quartet and singers Jorge
Beltrán and Carlos Reyes, but apparently was never finished and shown.192 In
1939 Sinfonía de Bogotá, one of the first Colombian talking movies featured several
songs performed by tenor Pepe León and Allá en el trapiche (1943), employed ra-
dio and theatre actors and singers such as Tocayo Ceballos, Maruja Yepes and Pe-
dro Caicedo who performed PASILLOS, BOLEROS, one PORRO and a Cuban CON-
GA, all composed by José Macías, Alberto Ahumada and Emilio Murillo, whose
BAMBUCOS El trapiche and El Guatecano (besides other pieces) were included in
the film; but Murillo died just before the premiere. In 1944 Golpe de gracia also
featured PORROS, BAMBUCOS and music pieces by the orchestras of Francisco
Cristancho, Ritmo Peñaloza and Alejandro Tovar, the »Fortich y Valencia« and
»Helena y Esmeralda« duets and singers Luis Macía, El Negrito Jack, Pepe León
and Spanish star Celeste Grijó.193 Two conspicuous participants – as music direc-
tors – in this film were Andrés Pardo Tovar (1911–1972) who would play an im-
portant role in the establishment of musicology in Colombia and José Maria Tena
(1895–1951), a Spanish composer, arranger and conductor who played a mayor
role in the radio and musical scenes of Medellín and Bogotá in those decades. In
the same year historical drama Antonia Santos, featured songs by well-known com-
posers such as Jorge Añez (No hay como mi morena, a BAMBUCO sang by the
Chaves Sisters duet) and less known ones as José Barros, who sang his own Queja
del boga. In Bambucos y Corazones (1945) another musical comedy, Lucho
Bermúdez and his Orquesta del Caribe performed Prende la vela (mapalé) along
with other ensembles and singers. The same year the Antioqueño production La
canción de mi tierra once again exalted local culture and music and featured local
singer Alba del Castillo with Carlos Vieco, at the height of his career acting as mu-
sic director (See part Three, III). The same year the romantic rural drama Sendero
de luz featured as its musical theme the BAMBUCO Quiero decirte performed by
»Los Trovadores de la Montaña« while baritone and actor Paco de la Riera and
Jorge Mora, a Colombian singer who in 1935 had taken part in opera perfor-
mances and would later have a career abroad as a broadcaster, appeared in the sen-
timental drama El sereno de Bogotá.194
192 Gómez and Torres, pp. 21–38.

193 Restrepo Duque, A mi cánteme, pp. 293–95.
194 Perdomo Escobar, La opera, p. 90.
211
Egberto Bermudez
La gran obsesión (1955), a psychological drama produced in Cali (using color

film), featured the Colombian international star Carlos Julio Ramírez who sang
Bésame morenita and Mis dos amores (both by Alvaro Dalmar) with the »Trio
Grancolombiano« directed by the composer and the orchestra of Julio García.
Llamas contra el viento (1956), based on Porfirio Barba Jacob’s »Canción de la vida
profunda« was co-produced by Alfonso López Michelsen (1912–2007) while in
exile in Mexico.195 It was filmed fully in Technicolor in Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela
and Colombia and featured Alejandro Durán and Delia Zapata Olivella (see Part
Three, IV).
However the most important musical film production of this period – al-
though filmed in black and white – was undoubtedly Colombia Linda (1955)
another Antioqueño production that featured almost everyone who was important
on the Medellín artistic scene, a city that besides being the centre of the phono-
graphic and radio industries was the textile and manufacturing capital of the coun-
try. As had happened with Bajo el cielo antioqueño a quarter of a century before,
the argument of the film is designed to display Medelín’s cultural and economic
power and is transformed – identifying the local with the national as we shall see in
Part Three, III – into a clearly Colombian nationalist agenda. The plot centers on
a young Colombian who returns after years of studying abroad; his girlfriend and
acquaintances resent his disdain of local things and challenge him in a bet about
how Colombia also possesses all sorts of riches, cultural and economic, naturally
handsomely presented in the film. The »Dueto de Antaño« and the TRIOS ANTI-
OQUIA, GRANCOLOMBIANO, CASCABEL, the ESTUDIANTINA MEDELLÍN and CO-
ROS DEL TOLIMA amongst others represented BAMBUCOS and PASILLOS. The
dance COSTEÑO repertoire was trusted to one of its best recording artists, » José
M. Peñaranda y sus Muchachos« including hits by José Barros and Los Camarones
by Julio Torres. Local cycling champion Ramón Hoyos and humorist Montecristo
complete the cast. The overall music direction was in the hands of Luis Uribe Bu-
eno, perhaps the most important figure of the recording industry at this time. The
producer, director, editor and cameraman was Camilo Correa, another prominent
figure of the local entertainment and radio industries and director of Micro, one of
the very few specialized entertainment magazines in the country.196
195 Politician and president of Colombia 1974–78, son of Alfonso López Pumarejo (1886–
1959), president of Colombia from 1934–38, and 1942–45.
196 Gómez and Torres, pp. 39–41.
212
Unfortunately several of the unfinished Colombian feature films from this pe-
riod (1940–1960) seem to have been musical. Torres gives a list that include: Un
bambuco vale un millón (Luis David Peña) and Sangre Criolla (Jacinto Jaramillo)
both from1938; Pasión Llanera (Roberto Saa Silva, 1947), Cumbia de fuego (Ray-
mond Meunier and Hans Jura, 1954) and Carmentea (Roberto Quintero, 1960).197
As we have already mentioned, Colombian songs obtained some recognition in
foreign film productions during the same decades, but this time fully sharing the
exotic quality of Latin-American and especially Cuban music. José M. Peñaranda’s
porro Se va el caimán (» The Cayman Goes Away «) was included in 1946 in La
reina del Tropico by Raul de Anda, a film starring Cuban actress Maria Antonieta
Pons (1922–2004) and actor and singer Kiko Mendive (1919–2000) and his or-
chestra.198 (See Part Two). As another example of Latin American tropical mint
exoticism, in 1950 Ninón Sevilla (1921), another Cuban film star performed La
Múcura (The earthenware pot) in a Brazilian-Cuban rendition arranged by Pérez
Prado in Perdida, a film by Fernando A. Rivero where we also find international
figures such as Agustin Lara and Pedro Vargas and prestigious ensembles such as
the » Mariachi Vargas « and Trio » Los Panchos «.199
II.
In mid-19th century Colombia, BAMBUCO referred either to a dance or a song and
in fact was usually both. As a song, it was basically a set of strophes or verses (im-
provised or not) sung to a cyclical harmonic scheme. As we have mentioned above,
in 1839 it began to be included in theatrical performances The piano variations
published around 1852 by Francisco Boada and Manuel Rueda and around 1859
by Manuel María Párraga (1835–1906) give us its harmonic contour, that basically
alternates a minor section (i–V) with a major one (III–VI) with periods of the dura-
tion of a bar (in triple time) on each degree. Besides this, we know very little of the
melodic shape of instrumental and vocal improvisations that were recognized as a
BAMBUCO. But that BAMBUCOS were vocal improvisations on those harmonic
schemes is clear from earlier sources. In his travel account of 1832–36, Englishmen
197 Rito A. Torres, » Hemos de tener arte propio. Noventa años de cine colombiano«, in
Gómez y Torres, p. 20.
198 José M. Peñaranda interviewed in Torres Montes de Oca, I, pp. 156–57 and The Internet
Movie Database: www.imdb.com/title/tt0218548/
199 TIMB, www.imdb.com/title/tt0136459/ and www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fkxR-v_
YFk&feature=related. Here the date given is 1949.
213
Egberto Bermudez
Charles Empson describes – with surprising musicological insight – » extemporane-

ous songs « sung by the Magdalena boatmen (bogas) accompanied by a »rude gui-
tar«, probably of a satiric guise as they featured » clever things« as part of an »exer-
cise of imagination«. Anecdote and »familiar thought and passing incidents« seem
to be prominent in these songs that he describes as being performed as intervals
during dances and which were preferred »to the regular airs and ballads which are
met with amongst the most refined Colombians«. Inland, Empson continues, la-
borers and muleteers also sang in duets and in »dialogue«, probably alluding to the
song contests typical of Latin-American traditional music (CONTRAPUNTEO,
PAYADA, PAYA, DESAFIO, etc.) and concludes that in Colombia and Venezuela,
singing accompanied with string instruments was common to all social layers.200
In 1849, Caicedo Rojas explains that COPLAS (quatrains) were added to the
BAMBUCO and the torbellino schemes, the latter being a succession of major
chords (I–IV–V), in which the BANDOLA (melodic role) was accompanied by the
TIPLE (harmonic role). In a reworking of his article around 1873, this author pro-
vides more examples of coplas and romances, and adds that the context of his ob-
servations was a war campaign in northeast Colombian in 1840 where he reports
peasant women and men singing together to the afore-mentioned accompaniment
and the alternative performance of COPLAS in the typical manner of the musical
competitions mentioned above.201 On his narrative of a trip from Medellín to Bo-
gotá in 1852, Manuel Pombo (1827–1898) offers the texts of a BAMBUCO sung in
duet by the local mule drivers who were his travel companions. Pombo gives twen-
ty-seven coplas and insists that it is only a sample of an endless strain and an indi-
cation of the cyclic accompaniments already mentioned.202
However, we know that the middle and upper urban classes also used the same
procedures. Lisboa reports precisely this in Bogotá in 1852 and compares local
song style and musical instruments with its Brazilian equivalents. A few years later,
in 1856, young Rafael Pombo (1833–1912) – Manuel’s brother then living in
New York – in his diary speaks of convivial gatherings with his Colombian friends
200 Empson, Narratives of South America, London: William Edwards, 1836, pp. 4–7, 44–52,
167–69, 204–15.
201 »El Tiple«, El Museo, I, 3, (1849), in Efraín Sánchez Cabra, Ramón Torres Méndez pintor
de la Nueva Granada, 1809–1885, Bogotá: Fondo Cultural Cafetero, 1987, pp. 179–84.
The reworking contains an introduction, in Apuntes de ranchería (Paris, 1873), included
in Apuntes de ranchería y otros escritos escogidos, Bogotá: Biblioteca Popular de Cultura Co-
lombiana, 1945, pp. 103–14.
202 De Medellín a Bogotá (1852), Bogotá: Biblioteca V Centenario Colcultura, 1992, pp. 122–26.
214
where they improvised seguidillas to a BAMBUCO accompaniment. In his works

(both youthful and mature), he includes several texts for BAMBUCOS and songs
(CANCIONES).203
The change from the cyclic type to a two-section song structure seems to have
occurred during the following decade. More than a decade later (around 1866)
Manuel Pombo quotes the texts of songs sung in one or two voices accompanied
by the guitar in a domestic (TERTULIA) context.204 Spanish stage songs and Italian
arias seem to have been the leading influences. Since the TONADILLA days, Spanish
song has adopted a binary structure (AB) and its influence lasted for decades. One
of the most popular melodies of this type, La Tirana del Trípili, Trápala by Blas de
Laserna (1751–1816), was performed in theatres in Bogotá and Medellín in 1838–
40 and 1864 respectively.205 The above-mentioned song manuscript compiled
around 1880 in Bogotá contains several examples of BAMBUCOS. There are simple
ones such as La morena (» The Dark-Skinned Girl «) or El huérfano (»The Or-
phan«), the former with a major harmonic scheme (I–V; II–V–I) while the latter
has a minor sequence with and brief refrain (i–V).206 As we will see this was the
same binary structure found in the earliest repertoire to be recorded.
Of the same period is Las bombas de jabón (»Soap Bubbles«) by Santos Quijano
(c.1807–c.1892) on a poem by local poet Ricardo Carrasquilla (1827–86) pub-
lished in 1860 that reappears as La Amira for voice and guitar in the manuscript
song collection we have referred to before.207 This case is useful to understand local
transmission procedures for music and song. Besides a logical transposition, the
guitar version changes the short piano introduction for a longer and easier chord
sequence and its melody and accompaniment are so simplified that the song is
203 Lisboa, pp. 259–60; R. Pombo, »Diario« in Mario Germán Romero, Rafael Pombo en
Nueva York, Bogotá: Academia Colombiana de la Lengua, 1983, pp. 102–3 and R. Pombo,
Poesía inédita y olvidada, Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1970, Ed. Hector Orjuela, I,
Poesía patriótica y popular, pp. 163–224; II, 157–59, 249–50, 254–56, 260–61.
204 M. Pombo, »La Guitarra«, Museo de Cuadros de Costumbres. Biblioteca de El Mosaico, Bogotá:
Foción Mantilla, 1866; modern edition, Bogotá: Biblioteca del Banco Popular, 1973, IV, pp.
357–68. See also: http://www.lablaa.org/blaavirtual/literatura/cosiv/cosiv37.htm
205 Johnson, p. 150; Eladio Gónima, »Apuntes para la Historia del Teatro en Medellín« (1897),
Historia, p. 60; Gilbert Chase, »Spain«, in Dent, p. 387. There is also evidence of its po-
pularity in Cuba (1807–12) and Santiago de Chile (1823), Zoila Lapique, Cuba Colonial:
Música, compositores e intérpretes, 1570–1902, La Habana: Ediciones Boloña, 2007, p. 98;
José Zapiola, Recuerdos de Treinta Años, Santiago: Empresa Editora Zig-Zag, 1974, p. 96.
206 Ms. MI 1453, ff. 35, 38v.; Bermúdez, Historia […], CD 2, 2, 4.
207 Ms. MI 1453, f. 15.
215
Egberto Bermudez
transformed into a vocal waltz. It seem that in songs the text was usually more im-
portant and in the manuscript the song is simply identified as Amira, the name of
its young female heroine properly attributed to its literary father dispensing with
the composer’s name. In a romantic vein Carrasquilla’s poem is a meditation on
youth’s ephemeral quality and a rightful product of the poet’s life as educator and
staunch advocate of catholic and family values.208
Music notation for BAMBUCOS begins to appear only in the 1870s and 1880s.
The Argentine envoy in Bogotá, Miguel Cané includes two of them in his narrative
of 1884, transcribed by Teresa Tanco Cordovez (1859–1945), Colombian pianist
and composer who with her sister sang them to him while they travelled down the
Magdalena River on their way to Europe in 1882.209 Clearly, the habanera-style
piano accompaniments present in the scores were added to the melodies transcribed
by Tanco and in spite of them, their melodic contours and features are still distin-
guishable. One is simpler than the other but both are binary in form and alternate
between minor and major in tonality with the following structures, AABB in Casta
Paloma and AAB for the other untitled piece.
As we have seen, the 1880s was a period of institutionalization of music educa-
tion and practice and also of modernization in music printing and publishing.210
The rhetoric »national« character of the new political establishment can be de-
tected in some musical publications such as the pieces appeared in the Papel Peri-
odico Ilustrado, clearly oriented to the government’s »nation building« project. It
has been said (see Part One) how, in homage to Núñez, the Caribbean HABANERA
(consciously or unconsciously labelled DANZA CARTAGENERA) has been fully ac-
cepted as part of the national repertoire. Then it is no surprise that collections such
as the Aires del País brief series published by composer, music educator and entre-
preneur Gumersindo Perea (?–?) includes habaneras. But there is more, this time
in the hands of Sindici, the Italian author of the national anthem. In 1878 he pub-
lished a small collection of songs for use in elementary schools with texts by na-
tional and Spanish poets and conceived his own series of »national airs« which ap-
parently were never published. However, the manuscript of one of its items reveals
a clear educational and nationalistic content. In his Aire Popular No. 1 for two
voices and piano, Sindici sets to music verses by Rafael Pombo that do not hide
208 Piano version in El Granadino, CD, 6. Details on Carrasquilla in Isidoro Laverde Amaya,
Bibliografía Colombiana, Bogotá: Medardo Rivas, 1895, also in: http://www.lablaa.org/
blaavirtual/bibliografias/bicol/bicol/indice.htm
209 Miguel Cané, En Viaje, 1881–82, Paris: Librería de Garnier Hermanos, 1884, pp. 246–49.
210 See Bermúdez, Historia, pp. 149–53.
216
their nation-building centralist programme by stating that the regions are »small
fatherlands« that do not fulfill music’s heart; only belonging to »the whole nation«
would fully satisfy this need.211 None of the regions tried to continue fostering lo-
cal culture as we note in the publication in 1880 of a local collection of »easy
songs« to be used in educational institutions of the State of Boyacá in central Co-
lombia that only contained the local conventional CANCIÓN PATRIOTICA dedicat-
ed to the State.212 Sindici’s Aire Popular employs an abstract hemiolic rhythmic
scheme clearly alluding to the BAMBUCO and Perea’s Dime que me amas (»Tell Me
You Love Me«) follows strictly the HABANERA pattern with its two sections (AB)
and its modulation from minor to major.213
In 1882, Ernst Rothlisberger, a Swiss University professor and traveller in Bo-
gotá, besides acknowledging the existence of »national music« exemplified by BAM-
BUCOS, PASILLOS and waltzes, remarked on the popularity of poets and on the vitali-
ty of oral popular poetry. He states that it was often sung and gives several examples
consisting mainly of COPLAS (quatrains) and a few SEGUIDILLAS. He also characte-
rizes very accurately the deeply romantic lean of late 19th-century Colombian song
when he describes a serenade where a duo of a blind adult singer and his young son,
accompanied by an ensemble of violin, violoncello, tiples, bandola and guitar, per-
formed songs about »love, fidelity and passion, about gracious maidens radiant as
jewels and pure as lilies«; they sang – he adds – »about farewells and reunions and
about all the storms of human life«.214 Another element – evident in Rothlisberger’s
testimony – that appears around these years is a substantial modification in the tra-
dition of accompanying songs. This tradition seem to have been that of chiefly us-
ing local string instruments (bandolas, tiples and guitars) but in the years 1880–90
the international influence of Spanish ESTUDIANTINAS, detected all over Latin
America with their ensembles of BANDURRIAS, seems to have arrived in Colombia.
These carefree romantic »stage students« – such as the European troupe of »Spanish
Students« who toured the USA in 1880 – were also called TUNANTES (rascals) and
211 Colección de piezas sencillas de canto compuestas para las escuelas primarias y dedicadas al consejo
fiscal de instrucción pública del Estado de Cumdinamarca, Bogotá: [n. e.], 1878; Perdomo Es-
cobar, Historia, plates p. 201. The first stanza’s last verses are: »Una patria tan chiquita no
me llena el corazón/patria grande necesita, soy de toda la nación«.
212 Carlos M. Torres, Colección de canciones fáciles para el uso de las escuelas del Estado de Bo-
yacá, Tunja: Ed. de Gómez e Hijo, 1880. Perdomo Escobar, Historia, p. 193, plate p. 200.
213 Danza a dúo con acompañamiento de piano, Aires del País, No. 2, Bogotá: Imprenta de La
Luz, 1883.
214 Ernst Rothlisberger, El Dorado. Reise- und Kulturbilder aus dem sudamerikanischen Co-
lumbien, Bern: Schmid & Francke, 1898, pp. 114–15, 138–42 (my translation).
217
Egberto Bermudez
included serenading in their stage routines performing songs such as the famous
JOTA Olé! (1878) a hit by Spanish composer Eduardo Lucena (1849–1893).
The near abuse of a romantic poetic vein, of sentimentality and easy rhymes
found in songs that were in vogue around 1897–98 is criticized wittily – echoing
Rothlisberger – by d’Espagnat, another foreign observer, who also alludes to sere-
nades and to the particular timbre of the TIPLE, the accompanying instrument par
excellence of local songs. He also refers to literature and poetry as a national pas-
time and adds that »muleteers are guitarists and guitarists are poets« warning us
not to believe that all find their way to the printing press. While praising the natu-
ral delicacy of women’s voices accompanied by the tiple, in passing he attests to the
currency of contemporary international hits such as Sobre las olas (»Over The
Waves«, 1891) the famous waltz by Juventino Rosas (1868–1894) that also exists
in a sung version.215
In the work of Colombian poet, diplomat and amateur composer Vicente Hol-
guín Mallarino (1837–1905) ZARZUELA and song meet again. His ZARZUELA El
fin del mundo was published (text only) in Lima in 1905 and his only known song,
the HABANERA El Payandé – although unknown in Colombia but very popular in
Peru – touches on the musical aspect of the Afro-Colombian cultural legacy.216 The
song appeared in 1892 in La Lira del Misty, a song collection published in Arequipa
that successfully arrived at its seventh edition in 1916 and it was included (Columbia
P17) in the first recordings of Peruvian songs by »Montes y Monique« in 1911.217
It is surprising to find such a small amount of vocal music in the concerts
presented in Bogotá in the 1880s and 90s. Concert programmes and newspaper
advertisements examined by Rodriguez and Duarte report some church music
choruses and operatic pieces (solos, ensembles and choruses) but only two songs:
Dacha y llanto (to a text by Victor Hugo), a romanza composed by Santos Cifu-
entes in 1894, and the Jota de los toreros, one of the songs of Sebastian Yradier
(1809–1865), written in 1897. It seems that previous efforts such as Ignacio Fi-
gueroa’s proposal of the creation of school choirs to stimulate local opera and
215 Pierre d'Espagnat, Souvenirs de la Nouvelle Granade, Paris: Bibliotheque Charpentier,

1901, pp. 18–19, 119–20, 124–25, 164–65, 271–72.
216 González Cajiao, p. 702.
217 La Lira del Misti. Colección de zarzuelas, yaravies, canciones, valses modernos, serenatas, etc.
Sétima edición correjida, reformada y aumentada, Arequipa: Tip. y Encuadernación Medina,
1915. Spottswood, IV, p. 2127 and Fred Rohner, »Fuentes para el estudio de la lírica popu-
lar limeña: el repertorio de Montes y Manrique«, Lexis, XXXI, 1–2, (2007), p. 349.
218
church singing in 1873 had remained on paper or were not very successful.218 It
seems that the REGENERACIÓN project literally »regenerated« secular tastes under
the tutelage of the hundreds of Spanish priests that flooded the country following
the dispositions on education after 1886, that were so many that even a partisan
Conservative like Luis M. Mora exclaimed that it seemed another »Spanish Re-
conquest«.219
At the GRUTA SIMBOLICA, ZARZUELA and song seem to have been highly arti-
culated in their theatrical improvisations on contemporary political and social
events. Precisely one of the first anecdotes referred to by Ortega Ricaurte is the
comic melopea parody of the main melody of El rey que rabió improvised by Julio
Florez upon a guitar accompaniment dedicated to the lost Tyrolean hat of one of
his partners and entitled El tirolés que rabió. Also, one of the first songs to be men-
tioned, attributed to Florez, is Mis flores negras, perhaps one of the first sung PASIL-
LOS of the national repertoire. The musical performances of the all-male young
assembly featured two-part singing and mainly the accompaniment of tiples, ban-
dolas and guitars, and again, ZARZUELA numbers seem to have been prominent
although their knowledge of the genre was limited to those seen in the city during
the past five years. Thus they performed a chorus from La Marcha de Cádiz while
its comic gavotte Duo de los patos (»Duck’s duet«) is reported too have been per-
formed as a parody with piano accompaniment in a public bar.220 Ortega and Mo-
ra coincide in referring also to the performance of sections from Chateau Margaux
(1887) a ZARZUELA by Manuel Fernández Caballero (1835–1906).221
Melopeas, theatrical or dramatized recitations of poems with musical accompa-
niment seem to have been preferred by the GRUTA members. Besides the ZARZU-
ELA numbers, one BARCAROLLE (see next section) and PASILLOS are the only songs
reported as part of their activities. Here, we must mention two PASILLOS by Emilio
Murillo. One with a text, composed in 1898 and performed with a piano accom-
paniment in one of their meetings, and the second, a PASILLO LENTO (»slow pasil-
lo«) entitled Para tí, sung in a serenade.222 Those, along with Flores negras, seem to
have formed part of the earliest vocal PASILLO repertoire. Of the twenty-nine scores
included by Añez and chosen as paradigmatic, only four are PASILLOS, the rest are
mainly BAMBUCOS. Two of them (Fulgida Luna and Lejos de tus labios) show a
218 Rodríguez y Duarte, La vida, pp. 64, 160–66.

219 L.M. Mora, quoted in Rodríguez and Duarte, La vida, p. 78; Park, pp. 265–66.
220 Ortega Ricaurte, pp. 36, 57, 84, 136.
221 Ortega Ricaurte, pp. 236–38, Mora, p. 187.
222 Ortega Ricaurte, pp. 41, 92
219
Egberto Bermudez
very simple repetitive structure (Aaa’a’’) and their verse structure (decasyllabic) is
different to the traditional octosyllabic scheme. Flores negras has a common binary
structure (AB) alternating minor and major sections and its poetic scheme is that
of the SEGUIDILLA. The last one, Mística by Fulgencio García (1880–1945) has an
even more complex verse (hendecasyllables) and musical structure (ABC) that in-
cludes a modulation from major to minor and follows the scheme of the
three-section instrumental PASILLO, a genre in which García excelled.223
The absence of PASILLOS from the manuscript song collection of the 1880s al-
ready mentioned might lead us to think of the vocal PASILLO as the last element to
be incorporated into the Colombian national song repertoire around the last dec-
ade of the 19th century. By the mid-1890s BAMBUCOS and DANZAS seem to have
been the only pillars of Colombian »national« song. PASILLOS were recognized as
instrumental pieces but not as songs and its probable that only at this late moment
were the latter incorporated into the national repertoire. This appears to be the
case of the testimony of professional musician, musical agent and composer Teles-
foro D’Aleman (c.1844–1927) who in his tiple tutor of 1895 includes interesting
observations about the accompaniment of songs but mentions as musical genres
only the BAMBUCO, the TORBELLINO, the polka and the waltz.224 Murillo’s quoted
indication PASILLO LENTO (»slow pasillo«) for the PASILLO with words seems to be
the key differentiating factor. In fact, two PASILLOS that could illustrate this transi-
tion in terms of performance are Ideal (Columbia C865) recorded by »Calle y
Ochoa« the singers of the Lira Antioqueña in New York in 1910, and Tus labios no
me dicen que me quieren (Victor 67062) by Manuel »Pocholo« Rodríguez and He-
lio Cavanzo in 1914.225 In both, the introductions are fast and the tempo is slowed
down when the voices enter.
After the Thousand Days War, ZARZUELA and theatre slowly came back to
Bogotá, as did opera more than five years later, when the first recordings of Co-
lombian music began to be heard in the country (see Part Three, I)226. As we have
mentioned above, Manuel A. Rueda and his brother Victor Manuel lived and
worked in Cuba in the 1910s. Martín had two boleros for voice and piano pub-
223 Añez, plates pp. 241, 78 and 163.

224 Telésforo D’Aleman, Nuevo sistema para aprender fácilmente a tocar los tonos, acordes, dúos
y rasgados en el tiple, Bogotá: Imp. de Antonio M. Silvestre, 1895, 2ª. Ed., pp. 35–37. On
D’Aleman see E. Bermúdez, Historia, pp. 172–73.
225 Spottswood, IV, pp. 1720, 2203. Joyas, 4, 8.
226 Villa, pp. 57, 74 and Arte Nuevo, I, 2, (enero 1905), p. 25, where the dramatic Martínez
Casado’s Company and the zarzuela Compañía del Diestro are announced.
220
lished in Cuba in 1917, Una lágrima de amor (»Tear of Love«) and Quejas (»Com-
plaints«), undoubtedly the first boleros by a Colombian composer and part of the
earliest international repertoire.227 Rayo de Luna (»Moonlight«), a vocal »PASILLO
lento para piano y canto« by Victor Manuel was also published there, by Anselmo
López, in 1914 with two laudatory poems of local authorship printed at the back
of the publication. Victor is also the author of a vocal DANZA, Llora (»Cry«), with
verses by Angel Herrero. The Museo Nacional de la Música Cubana holds an or-
chestral arrangement of Rayo de Luna by celebrated Cuban composer Gonzalo
Roig (1890–1970), author of hundreds of songs including Quiéreme mucho
(1911), a BOLERO-CRIOLLA that became an international hit.228 In previous years
Anselmo López had published El Muro. Canción Colombiana (»The Wall«) for two
voices and piano, attributed to Francisco Suarez y de Elcoro. Besides recording it
with Briceño in 1930 (Brunswick 41030), Añez also names the score as a BAMBU-
CO, attributed to the local singer and composer Ricardo Cuberos (?–?), and identi-
fies the lyrics as being written by the Mexican poet Francisco A. de Icaza (1863–
1925).229 The melodies are practically the same and its structures are identical (AB)
alternating major and minor sections in the same tonality echoing the early PASIL-
LOS included in his selection (see above). To the same Suarez is also attributed
another song El soldado (»The Soldier«) recognized as Colombian – also included
by Añez – and published in Cuba in the same years (See Part One, I).230 The adap-
tation of BAMBUCO to criolla is also present in another song (Los Arrayanes) recog-
nized by Añez as an early BAMBUCO, recorded by »Wills y Escobar« in 1919 (Vic-
tor 72333) but also attributed to Sindo Garay (1867–1966).231 These cases illu-
strate the first stages of the internationalization of Colombian songs, particularly
227 Both published in La Habana by Anselmo López, the most prestigious Cuban publisher
of his time.
228 La Habana, Museo Nacional de la Música Cubana, Box »Colombia«. I thank Jesús
Gómez Cairo and José Reyes Fortun for their kindness in allowing the study of these
scores. See Hernán Restrepo Duque, Lo que cuentan los boleros, Bogotá: Centro Editorial
de Estudios Musicales, 1992, p. 11 and Betancur Alvarez, p. 189.
229 Spottswood, IV, p. 1707; Añez, plate p. 35 and for text pp. 58, 378 where he includes
only four stanzas of the original six, the Cuban score only gives three. On Cuberos see
Añez, pp. 57–59.
230 So far it has not been possible to find any information at all on this author(s) or arran-
ger(s). Betancur Alvarez, 189. Recorded as danzón by Barbarito Diez and the Antonio
Maria Romeu in Así bailaba Cuba, I, La Habana: Panart, c. 1954? See Cristobal Díaz
Ayala, Del Areyto al Rap Cubano, San Juan: Fundación Musicalia, 2003, p. 270.
221
Egberto Bermudez
BAMBUCOS that would become prominent in the Cuban and Mexican (Yucatán)
song repertoires in the decades to come (1910–40). At this point, Colombian song
began to participate in the new dynamics of recordings, discs and the creation of a
music market, something we will examine in Part Three.
The new situation posed problems for traditional music. COPLAS, DÉCIMAS
and SEGUIDILLAS had been the basis of song texts all over Latin America and bor-
rowings, variations and glosses of old motifs, verses and even whole stanzas were
common in those texts. Recordings had a new element: it fixed a performance in
space and time and besides the interpreter – always present – if possible the musi-
cal genre and the author had to be identified in order to become part of the docu-
mentation of the recording. Performers, arrangers, producer or session musicians
present did not always have the right information and quick decisions were always
taken that led to mistakes, false attributions and injustices which proved to be very
difficult to correct. Ambitious, pretentious and opportunist musicians, composers
and performers took advantage of those opportunities. I suppose inexperienced
performers could also give incorrect information unintentionally and we have to
acknowledge that in the early stages – in the case of Colombian and Lat-
in-American musicians – there was a language barrier that one can imagine was
sometimes difficult to breach. To illustrate the case it is worth quoting an anecdote
told by the composer Angel M. Camacho y Cano who found in the street a musi-
cian who had recorded two of his own songs under his name and complained
about it by pointing to the names on the labels on the disc. The musician candidly
answered »I am not pretending to be the author; they tell me to sign here, and I
sign everything they put in front of me«.232
Part Three: The Groove and the Wave
Public awareness of the first Colombian song recordings seems to have been restrict-
ted to very small circles. It appears at least odd that Añez, who was a recording artist
in the United States for almost a decade and a half, mentions only in passing those of
»Pelón y Marín« (1908) and does not mention at all those of the LIRA ANTIOQUEÑA
(1910), only briefly referring to Eusebio Ochoa, one of its singers. This suggests that
he did perhaps not know them very well or that indeed he had not heard them at all,
because when he discusses recordings – in the case of the late electric ones (of 1926–
33) which are contemporary to his own – he is usually very thorough, giving many
232 De la Espriella, p. 200.
222
details.233 Only at the end of the 1960s, Zapata Cuencar and after him Restrepo Du-
que revealed the details of these recordings and their contents.234 Out of the whole
corpus of early recordings, Añez only comments favourably on those of Daniel Uribe
(1910) and even suggests – as Restrepo Duque confirms – that he exercised leader-
ship amongst his fellow composers and musicians.235 At these initial and experimen-
tal stages we have a continuous flow of Colombian artists who travelled abroad
(mainly to the US) to make disc recordings that were included in the international
series of companies such as Columbia, Victor, or Brunswick.
The heyday of the SON during the first half of the 20th century can be roughly
divided in two periods, taking 1928–29 as the breaking point where we begin to
find an increasing number of professional artists and see the expansion of the re-
pertoires and a greater impact at home due to the consolidation of Colombian ra-
dio broadcasting industry. This coincides with the transition between mechanic
and electric recordings that began in the mid-1920s; the latter were already stan-
dard in the industry by 1929–30. The second period (1930s–50s) develops around
the consolidation of the national recording industry from its experimental begin-
nings in the mid-1930s to its industrial establishment in the early 1950s.
Reynaldo Pareja’s analysis of the consolidation of Colombian radio industry
insists on the replication of the US model.236 This model – that combined effec-
tively the radio and the phonographic industries – was rapidly adopted in Colom-
bia and by 1936 some distributors of the RCA Victor Company around the coun-
try (in Bogotá and Manizales) founded their own radio stations. Antonio Fuentes,
who in 1932 established his Emisora Fuentes in Cartagena and two years later Dis-
cos Fuentes – the first Colombian recording company – also followed this model
strictly.237 These new industries and their dynamics prompted an adjustment of
the repertoires and the music making strategies used so far, as described previously.
This period of adjustment lasted until the 1930s with a phonographic initial phase
(until c.1925) and a phonographic-radio secondary one (until 1930). The types of
songs we have studied so far adapted to this new means very well and, with time,
as we shall see below, new types emerged from the confluence of old trends and
233 Añez, pp. 27, 217.

234 H. Zapata Cuencar, Centenario de Pelón Santamarta 1867–1967. Vida, andanzas y can-
ciones del autor de Antioqueñita, Medellín: [Author’s Edition], 1966, pp. 28–30.
235 Añez, pp. 139–40; Restrepo Duque, Los que cuentan, pp. 17–18.
236 Pareja, Chaps. I–IV, Conclusiones.
237 Ofelia Peláez, Luís F. Jaramillo, Colombia musical. Una historia, una empresa, Medellín:
Discos Fuentes, 1996, p. 26.
223
Egberto Bermudez
the new industries. Thus the shape of the Colombian music market sketched in
the following paragraphs aims at highlighting the vital role played by the broad-
casting and phonographic industry in the development of the aesthetic, musical
and literary trends present in Colombian songs from the 1910s to the 1950s.
The primary sources for this section are the recordings themselves, and their
main source of contextual information for our time span is the groundbreaking
work of Richard K. Spottswood (1932). Additional information can be obtained
in catalogues such as the Rigler and Deutsch Record Index and the valuable recent
discographies of Ross Laird (Brunswick), Brian Rust (Columbia) and Laird and
Rust (Okeh).238 This information has been collated with data from local sources
particularly Restrepo Duque, Zapata Cuencar and Rico Salazar. These authors had
also drawn vital information from artist’s own collections of press clippings and
concert bills (those of Wills and Añez), as well as from their own and other private
record collections in Colombia and abroad.
I.
In 1911 gramophones were reported by foreign visitors in the steamships along the
Magdalena river, their repertoire consisting of opera selections (La Traviata and La
Favorita), military marches, dance pieces, sung HABANERAS, items such as La Pa-
loma and the Colombian national anthem which was played so repeatedly that the
traveller claims to have learned it by heart before the end of his trip.239 Echoing
238 The Rigler and Deutsch Record Index is a microform-unified catalogue of the 78-rpm record
collections at Stanford University, Syracuse University, Yale University, New York Public Li-
brary and the Library of Congress. Ross Laird, Brunswick Records: A Discography of Recordings,
1916–1931, Westport (CT): Greenwood Press, 2001, 4 vols.; Brian Rust, The Columbia Master
Book Discography, Westport (CT): Greenwood Press, 1999, Vol. 1; Ross Laird and Brain Rust,
Discography of Okeh Records, 1918–1934, Westport (CT): Praeger Publishers, 2004. Additional
public access Internet databases are: Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mex-
ican-American Recordings (http://digital.library.ucla.edu/frontera/), based at the University of
California, Los Angeles; Encyclopedic Discography of Victor Recordings, EDVR (http://victor.
library.ucsb.edu/index.php) and Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project, CPDP, (http://
cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/index.php), both based at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
239 Felix Serret, Voyage en Colombie (1911–1912), Paris: H. Dudod y E. Pinat Eds., 1912, p.
242. Terminolgy is ambiguous here and generally »phonograph« was used in the USA while
»gramophone« in the UK. However, phonograph was understood as a device to record and
play cylinders whereas gramophone mostly meant a device to play only discs. »Graphophone«
was the term given by Alexander Graham Bell to his wax cylinder »phonograph«, the term
used by Thomas A. Edison. Emile Berliner’s »gramophone« and its discs came in 1887.
224
what we have already mentioned in section one about the emblematic role of pa-
triotic song, it comes as no surprise that in the New York recording sessions led by
Emilio Murillo in mid-1910, one of the first items to be recorded was the national
anthem and at least three versions of the Himno Nacional were circulated in the
following years.240 Later on Bogotá’s newspapers report the activities of representa-
tives of recording companies and the contests organized to select candidates for
recording contracts.241 Outside Bogotá, between 1910 and 1930, the Cartagena
newspapers published advertisements for scores, piano rolls and discs of Colom-
bian and foreign repertoire as well as Columbia’s GRAFONOLAS, Victor’s VICTRO-
LAS and their indispensable gear.242
A decade later, in 1921, a German report on trade and investment in Colom-
bia judges as significant the role played by gramophones and phonographs in trade
imports for the years 1915–16.243 By the early 1930s, VICTROLAS (the brand of
record players produced by Victor) provided entertainment for all layers of the Bo-
gotá society, where recorded hit songs were heard both in foreigner’s homes
(American songs) and tangos in the local bars (CANTINAS), sometimes combined
with live music.244 This democratization contrasts sharply – as the photographs of
Francisco Mejia, a noted Medelín artist, attest – with the sophisticated and cos-
mopolitan look visually associated with the new machines by the local Columbia
agent’s publicity campaigns from the late 1920s and the »civilizing« power at-
tached to the new technology and the new music market which was hailed in the
Spanish edition of The Voice of the Victor in 1923. The publication praised Me-
delín’s local distributor Felix de Bedout e Hijos for having understood that and for
their commercial efficiency.245
239 E. J. Gutiérrez, pp. 146–56.

240 The Himno Nacional de Colombia was the first item recorded by the Lira Antioqueña in
mid-1910 (June–July?), then by the Band of Arthur Pryor on June 9th that year and later
by singer Emilia Sánchez in December 20th, Spottswood, IV, pp. 2009, 2292; EDVR
(http://victor.library.ucsb.edu/matrixDetail.php?id=200009184), Rico Salazar, pp. 19, 91
where he gives tentative dates. The recordings can be found in Joyas, 2, 20; 3, 1 and 21.
241 Will’s album quoted in Restrepo Duque, Lo que cuentan, pp. 22–23.
242 E. J. Gutiérrez, pp. 146–56.
243 Otto Burger, Kolumbien. Ein Betätigungsfeld fur Handel und Industrie. Nebst einem Beitrag
über die Kentnisse der Vorkommen und Stand des Bergbaus 1921, Leipzig: Dieterich’sche
Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1922, p. 284.
244 Virginia Paxton, Penthouse in Bogota, New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1943, pp. 97, 239–41.
245 Carlos José Restrepo, Francisco Mejía, fotógrafo, Bogotá: Banco de la República, [1985?].
225
Egberto Bermudez
The Colombian »national« song repertoire recorded between 1908 and 1914 is
very heterogeneous and clearly shows the coexistence of several musical and textual
trends, both popular and learned. When listening to these songs, we are left with
nothing else but to conclude that the apparent divide between »popular« and »art
music« nurtured in later decades by artists, journalists and writers (including Emi-
lio Murillo himself) was artificial, highly demagogic and very distant from the mu-
sic itself.246 In Fiebre (Columbia C 644), a song attributed to Murillo with a text
by Julio Florez and recorded in 1910 by Daniel Uribe (1883–1964), it is evident
that the composer’s idea was to borrow from the contemporary art-song style, us-
ing unusual modulations and chromatic melodic shapes based on long strains, very
distant from the rhythmic short tonal motifs characteristic of the BAMBUCOS of
»Pelón y Marín«.247 Another example is Canción (Columbia C645), a song by
Uribe himself, that shares the same traits with his HABANERA Amo tus ojos (Victor
72745) also recorded by Victor J. Rosales in 1920.248 He was furthermore the au-
thor of another rendition (labelled VALS LENTO) of Juan Ramón Jimenez’s text
Amapola del camino (Columbia C 641) that moves away from the Spanish TINGE
of G. Quevedo’s (See Part Two, I).249 On the other hand the songs recorded by
Pedro Leon Franco (1867–1952) and Adolfo Marin (1882–1932), a.k.a »Pelón y
Marín«, and the duets of the LIRA ANTIOQUEÑA in 1910 exhibit a clear connec-
tion to 19th-century practice, where repetitive harmonic cycles serve as basis for
their structure.250 Their melodies tend to include repeated notes and arpeggiation
profiles; most of the time, they are strictly syllabic in the setting of the text.
BAMBUCOS, significant in the whole corpus, exhibit certain traits (Musical Ex-
amples 1 and 2) but their main marker is a rhythmic and melodic motif typical of
intermediate and final cadences.251 Some show harmonic variety, not only through
246 For a good synthesis of the arguments involved in the polemics on »national music« see
Cortés, Ch. II, pp. 51–71
247 Joyas, 2, 2 and 5; Rico Salazar, p. 93. Fiebre is labelled a bambuco by Rico Salazar but
does not show at all any of its musical characteristics. Unfortunately Spottswood does not
list it so it is difficult to know what the original label read.
249 Spottswood, IV, p. 2344, Rico Salazar, p. 93.
250 Zapata Cuencar, Cantores, pp. 91–8; Centenario, pp. 14, 51–52; E. Bermúdez, »Las
primeras grabaciones comerciales de música popular colombiana: El repertorio de Pelón y
Marín de 1908« in progress.
251 This also has been the subject of inconclusive polemics and Davidson (II, pp. 69–109),
Restrepo Duque, (A mi canteme, pp. 43–61) and above all Luis Uribe Bueno’s contribu-
tion to Restrepo Duque’s work (pp. 62–83) are the best synthesis on the matter.
226
conventional modulation but also through sudden harmonic changes, occasionally

daring in the context of the general style of international sentimental songs. Their
performing singing style is strongly marked by a free-rhythm (rubato) approach,
especially using long fermatas at the beginnings of phrases and less frequently, at
intermediate spotspoints. From the instrumental point of view, songs have in gen-
eral preludes and interludes (called PASACALLES) that tend to be more harmonic
than melodic when string instruments are used and, in fewer cases, are developed
melodically when suitable instruments (piano, violin, flute, etc.) were available.
Romanticism reigns unchallenged in the texts and romantic love (with all its va-
rieties and shades) is by far the predominant theme. There are, however, some spe-
cific trends (courting, unrequited love) of which one very discernible is the motif of
death (including allusions to necrophilia and in general to the macabre), present in
certain works of Julio Florez, possibly the most notable Colombian poet in this
corpus. Love and death and, in passing, meditations on human fate are common as
well as irony and paradox. Love and death, for instance, are ironically mingled with
jealousy in Celos (Columbia C749) recorded by Uribe and V. J. Rosales in April
1910. This BAMBUCO had been previously recorded by »Pelón y Marín« (Colum-
bia C392) and appears again in 1914 in the recordings of the Cuban duet »Cruz y
Cruz« (Victor 67344).252 International currency of macabre Colombian songs dur-
ing this period is attested by another hit, the PASILLO Diamantes (to a text by the
Colombian poet Federico Rivas Frade) recorded by »Pelón y Marín« (Columbia
C397) and still remembered today in Cuba’s musical circles.253 In general terms the
textual motifs of early Colombian song fit very well into the picture drawn by M.
Mateo Palmer for the early Cuban song (TROVA) represented by artists such as
Sindo Garay, Manuel Corona and Alberto Villalón. Besides love and the exaltation
of the beloved, feminine and natural beauty (usually metaphorically intermingled)
occupy a distinguished second place, followed by romantic and idyllic exaltation of
the country’s natural beauties and rural life. Mateo identifies other types of Cuban
early TROVA songs such as political songs, or those exploring the position and role
of the singer in society, both practically non-existent in our case (See Part One).254
Socially, songs occupied several spaces. Contrary to the artisan and working
class origins of »Pelón y Marín« and the members of the LIRA ANTIOQUEÑA, the
252 Joyas, 2, 1.
253 Rico Salazar, p. 65. Maria Teresa Vera and Lorenzo Hierrezuelo recorded this song some-
time after 1924. I thank José Reyes Fortun (La Habana, Cuba) for this information.
254 Margarita Maeto Palmer, Del bardo que te canta, La Habana: Letras Cubanas, 1988, pp.
58–130, 168–205.
227
Egberto Bermudez
Uribe brothers’ family belonged to the Antioqueño cultural elite and their mother
was musically trained and a music teacher.255 On the other hand Emilio Murillo
represented the Bogotá middle class (merchants and traders) where local song tra-
dition had consolidated.256 And although himself and Pelón had travelled and per-
formed across the country, in the New York 1910 recordings Uribe would insist –
perhaps on stylistic grounds as we shall see – on marking the regional difference
labelling Jamás (Columbia C647) as MELODÍA ANTIOQUEÑA and Eres bella (on
the opposite side of the disc) as CANCIÓN ANTIOQUEÑA.257 BAMBUCOS, PASIL-
LOS, DANZAS and VALSES, in that order, are present in these recordings, followed
by the few canciones discussed previously. However, musical genre is sometimes
difficult to assign as in El enterrador, another non-native macabre text set to music
in Colombia, most probably one very popular in the Spanish repertoire and main-
tained in songs both in Spain and Cuba until the 1950s.258
The second phonographic-radio phase here mentioned led to different results
in Colombia, thus departing from the effects it had in the American case where it
provoked the bankruptcy of Columbia in 1923 and its final absorption by the Co-
lumbia Broadcasting System (CBS) in 1938259. Cortés indicates how in 1924 pri-
vate entrepreneurs from Bogotá experimented with wireless transmission and even
broadcasted poetry and vocal and instrumental music through loudspeakers, in-
cluding the BAMBUCO A la luz de la luna performed by a local duet. Mundo al Dia
reported extensively on the new technology and even announced its project to es-
tablish, alas unsuccessfully, its own radio station.260
The most important recordings from this period are those of the »Trio Colom-
biano« (Alejandro Wills, Arturo Escobar and Miguel Bocanegra), Victor J. Rosales
– alone and in duets with Jorge Añez and Arturo Patiño – and Añez with Colom-
255 The main source of information on the Uribe Uribe brothers is Zapata Cuencar, Can-
tores, pp. 23–25.
256 See Bermúdez, Historia, p. 143; De la Espriella, p. 154.
257 Spottswood, IV, p. 2344. Unfortunately I have been unable to locate these recordings.
258 The text appears, modified, in one version of Angelillo, c.1937 as a cuplé and also as a cha-cha-chá
recorded in Cuba by Abelardo Barroso in 1956 with the Orquesta Sensación. This piece was in-
cluded in the soundtrack of Cuban thriller (in animation) Mas Vampiros en la Habana, c. 2002. I
thank Gaspar Marrero (Sancti Spiritus, Cuba) for this valuable information and a copy of Barro-
so’s recording. Music commentator Manuel Drezner in his El Espectador column revealed that the
text appeared in 1882 in the Bogotá newspaper La Caridad and attributed to Francisco Garas, an
otherwise unknown Spanish author. Peláez, p. 200 and Rico Salazar, p. 69.
259 Spottswoood, I, p. xvi.
260 Cortés, Ch. V, pp. 162–69.
228
bian-Panamanian singer and composer Alcides Briceño (1886–1963). They were

made for Victor in New York in April-May 1919 (TRIO COLOMBIANO), March-
October 1920 (ROSALES and his duets) and from 1922 to 1933 (Briceño and Añez)
and represent the consolidation of the canonic Colombian national song reper-
toire. Rosales made another set of recordings for Edison and Banner (mainly reis-
sues by Brunswick), including international repertoire with piano accompaniment
between 1924 and 1928. In the same years Añez recorded for Brunswick and Voca-
lion with LOS CASTILLIANS (a quartet), conducted and recorded with his own in-
strumental ensemble (ESTUDIANTINA AÑEZ) and also with international figures
such as Guty Cardenas (See Part One, I).261 In the years that ensued, the recordings
of BAMBUCOS such as Wills’ Tiplecito de mi vida (Columbia 3828X, 1929), Mo-
rales Pino’s Cuatro Preguntas (Victor 72335, 1919) and Ya ves or Ingrata (Victor
17803, 1922), Añez’s Agáchate el sombrero (Victor 46200, 1929) and Pedro León
Franco’s (Pelón) Antioqueñita (Columbia 3143X, 1927–28); PASILLOS as Fúlgida
Luna (Victor 77579, 1924) and Flores Negras (Victor 77050, 1923), Quevedo’s
Amapola (Victor 72342, 1919) and A. Castilla’s Guabina Tolimense (Columbia
3074X, 1927–28) became undisputable icons of the repertoire. The first record-
ings of foreign songs (tangos, Mexican RANCHERAS and Cuban BOLEROS and
DANZONES CANTADOS) made by Colombian artists also date from this period.262
We can safely assume that in the first decades of the 20th century there was a
Latin-American international song repertoire, mainly a product of the touring acti-
vities of ZARZUELA and other theatrical entertainment companies that had tra-
velled extensively throughout the previous century knitting a tight music network
between Spain, the United States, the Caribbean and South America (see Part Two,
I). Such an assumption may prevent insisting on sterile polemics about the »natio-
nality« of hit songs or dates for creation of new genres that had generated so much
material of dubious utility, so typical of amateur writing on music in Latin Ameri-
ca, and good example of how cultural nationalism – or regionalism and localism –
can become an insurmountable obstacle to expand our knowledge on these mat-
ters.263
261 Spottswood, IV, pp. 1697–1709, 1777–78, 2275–78.

262 Bermúdez, »Del humor«, I, pp. 100–108.
263 Interesting reading on this matter is the article by Leonardo Acosta on »new genres« and
»first works«: »Los inventores de nuevos ritmos: Mito y realidad«, Otra visión de la música
popular cubana, La Habana: Letras Cubanas, 2004, pp. 86–118.
229
Egberto Bermudez
II.
Two concepts can be recognized as the driving forces in shaping Colombian song
repertoire in the 1930s: professionalization and modernization (as a musicological
category, following Nettl).264 The advent of electric recording in 1925 contributed
greatly to the expansion of the international music market, and business thrived in
the epicenters of the industry, notably New York. Taking as an example the case of
Puerto-Rican musicians, Glasser studies the conformation of Latin-American music
communities and the professionalization of their musicians.265 A quick glance of
the New York Spanish press brings forth the substantial importance of the Lat-
in-American market for the major recording companies but also shows the margin-
al interest in Colombian repertoire compared to that of Puerto Rico, Mexico and
Cuba. Only in 1928–29 did the Hernandez Brothers, Cuban cuplé singer Pilar Ar-
cos and tenors Julian Mario Oliver and José Moriche appear in advertisements for
Colombian music recordings. In August 1928, a »Colombian music week« pro-
moted by a major record retail shop included PASILLOS, DANZONES and a single
BOLERO and DANZA.266 Reasonably, Spottswood argues that Spanish recordings
mainly catered for the Central and South American markets and in many ways dif-
fered from other ethnic recordings that had a US significant local market. Besides,
he recognizes – and excludes from his discography – a series of standard recordings
by American studio singers and orchestras during the 1920s and 30s that featured
the so-called »Latin tinge«.267 No matter how peripheral, through their discs and
the media (radio, press) Colombian artists living in New York contributed greatly
to the advance of professionlization of local musicians and – as Restrepo Duque did
– it is only fair to recognize that »Wills y Escobar ’s « career at home and abroad
was also an important model for Colombian professional musicians to come.268
At home, the potential of the new media (radio, records) spurred musicians to
react and implement changes brought by the new climate in the musical and enter-
264 Bruno Nettl, »Some Aspects of the History of World Music in the Twentieth Century:
Questions, Problems, and Concepts«, Ethnomusicology, 22, 1, (Jan., 1978), pp. 123–136; in
Spanish some of these thoughts an others are developed in »Transplantaciones de músicas,
confrontaciones de sistemas y mecanismos de rechazo«, Revista Musical Chilena, XXXIV,
149–50, (1980), pp. 5–17.
265 Ruth Glasser, My Music is my Flag: Puerto Rican Musicians and their New York Communi-
ties, 1917–1940, Berkeley: University of California, 1995.
266 La Prensa, New York, Aug. 18, 1928, p. 2.
267 Spottswood, I, pp. xvii–xviii.
268 Restrepo Duque, Lo que cuentan, p. 18.
230
tainment fields. In 1933 Jorge Añez returned from a successful performing career
in the US, and a couple of years later took part in the establishment of a radio sta-
tion (ECOS DEL TEQUENDAMA) that made – along with RADIO SANTAFÉ – the
Colombian repertoire the centre of its musical programming stimulating live per-
formances of Colombian musicians and composers and which at the end of Añez’s
life became one of the first independent cultural enterprises of Colombian radio.269
Although failing in his initiative of establishing control of the new industry, in
those years the Colombian government contributed to the introduction of national
music into the new technologies by importing in 1936 the first electrical recording
equipment for RADIO NACIONAL, the state radio station, where ground-breaking
recordings of the national repertoire were made.270 In 1935 Luis López de Mesa,
Minister of Education (in charge of the station) had warned about rapidly under-
standing and implementing the great potential of radio and cinema as powerful
tools for education and political action.271 However, the private sector was not only
quicker than the government to understand it but – as shall see – immediately put
it in action.
Starting in the previous decade, the internationalization of Colombian song
repertoires was consolidated in the 1930s and continued well into the 1950s. Gar-
del’s recording in 1920 of Tras las verdes colinas (known also as Rumores) amongst
other Colombian pieces marks the beginning of its popularization by international
stars. In the 1930s Spanish figures such as José Moriche (c.1895–1942) and Juan
Pulido (1891–1972), along with Mexican Margarita Cueto (1902–1977) recorded
and included numerous Colombian songs in their concert repertoires. Those in-
clude Mis Flores negras (PASILLO), La Espina (BAMBUCO), Por un beso de tu boca
(BAMBUCO), Cuatro Preguntas (BAMBUCO) and Amapola, amapolita (CANCIÓN).272
In the 1940s Colombian residents abroad as well as foreign artists were the leading
figures shaping the type of Colombian song that developed as a standard within
the Colombian music market. Artists such as Hector (1898–1948), Gonzalo
(1899–1958) and Francisco (1903–1970) a.k.a the »Hermanos Hernández«,
Hernán Rodríguez (1907–1942) (a.k.a Nano Rodrigo), Ladislao Orozco, Sarita
269 Añez, pp. 218, 279; Restrepo Duque, Las cien, pp. 3, 132; Rico Salazar, p. 185. Ecos del Tequen-
dama was converted in 1950 in Emisora HJCK. Téllez B., pp. 21, 52 and Pareja, pp. 86–87.
270 Restrepo Duque, A mi cánteme […], p. 280.
271 Luís López de Mesa, quoted in Renan Silva, »Ondas nacionales. A propósito de la crea-
ción de la Radiodifusora Nacional de Colombia«, in República liberal, intelectuales y cultu-
ra popular, Medellín: La Carreta, 2005, p. 68.
272 Restrepo Duque, Lo que cuentan, pp. 143–86; Rico Salazar, pp. 756–60.
231
Egberto Bermudez
Herrera (1913–1987) and María Betancur de Caceres (?–1982) were joined by

non-Colombians such as Alcides Briceño, Terig Tucci, Miguel Cáceres and Luis
Valente (all from Argentina). However, their international style contrasted sharply
with that of Colombian artists who had remained and developped their perform-
ing careers at home, and who – as an additional disadvantage and with very few
exceptions – did not have the opportunity to project themselves as recording art-
ists. Amongst these perhaps the most fortunate were »Ospina y Martínez«, a Me-
dellín duet established in 1929 that recorded in the late 1930s and early 1940s. In
the same years »Obdulio y Julian« another local duet began to gain recognition but
could not make any recordings until the end of the following decade.273
A challenge to the canonic Colombian repertoire appears at the end of the
1920s with the first recordings of songs of the Colombian Atlantic coast
dance-music repertoire. Around 1927–1928 Costeño composers and musicians
Angel M. Camacho y Cano (1901–1993) and Adolfo Mejia (1905–1973) tra-
velled to the United States and for a few years participated actively in the Lat-
in-American music life of New York and other cities. Although apparently they
did not travel themselves, the scores of composers from the same region such as
Cipriano Guerrero (1894–c.1955) and José Pianeta Pitalúa contributed greatly to
the early stages of this repertoire.274 Amongst the musicians who sang with Añez
was the Colombian-Panamanian Alcides Briceño who also collaborated with his
compatriot Ricardo Fabrega Jr. (1905–1973) in popularizing Panamanian dance
music that on the whole, had the same characteristics as the Colombian repertoire
here discussed. »Camacho y Cano’s« PORROS belong to the international (mostly
Spanish Caribbean) dance music tradition of ESTRIBILLOS or short repetitive vocal
verses included in dance pieces.275 Satiric and double entendre texts are common in
his compositions such as Por lo bajo (Brunswick 40873) and Negocio es negocio
(Brunswick 41123) that also show a responsorial (solo-chorus) singing technique
(similar to the MONTUNO in the Cuban SON), one of the stylistic brands of Ca-
ribbean and in general Afro-American musical traditions.276
273 Zapata Cuencar, Cantores, p. 31; Rico Salazar, p. 663 gives 1934 as the date of establish-
ment of the duet.
274 Restrepo Duque, A mi cánteme, pp. 275–76; Zapata Cuencar, Compositores colombianos,
pp. 79–84; Cortés, p. 77; De la Espriella, pp. 197–202.
275 In records of the 1930s estribillos and their performers were clearly identified in the labels,
particularly in Panamanian, Colombian and to a lesser extent, in the Puerto Rican and Cu-
ban dance repertoire.
232
However Guerreros’ La pringamosa (Columbia 2749–X) recorded by the Cu-

ban singers Pilar Arcos and Miguel de Grandy as a DANZÓN COLOMBIANO in the
summer of 1927 can be considered – along with the »Trio Colombiano« recording
of Eliseo Grenet’s La Mora (Victor 72322) in 1919 – one of the first sung DAN-
ZONES to be recorded and an antecedent of the Cuban DANZONETE.277 This is
indeed possible, as Acosta has asserted in his critique of what could be called »ori-
gin-obsessed« musicology.278 The piece is in two sections (AABB), with a refrain
(A) twice as long as the verse (B) and exhibits a quick tempo DANZÓN rhythmic
scheme and the same picaresque language we have referred to earlier.
Further research will clarify the role played by Cartagena’s poet, the composer
and entrepreneur Daniel Lemaitre (1884–1961) credited as the author of many
songs (DANZONES, PASEOS, PORROS, MAPALÉS, MERENGUES, etc.) amongst them
Merengue Panameño (Fuentes 2000A), one of the first records manufactured in the
country in the early 1940s, as well as the PORROS Pepe (a.k.a Cuando me apretan
bailando) and Sebastián rompete el cuero recorded in 1940 as Pobre Sebastián (Vic-
tor 83382) by Rafael Hernández and his Grupo Victoria.279 Lemaitre is also cre-
dited as the author of BOLEROS, amongst them Palomita Blanca, and of the song
Niña de los ojos verdes recognized by De la Espriella – based on family oral tradition
– as a BOLERO.280 Lemaitre belonged to Cartagena’s elite, cultural and artistic cir-
cles and in 1925 was included in a list of Cartagena’s active composers while a dec-
ade earlier several of his instrumental DANZONES were premiered publicly.281 In
the same years in nearby Cienaga’s banana-growing zone, musical activities flou-
rished around the activities of the » United Fruit Company «. Many popular songs
are attributed to musically trained composers Eulalio Melendez (1846–1916) and
277 Neither Spottswood nor the Rigler and Deutsch Index register the recording. However, its
series number coincides with recordings made between July and September 1927 by Pilar
Arcos and José Lacalle with his various ensembles working for Columbia. Spottswood, IV,
p. 1997; Rigler and Deutsch Index, p. 3680. I thank Julio Oñate (Valledupar, Colombia) for
kindly supplying me with a copy of the recording. On La Mora see Spottswood, IV, p.
1777 and Emilio Grenet, pp. xxxiv–xxxvi and Betancur Alvarez, pp. 217–19.
278 Acosta, pp. 86–90.
279 Spottswood, IV, p. 2392; Wade, p. 85; Zapata Cuencar, Compositores, p. 82 as El baile
apretao; Pinilla, p. 265.
280 Pinilla, p. 265; Zapata Cuencar, Compostiores, p. 82; De la Espriella, pp. 389–394; 396–
405; Miguel Camacho Sánchez et al., Bibliografía general de Cartagena de Indias,
Mompóx: Ediciones Pluma, 2007, II, pp. 654–55.
281 El Bodegón. Semanrio de literatura y buen humor, Cartagena, III, 100, March 14th, 1925,
p. 2; E. J. Gutiérrez, p. 149. See also Betancur Alvarez, p. 217.
233
Egberto Bermudez
Andrés Paz Barros (1906–1977), author of La cumbia cienaguera (Fuentes 262)

recorded by Luis E. Martínez in 1949.282
A new genre, the RUMBA CRIOLLA, appeared in Bogotá in those years. It can
be considered the first Colombian modern »fusion« and was basically a fast dance
piece (instrumental or sung) based on the rhythmic structures of the BAMBUCO
with Cuban or international style orchestral instrumentation. Its short texts belong
to the ESTRIBILLO tradition mentioned above. The development of RUMBA
CRIOLLA – as we shall see – is intrinsically related to that of the Colombian MÚSI-
CA BAILABLE repertoire in its first stages (1935–45). Although it is recognized that
the genre had an earlier history, the first one to be recorded was Que vivan los no-
vios (Victor 83138) by Emilio Sierra (1891–1957).283 Very rapidly RUMBAS
CRIOLLAS by Sierra, Milciades Garavito (1901–53) and Diógenes Chaves Pinzón
(1892–1961) began to be frequently broadcasted, circulated in discs and became
part of the standard dance repertoire of the Bogotá main dance orchestras, inciden-
tally, conducted by these composers themselves. Another hit of this repertoire,
Barrachita y parrandera (Odeon 71029B), was recorded around 1941 by Matilde
Diaz (1924–2002) a young singer who was to become the wife and partner of Luis
E. »Lucho« Bermúdez (1912–1994) and the lead singer of the Colombian national
dance repertoire (MÚSICA BAILABLE) from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s.284
Some of the RUMBAS CRIOLLAS based on the BAMBUCO do maintain its displaced
final accents (its main characteristic) while in others the musical phrases are mod-
ified to fit them in place. This can also be detected in the recordings made by for-
eign orchestras such as the renditions of Jugando and San Pedro, RUMBAS CRIOL-
LAS by Luis A. Osorio (1914–78) by the »Chilean Porfirio Diaz Orchestra«
(c.1945), where the typical BAMBUCO rhythmic features are clearly forced into the
binary basis of the Cuban genre.285 Other examples are based on the instrumental
282 Oñate, p. 440; Adolfo González Henríquez, »La influencia de la música cubana en el Ca-
ribe colombiano«, Huellas, 25, (April 1989), pp. 40–41; Ismael A. Correa D., Música y
bailes populares de Ciénaga, Magdalena, Ciénaga: [Author’s Edition], 1993, pp. 15–16,
24–28; G. Henríquez Torres, loc. cit.
283 The piece was recorded in Bogotá by Sierra’s own orchestra and manufactured in Argen-
tina. Rico Salazar, pp. 298–99. This author argues – with no documentary evidence –
that the piece was premiered at the inauguration of Radio Santafé in 1938. However, the
station had been functioning since 1932. Cf. Tellez B., p. 21.
284 Restrepo Duque, Lo que cuentan los boleros, p. 201; Rico Salazar, p. 503.
285 Joyas, 21, 22. Rico Salazar, p. 311and Restrepo Duque, A mi cánteme, p. 306. On the Porfirio
Díaz Orchestra see González and Rolle, pp. 471–72 and Hernán Restrepo Duque, »Porfirio
Díaz«, Todo Tango. Los Creadores. Músicos, www.todotango.com/SPANISH/creadores/pdiaz.asp
234
PASILLO rhythmic structure very different to the sung genre (PASILLO) we have
been referring to thus far.
In fact some instrumental PASILLOS (Chispas and On tabas) recorded by the
above-mentioned orchestras had been incorporated into the RUMBA CRIOLLA re-
pertoire.286 As we have mentioned, RUMBA CRIOLLA as a genre developed simulta-
neously and in close contact with the MÚSICA BAILABLE repertoire of the Atlantic
Coastal region. A good example of this interrelation can be Barranquillera a porro
by Sierra that echoes closely the thematic material of the famous El Cafetal by Cre-
sencio Salcedo (1906?–1976).287 Sierra himself defended the Bogotá identity of the
new genre pointing out that it was the same as old FANDANGO, meaning the con-
text for a couple dance with a loose choreography such as the 19th-century BAM-
BUCO, and – following the colonial tradition – danced by the lower classes in pub-
lic entertainment venues such as CHICHERIAS and CANTINAS (bars).288 The cur-
rency of the old dance style can be corroborated by failed attempt to adopt
»modern« ballroom style choreography for the BAMBOO, as that included in Mun-
do al Dia (November 1928) where their authors José A. Sanmiguel and Alberto
Urdaneta assured that with »patriotic fervor« the BAMBUCO had been »modernized
without losing its primitive flavour«. The authors insist on its »modernized and
ennobled« version, similar to what »happened in Argentina with popular tango«.289
In the late 1940s the »Costeño ensemble« (accordion guitar, maracas, bongos)
recordings would make an impact on Bogotá and produced further »fusions« such
as those of Julio Torres (?–1951) and »Los Alegres Vallenatos«, where local mate-
rials were accommodated to the fashionable Costeño rhythmic schemes and overall
sound. Los Camarones (Sello Vergara 2001A) is an adaptation of a local song and
in El Aguacero (Sello Vergara 2001B) one finds verses impossible to hear in tropical
cities: »Please open the door, my baby/I am getting wet/I cannot stand this rain
anymore, I am freezing!« 290
286 Joyas, 21, 1 and 20.

287 Joyas, 21, 19.
288 Ruiz Hernández, »Las rumbas criollas de Emilio Sierra«, in Personajes, p. 111. Rico Sala-
zar, p. 297, reproduces this information without reference to the original source. CHI-
CHERIAS (from CHICHA, the local maize beer).
289 Restrepo Duque, A mi cánteme, pp. 228–43. The title of the instrumental bambuco was Tierra
Nativa and appreared in Mundo al Día, No. 1455, Nov. 29th, 1928, p. 25. I thank Jaime Cortés
(Bogotá, Colombia) for the relevant details here quoted, absent from Restrepo Duque’s mention.
290 »Abreme la puerta mi nena/que me estoy mojando/Ya no aguanto ya este aguacero/me
estoy congelando!« Añez, p. 338 records the success of Torres’ adaptation of Los Cama-
rones that he considers a Bogotá traditional tune.
235
Egberto Bermudez
At these initial stages (1930–40), recorded music represented almost 80% of

the total radio programming covering a wide spectrum from opera and ZARZUELA
to international and Colombian popular music.291 Musical programming was con-
centrated – along with the news – in the early morning and at night and for in-
stance in Bogotá in 1932, FOXTROTS and TANGOS, Spanish JOTAS and Strauss
waltzes complemented a basically Colombian repertoire. In Medellín, for the pe-
riod 1930–35 radio broadcasts included vocal soloists and duets of the standard
Colombian repertoire who shared the live music stage with piano and orchestral
music (lead by Spanish and Italian conductors) and foreign artists such as the Ar-
gentinian tango composer and bandoneon player Joaquín Mauricio Mora (1905–
1979) and Chilean Lidia Paz, residents in the city, besides other visiting artists that
for years included a Guatemalan marimba ensemble.292 The period of expansion of
the market for recorded music coincides roughly with that described for radio.
Documents and correspondence referring to Liberal government plans for rural
education between 1935–36, studied by Tovar Pinzón, portray an important pres-
ence of record players, discs and catalogue–songbooks in the coffee-growing region
(Caldas and Antioquia) and the neighbouring VALLE DEL CAUCA, but not in the
other areas mentioned that include Santander, the Atlantic coast and some peri-
pheral colonization zones (Meta, Casanare and Arauca).293 Moreover, the monopo-
listic quality of the industry also reveals itself in those documents where we detect
only Victor products (VICTROLAS and machines with their electric recording sys-
tem, Orthophonic) explaining the already mentioned New-York company’s maga-
zine praise of the efficiency of their representative in Medellín.
III.
In the 1940s world current affairs and Colombian traditional political antagonisms
concurred in invoking nationalism in public debates around political, economic,
educational and religious issues. The lines – as we have seen – have already been
sketched and the 19th-century and the religious divide had been actively main-
tained alive by the Conservative party. As it had done previously, in 1942 the Lib-
eral Government issued another questionnaire about local culture – also aimed at
schoolteachers – that included questions on music, dance and the presence of ra-
dio, records and record-players. The answers given – quoted by R. Silva – show the
291 Pareja, pp. 21–24.

292 Restrepo Duque, A mi cánteme, pp. 260–61; Lo que cuentan, pp. 236–37.
293 Tovar Pinzón, Colombia, pp. 275–78.
236
presence, all over the areas covered, of new international (American, Cuban, Mex-
ican and Argentinian) song and dance genres and a very tangible influence of radio
and the phonographic industry. Cultural affinity however, defined certain musical
choices, such as that of the popularity of Cuban or Cuban-originated (the so-called
MÚSICA ANTILLANA) genres such as that generically called RUMBA. Answers from
the coastal area (Bolivar) tend to identify its Cuban origins but those from the
mid-Magdalena river (Honda) and even those of inland provinces (Boyacá, San-
tander) probably refer as well to the new RUMBA CRIOLLA. The radio as a substi-
tute to live music – especially in public entertainment venues – became a new ele-
ment as well as the distribution of CANCIONEROS (songsters-catalogues) emphasiz-
ing that the love songs they contained were also »heard on discs«, »broadcast on
radio or featured in films«. As in the previous materials, VICTROLA (the Victor
brand) has become a generic word (phonographs are less mentioned) but neverthe-
less reflects the grip of the market their representatives had. Musical variety is well
described reporting the presence of brass bands (Caldas, Bolivar) and the deter-
mining factor of church music education (Caldas) and it is possible to conclude
that dichotomies on national-foreign and modern-traditional – if used – could
have been conditioned by the political nature of the questionnaire’s wording.294
The first recordings of what a decade later would be called VALLENATO were
made in the early 1940s simultaneously with those of what eventually became
known as »música bailable«. By 1942, the Colombian Atlantic coastal area had the
third regional concentration of radio frequencies following Antioquia and the Bo-
gotá area. The biggest concentration was Barranquilla with ten, followed by Carta-
gena where Fuentes, giving him a clear advantage for the commercialization of his
recordings, operated three out of the five frequencies. Montería and Santa Marta
had two each and there was one station in Ciénaga, Magangué and Ocaña295. This
monopolistic profile as we shall see, replicated itself in Medellín.
294 Renán Silva, Sociedades campesinas, transición social y cambio cultural en Colombia. La En-
cuesta Folklórica Nacional de 1942: aproximaciones analíticas y empíricas, Cali: La Carreta,
2006, pp. 240–46. The original questionnaire did not survive and as far as the music sec-
tion is concerned it is impossible to know what it contained because Silva’s reconstruction
(pp. 119–20) uses musical terms in a very loose manner. The presence of Marcelino de
Castellvi and Jorge Añez, reported in the valuable information on the members of the
Comisión Nacional de Folklore (pp. 13–25), and also of Octavio Quiñones Pardo, not
mentioned by Silva, suggests a more technical and precise wording.
295 Emirto de Lima, »La radiodifusión en Colombia«, in Folklore, pp. 180–83. The author
lists frequencies and names stations which have been discussed in my works »Detrás«, p.
507 and »Del humor«, I, p. 88.
237
Egberto Bermudez
And precisely, in 1942 in her answer to the questionnaire mentioned earlier an

anonymous Corozal (then Bolivar now Sucre) schoolteacher mentioned three of
the Fuentes hits. They were El pollo pelongo (Fuentes 2000B) La vaca vieja (Fu-
entes 2001A) and Señora Santana attributed, the first two to Joaquín Marrugo and
the third to Climaco Sarmiento (1916–1986). As in the examples recorded pre-
viously, ESTRIBILLO and strophe alternation characterize these songs textually.
Musically, they also shared with previous examples its responsorial singing style
and the basic rhythmic structure of the traditional music of the region, with in-
struments that accentuate the offbeat and others the main beat, the texture being
led by a characteristic idiophonic timbric and rhythmic timeline. Most of the time
the patterns can be detected although sometimes the big band orchestration – and
deficient recording technology – tend to leave it in the background.296 A few years
later this orchestral style would acquire its canonic status with the PORROS of Lu-
cho Bermúdez whose best example is no doubt Carmen de Bolíivar (c.1945) dedi-
cated to his hometown. Bermúdez follows strictly the previously described struc-
ture and combines it with a text that although romantic, goes beyond the stan-
dards in having many fortunate images. It describes his hometown’s women as:
»Having their lips as red as sugarcane’s juice/and carrying in their eyes all your
mountain’s ardor«; moreover, during the patron saint’s feast, »the people gather
and poetry and liquor run like rivers/and when crossing some big dreamy eyes,
they turn into daggers and become our assassins«.297
Simultaneously, recordings made in Barranquilla and manufactured by Odeon
abroad in the mid-1940s followed closely those made before at home and abroad.
Guillermo Buitrago (1920–1949), »Bovea y sus Vallenatos«, and José Barros
(1915–2007) with »Los Trovadores de Barú« recorded for Fuentes in Cartagena,
Julio Torres (1929–1951) for Sello Vergara in Bogotá, »Fortich y Valencia« in
Buenos Aires and for Luis C. Meyer in Mexico.298 In Barranquilla Emigdio Vela-
sco recorded Abel Antonio Villa (1924–2006), Emiliano Zuleta (1912–2005),
296 See E. Bermúdez, »¿Que es el vallenato?: Una aproximación musicológica«, Ensayos. His-
toria y Teoría del Arte. Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas. Universidad Nacional de Co-
lombia, IX, 9, (2004), pp. 7–62 and liner notes in Los Bajeros de la Montaña. La acabación
del mundo: Música de gaitas de los Montes de María, Bogotá: Fundación de Musica, 2006,
CD MA–TCOL006, pp. 19–20.
297 »Como las mieles que dan tus cañas tienen tus hembras los labios rojos/toda la fiebre de
tus montañas la llevan ellas dentro’e los ojos« […] »pasa la gente y a manantiales corren
los versos y los licores/y unos ojazos ensoñadores nos asesinan como puñales.«
298 Peláez and Jaramillo, pp. 96–133.
238
Esteban Montaño (1918–1998), Francisco »Pacho« Rada (1907–2003), Luis E.

Martínez (1922–1995), Jose M. »Chema« Gómez (1907–2003) and José M. Peña-
randa. Some of these musicians and others including Bovea, also made a few
non-commercial recordings.299 It is difficult to know how these records were used
but we know some were privately distributed by their artists and probably also
heavily broadcasted.
Although very similar in musical structure these recordings – considering only
those made commercially – show great differences, technically and aesthetically
speaking. For instance a similar approach (big-band orchestral sound and crooner)
is found in Compae Chipuco (Barranquilla, c.1944) recorded by Jaime Garcia with
the »Atlántico Jazz Band« orchestra, El gallo tuerto (México, 1946) recorded by the
Luis C. Meyer with the »Rafael de Paz Orchestra« and El hombre caimán or Se va
el caimán (Buenos Aires, 1945) recorded by Johnny Alvarez with the orchestra of
Eduardo Armani. All of them follow international big-band dance accompaniment
schemes that end up occulting the original rhythmical structure that – on the con-
trary – was highlighted in Bermudez’s renditions in spite of using the same ensem-
ble. On the other hand, button accordions and guitars coexist in several pieces
sung by Villa, Buitrago, Zuleta and Montaño and its short melodic motifs and
improvisatory character reflect the presence of traditional local patterns. On the
other hand, »Los Trovadores de Barú« had a distinctive sound (with two clarinets,
guitar and bongos) echoing the Cuban son ensembles of the 1920s and 30s and,
more precisely, their particular rhythmic anticipation in the accompaniment is
noticeable on the guitars of Buitrago’s recordings.
Elsewhere we have shown how this tradition has historically incorporated ele-
ments of African songs of social comment, satire and derision thus sharing the style
of Caribbean topical and satirical song that appeared in CALYPSO (Trinidad),
MENTO (Jamaica), PLENA (Puerto Rico) and PWEN (Haiti) among others.300 Al-
though not strictly narrative – as has been generally described – anecdote, topical
comment and social critique were its backbones differing sharply from the national
299 Details in Oñate, pp. 465–68.

300 E. Bermúdez, »Por dentro y por fuera: El vallenato, su música y sus tradiciones escritas y
canónicas«, Música Popular na América Latina. Pontos de escuta, Eds. Martha Ulhôa, Ana
Maria Ochoa, Porto Alegre: Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, 2005, pp. 214–45
and »Detrás de la música: el vallenato y sus tradiciones canónicas escritas y mediáticas«, El
Caribe en la nación colombiana. Memorias. X Cátedra Anual de Historia »Ernesto Restrepo Ti-
rado«, Alberto Abello (ed), Bogotá: Museo Nacional de Colombia/Observatorio del Caribe
Colombiano, 2006, pp. 476–516.
239
Egberto Bermudez
repertoire thus described, romantic, idealized and remote from reality. Real people,
their names and their glories and miseries, were part of those texts, also made at-
tractive to the public by being delivered in a festive, jocular and nonchalant way.
To a certain extent, estribillos – as we have described them in dance songs of the
1930s – had the same qualities and, having been developed along the same lines,
were present in the GAITAS, PORROS and FANDANGOS of the MUSICA BAILABLE
repertoire of the decade. The Conservative Party press condemned the presence of
such picaresque texts in 1946 sentencing that they ill-represented Colombia as a
»cultured and decent« country.301
But in those years the Medelín music radio and phonographic industry was
about to enter its most important stage. Saenz Rover has shown how, in their cru-
sade for economic protectionism in the 1940s Colombian industrialists (and its
Medellín based national association ANDI) began a vigorous media campaign in
order to convince the public that protection not only was convenient for their in-
dustries but also for the interests of the nation and those of the whole of the popu-
lation. The defense of things »national« began to be part of the daily contents of
newspapers and radio programmes as a product of heavy economic pressure from
industrialists allied with the extreme right faction of the Conservative Party.302
Moreover, De Lima’s quoted study indicates that in 1942 twenty-eight radio sta-
tions (more that a quarter of the total existing in Colombia) were located in the
area of influence of Medelín, leaving behind the capital with only twenty-three and
the ensemble of the Coastal cities with eighteen. This was by far the biggest capaci-
ty of live and recorded music broadcasting in the country and no doubt – as we see
from the previous data – a very effective medium for the dissemination of the
products of the phonographic industry.303
From their beginnings Colombian (particularly Antioqueño) manufacturing
industries (textiles, tobacco, clothes, edibles, coffee) had recourse to music, and
songs in particular, as part of their publicity strategies. A very popular Medellín
duet, »Martínez y Trespalacios«, sang the current hits from a naval chariot dis-
guised as navy officers and sponsored by the »Compañía Colombiana de Tabaco«
(Coltabaco, Colombian Tobacco Company) during the 1928 Carnival parade at-
301 A leading article in El Siglo, attributed to Laureano Gómez, quoted by Ciro Quiroz Otero
and in Bermúdez, »Del humor«, II, p. 66.
302 Eduardo Saenz Rovner, La ofensiva empresarial. Industriales, políticos y violencia en los
años 40 en Colombia, Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia/CES, (1993) 2007,
2nd. Ed., pp. 33, 217.
303 E. Bermúdez, »Del humor«, I, p. 88.
240
tended by Antioqueño ex-President Carlos E. Restrepo. The company – founded

in 1919 – had established its publicity department in 1924.304 In the following
decade the same company sponsored a music (song) competition, won in 1935 by
Carlos Vieco (1904–79) one of the most prestigious composers of his time. In later
years (1941–42) another of Medellín’s textile companies, Indulana (also involved
in football) and Tejidos Rosellón, launched their own music competitions where
Vieco again strengthened his musical prestige. However, the most important mu-
sic contest was that of »Fabricato« (the second largest textile Colombian company)
which started in 1948 and where new figures such as Jorge Camargo Spolidore
(1916–1973) and Luis Uribe Bueno (1916–2000) were consecrated.305 In 1931
local industrialists – » Fabricato« and »Coltabaco« – were majority investors in the
creation of LA VOZ DE ANTIOQUIA and by 1935 other industries (beer, chocolate
and pharmaceutical manufactures) became new partners in the station that then
had a weekly music programme sponsored by one of its owners (Coltabaco). In the
same years, even the pioneer film-making and distribution company (Cine Co-
lombia) – also based in Medelín and acting as RCA agent – had a music pro-
gramme specializing in BOLEROS modeled on those currently heard on Mexican
radio programmes.306 In 1947 big local industries such as »Tejicondor« and »Col-
tejer« (textiles), »Everfit« (clothing manufactures) and »Café Sello Rojo« (coffee)
financed the most popular radio slots, all broadcast live and with significant musi-
cal content.307 Finally, besides its song contests in the early 1950s »Fabricato« even
financed its own professional orchestra under the direction of Camargo Spoli-
dore.308
In trying to get a radio stronghold in Bogotá, in 1948 »Coltejer« (Colombia’s
first textile industry) was financially involved in the setting of »Emisoras Nuevo
Mundo« and simultaneously stripped »Fabricato« (the second textile industry) of ex-
clusive textiles publicity in LA VOZ DE ANTIOQUIA affecting, almost fatally, the
transmission of its contest’s final concert. This station eventually became half owner
of »Nuevo Mundo« and the starting point of »Caracol« (CADENA RADIAL COLOM-
BIANA). Later in the year the new station was inaugurated with Mexican singer Nes-
tor M. Chayres as principal attraction and from then on »Nuevo Mundo’s« musical
programming followed closely the model of its Antioqueño partial owner. The same

305 Restrepo Duque, A mi cánteme, pp. 318–20; Rico Salazar, pp. 227, 265, 334.
306 Pareja, p. 31; Rico Salazar, p. 399.
307 Pareja, pp. 28–31.
308 Rico Salazar, p. 265.
241
Egberto Bermudez
scheme was followed by »La Voz de Medellín«, a new station that with Bogotá’s
»Nueva Granada« became RCN (RADIO CADENA NACIONAL). The latter was com-
peting fiercely for publicity and musicians to the extent of luring Spanish arranger
and director Jose M. Tena and singers and actors Roberto and Marina Ughetti –
who belonged to a family with a long musical-theatrical tradition (See Part Two, I) –
all of whom had been with LA VOZ DE ANTIOQUIA since the mid-1930s.309
Politically, Colombian radio had also established clear lines with the creation
in 1936 of »La Voz de Colombia« by Conservative CAUDILLO Laureano Gómez to
neutralize the Liberal Party government policies voiced in allied radio stations such
as »La Voz de la Victor« and »La Voz de Bogotá«. Medellín’s »La Voz de Anti-
oquia« clearly aligned with Gomez and the conservatives and in 1937 called for a
massive anti-government mobilization and, two years earlier, had reported live –
intending national coverage – the 2nd »National Catholic Eucharistic Congress«
that met in Medellín.310 By 1947 Gomez’s station incorporated a programme
called ANTIOQUIA HABLA (»Antioquia speaks«) designed as a propaganda tool and
financed – through ANDI – by the Medellín leading manufacturing industries.311
Competitors opted for the same strategies and foreign companies such as Bayer,
Kresto and Sydney Ross (Mejoral, Glostora) financed music and radio-theatre
programmes, a trend they pursued all over Latin America.312
The slow establishment of the Colombian record industry gave its first consol-
idated results around the mid-1940s and as Restrepo Duque recalls, the Medelín
music industry has been very aware of developments abroad and in Bogotá, Carta-
gena and Barranquilla.313 In the »national« repertoire (BAMBUCO, PASILLO and
DANZA) the »modern« sound distilled in some of the »Hermanos Hernández« and
other contemporary recordings, provoked (within the broadcasting industry) a
conservative reaction based on the continuity (in some cases) and the revival (in
others) of the purportedly »authentic« sound or duets of the earlier period. This
can be exemplified by the creation of the »Dueto de Antaño« in 1941 whose very
name (»Days Gone Duet«) explained their preference for the »older« sound and
repertoire. Other groups of this type followed suit and by 1945, the songs (BAM-
BUCOS and PASILLOS) of »Espinosa y Bedoya« from Medellín, »Los Heraldos de
309 Téllez B., pp. 36, 96–104.

310 Pareja, pp. 38–39.
311 Sáenz Rovner, La ofensiva, p. 90
312 Restrepo Duque, A mi cánteme, pp. 310–13; Rico Salazar, pp. 401–2.
313 Restrepo Duque, A mi cánteme, pp. 275–81, 300–304.
242
Caldas« from Pereira and »Garzón y Collazos« from Ibagué began to be frequently
broadcast live while the artists toured extensively around the country.314
As we have seen in Part One III, all things national were in vogue but most
texts were formulaic and repetitive. Of all of Luis C. González songs (the paradigm
of the period) perhaps Besito de fuego (»Little Kiss of Fire«, c.1942) is outstanding
for its poignant blending of music (by Enrique Figueroa) and verses: »This little
kiss of fire that I stole from you, my love/made the day die of envy […] tomorrow,
captivatingly, another day will be born/the same way as did my happiness when I
stole that kiss from you/and precisely because of this I want the new day to die/my
love, lets kill it of envy, with another kiss! «315 Musically, BAMBUCOS such as this
one depart from complicated harmonic structures and also emphasize the major
keys as central tonalities. However, the popular Medelín duets maintained an
enormous wealth of BAMBUCOS of the previous generations such as those of Ma-
nuel Ruiz Mejia (1891–1964) a.k.a Blumen, active since the late 1910s, and who
set to music works by Antioqueño poets. Zapata Cuencar qualified his works as
highly original, as his En el alma de una flor (c.1930) that exhibits an unusual and
rich harmonic complexity that – along with other examples – recalls Daniel
Uribe’s distinctions of the 1910s and suggest the existence of a regional style.316
Performance style also starts changing at that time and »old-style« long fermatas
seem slowly to have given way to more straightforward renditions. However, they
did not disappear immediately and for instance, in spite of Uribe Bueno’s added
orchestral fireworks, »Odbulio y Julian’s« rendition of Las Mirlas – BAMBUCO by
Climaco Vergara (1859–1927) – is in essence exactly the same as Espinosa y Be-
doya’s »old-style« version.317
At the same time within the system, alternative voices began to appear in the
periphery of the monopolistic radio and phonographic industries and their indus-
trial barons. The considerable size of the market (that increased throughout the
1950s) made possible the opening of new music markets through different labels
314 Zapata Cuencar, Cantores populares, p. 33; Rico Salazar, pp. 544–50.
315 Sello Vergara LP–107, LP 10’’, Bogotá, c. 1950, A, 3. »Aquel besito de fuego que te robé
vida mía/hizo que muriera el día envidioso de mi anhelo […] mañana con embeleso ha de
nacer otro día/como nació la alegría cuando te robé aquel beso/precisamente por eso quiero
que se muera el día/matémoslo vida mía de envidia con otro beso«; Rico Salazar, p. 650.
316 Obdulio y Julian. Primavera en Medellín, Medellín: Sonolux, c.1954, LP 12164, B. 4.
Zapata Cuencar, Cantores, p. 30; Rico Salazar, pp. 78–79.
317 Obdulio y Julián. Primavera, A, 6; Bambuco. Espinosa y Bedoya, Medellín: c.1959, Zeida,
LP LDZ 2034, A, 3.
243
Egberto Bermudez
associated to »Sonolux« and »Codiscos« and even, in the late 1950s and 60s, al-
lowed the appearance of small recording companies that gained significant niches
especially in the lower echelons of Medellín’s urban population, mainly economic
rural immigrants coming from neighbouring areas and who were attracted by the
manufacturing industry’s expansion. In another study I have given attention to
this process that – from the late 1940s to the mid-50s – culminated with the ap-
pearance of new local styles later labelled MÚSICA DE PARRANDA and MÚSICA DE
DESPECHO318. Without considering them as fusions, these styles synthesized the
results of what had been happening in Medelín, i.e. the coexistence of the national
canonic repertoire (BAMBUCOS, PASILLOS and DANZAS) with both Colombian
regional (PORROS, PASEOS, MERENGUES) and international (TANGO, RANCHERA,
ECUADORIAN PASILLO) song repertoires.
As Restrepo Duque admits, the musical taste of the rural population became a
critical factor and their preferred repertoires began to be identified as MÚSICA
GUASCA (equivalent to US hillbilly) and MÚSICA DE CARRILERA (railway-track
music). In Antioquia and Caldas, radios and jukeboxes at urban bars, rural miscel-
laneous stores and train stations were important musical venues and the strength of
the local radio stations and disc importers and manufacturers kept them well sup-
plied with all sorts of songs during the 1940s and 50s.319 Foreign musical genres
such as the TANGO, the BOLERO, the waltz and the Ecuadorian PASILLO were also
essential to this process. In spite of its apparent monolithic »purely Colombian«
façade, the Medellín musical environment was to a certain extent moderately cos-
mopolitan, and in those years had as key figures Spanish musicians such as José
Arriola, Luis M. de Zulategui, José Ventura and José Maria Tena; the Argentinian
Joaquín M. Mora and Mario Maurano and the Italian Pietro Mascheroni. From
the late 1930s Ecuadorian (Uquillas, Peronet, Izurieta and later Julio Jaramillo and
Olimpo Cárdenas) and Argentinian (Caceres, Valente) performers had also actively
participated in the development of the local recording and radio industries. Libar-
do Parra Toro (1895–1954) a.k.a Tartarín Moreira, a Medellín eccentric, poet and
musician tried to »Colombianize« foreign song repertoires following the ancient
318 E. Bermúdez, »Del humor«, I and II.

319 Restrepo Duque, Lo que cuentan, pp. 94–97, 177; A mi cánteme, p. 278; Mora, pp. 143–
44. Guasca (from Quechua huasca) means »cord«, used by peasants instead of leather
belts. As to música de carrilera, from the 1930s Antioquia and Caldas had Colombia’s
biggest railway network (337 km. in 1942), so railway stations and tracks were an integral
part of the domestic scene. Cf. Luís F. Molina L. »El ferrocarril de Amagá. Desarrollo de
la ingeniería antioqueña«, Credencial. Historia, 102, (May 1998), p. 13.
244
procedure of CONTRAFACTA (same music new words) and his experiments cover
TANGO, waltz and other genres. In general he prefers the poetic and romantic to
the dramatic and crude and even composed a few pieces recorded abroad and in-
corporated to the canonic repertoire.320 His pieces were essential in opening ave-
nues for the consolidation of local MÚSICA DE DESPECHO.
Restrepo Duque recalls that »Colombian music« (understanding it as the na-
tional repertoire of BAMBUCOS, PASILLOS and DANZAS) had less favour in rural
areas and that, using his words, »the common folk preferred Ecuadorian sadness
and Cuban reverie«.321 However, in the area around Medelín and Manizales, mis-
cellaneous stores and CACHARRERIAS (selling goods ranging from pikes and shovels
to thread and needles) had been essential in developing the trade circuits between
large, medium size and small towns and villages, as FONDAS were essential in the
coffee-growing region as venues for recorded and live music, especially for TRO-
VAS, the local Antioqueño traditional song controversies.322 For instance, in Me-
dellín, Cacharreria »La Campana« and other small publishing houses published
cheap poetry booklets through the 1950s that circulated profusely in Antioquia
and the coffee-growing regions of central Colombia – even Bogotá – as keepers of
sentimental and romantic poetry. This was the very essence of the texts of the ca-
nonic repertoire and of the future MÚSICA DE DESPECHO. Songbooks kept the
public aware of new developments in the national and foreign repertoires.323 Be-
sides, most of the immigrants arriving in Medellín from the neighbouring country-
side came to work as textile workers and many musicians of the GUASCA, CARRI-
LERA, PARRANDA and DESPECHO repertoires – interviewed by Burgos Herrera –
admit to having worked for textile companies and. Kommentar [XH4]: Le reste de la
phrase n’est pas clair
participated –notably those of Fabricato- of their radio and phonographic
connections.
When the Costeño repertoire expanded its boundaries in the late 1940s and
early 50s PASEOS, PORROS and MERENGUES were also easily incorporated into this
repertoire and their local versions – as also happened in Bogotá and surrounding
areas – gave origin to distinct dance repertoires such as MÚSICA DE PARRANDA
320 Restrepo Duque, Lo que cuentan, pp. 211–28; Rico Salazar, pp. 234–38; Bermúdez, »Del
humor«, II, pp. 70–71.
322 Testimony of Nicolas Muñoz in Alberto Burgos Herrera, La música parrandera paisa,
Medellín: [Author’s Edition], 2000, p. 297. Fondas were coffee commercialization spots
and trading centers.
323 For a longer discussion of these topics see Bermúdez, »Del humor«, II, pp. 71–71.
245
Egberto Bermudez
and PARRANDA as a new genre. Many musicians who in the 1950s and 60s took
part in the conformation of the PARRANDA repertoire accept that perhaps their
most important musical influence came with the recordings of Guillermo Buitra-
go.324 Although composed earlier (1938) the first hit of MÚSICA DE PARRANDA to
be recorded was the PARRANDA 24 de diciembre (Victoria V–147, c.1956) by Fran-
cisco »Mono« González (1907).325 It is significant that on the other side we find
Arbolito de Navidad by José Barros – labelled as SON PAISA – and originally record-
ed in Fuentes around 1947 (Fuentes 128); with Buitrago’s La Vispera de Año Nu-
evo (Fuentes 096) it would be the core of Christmas music popular in those years.
At this point on stylistic affinities it is impossible to dissociate it from the SON PAI-
SA Pachito E’ché (Tropical, c.1949) by Alex Tobar (1907–75) a big hit in the early
1950s.
IV.
With the establishment of radio networks (Caracol in 1947 and RCN two years
later) and pressure from the growing phonographic industry and the introduction
of TV, live music shows – one of the characteristics of the period until the
mid-1940s – were replaced by music programmes based on recorded music, some
of it produced by the same stations that – foreseeing the change – had acquired
recording and cutting equipment. The system acquired its modern profile with the
introduction of disc-jockeys around 1956–57. The musical community reacted in
1953 with the creation of the first trade union of musicians.326 In the period from
1949 to 1953 they were already two major recording companies in Medellín (So-
nolux and Codiscos) and some small ones, Ondina and Lyra (Sonolux) and Silver
and Zeida (Codiscos), that catered for the mainstream and fringe repertoires. In
late 1954 Discos Fuentes transferred from Cartagena to Medelín and around 1956
with the appearance of Victoria, the city became the unchallenged epicenter of the
Colombian phonographic industry with only one company in Bogotá (Sello Ver-
gara) and two in Barranquilla, Tropical founded in 1945 and Atlantic around
1949.327
324 Interviews in Burgos Herrera, La música.

325 Burgos Herrera, La música, p. 14.
326 Pareja, pp. 48, 82–84.
327 Restrepo Duque, A mi cánteme, p. 322; Cano, pp. 18, 25; Peláez and Jaramillo, pp. 42–3,
90; Wade, pp. 94–95. Curro and Eva labels would appear in Cartagena and Barranquilla
in the mid-1950s. On Victoria records see Burgos Herrera, La música, pp. 83, 287.
246
During this decade, Mexicans such as Alfonso Ortiz Tirado and Juan Arvizu,
and Argentinians Libertad Lamarque and Leo Marini helped to maintain the stan-
dard repertoire of BAMBUCOS and PASILLOS on the international scene. Also from
the late 1940s to the mid-50s Colombian dance music songs Pachito e’che (SON
PAISA), the PORROS Se va el Caimán, El Mochilón, La Múcura and Mi Cafetal, La
Puya guamalera (PUYA), Navidad Negra (CUMBIA) and Ay cosita linda (MERE-
CUMBÉ) amongst others were known throughout the Americas in the renditions of
Cubans Benny Moré, Miguelito Valdés, Bienvenido Granda and Dámaso Perez
Prado, Puerto Rican Bobby Capó and the »Lecuona Cuban Boys«.328 In the same
years the international careers of Colombian singers Carlos J. Ramirez, Luis Carlos
Meyer, Alvaro Chaparro (1917–99) a.k.a Alvaro Dalmar, and Nelson Pinedo
(1928) helped to consolidate abroad the presence of Colombian song. Dalmar was
also a composer and although he was loved in the United States and Europe dur-
ing the 1940s and 50s his songs were incorporated into the standard repertoire. In
1954, his BAMBUCO La carta became such a hit that – as we have said it – com-
peted with his own Bésame morenita (BAMBUCO) in being played up to than twen-
ty-seven times a day by a radio station in Bucaramanga.329
The expansion of the phonographic industry in the mid-1950s included a
great variety of musical trends. Modernization – as we have defined it above – al-
though not embraced by the majority, was not totally abandoned and became an
important option for composers and arrangers such as Carlos Vieco and Jorge
Camargo Spolidore who were very active musically in the broadcasting and record-
ing industries. Moreover, Luis Uribe Bueno was music director and producer for
Sonolux, the leader of the national industry and also national representative of
RCA Victor. He worked in close collaboration with Restrepo Duque, the compa-
ny’s publicity and artistic director, who also had a music programme, RADI-
OLENTE, for Caracol since 1952.330
The first national experiments with the new LP (33 rpm 10 or 12 inches)
technology opted naturally for the »modern« sound of enhanced orchestral groups
and polyphonic vocal ensembles. Novelties such as the electric organ (Hammond,
Wurlitzer) also became symbols of modernity and organists like Jaime Llano Gon-
zalez (1932) and Manuel J. Bernal (1924–2004) participated with his electric in-
328 Betancur Alvarez, pp. 248–81.

329 Joyas, 24, 1 and 7; Carlos E. Cogollo R., »Historia de la Radiodifusión en Bucaramanga,
1929–1960«, in Historia de la Radiodifusión en Bucaramanga, 1929–2005, Bucaramanga:
UIS, 2007, p. 76.
330 Cano, p. 18.
247
Egberto Bermudez
struments in radio programmes since the early 1950s and in recordings from the
end of the decade, especially of instrumental versions of song hits.331 With »Ca-
margo Spolidore’s orchestra«, Llano Gonzalez participated with his Hammond
organ in Colombian TV’s first broadcast in June 1954.332
Besides renovating the sound of duets (»Obdulio y Julián«) with the addition
of a small orchestral ensemble, during the decade Uribe Bueno introduced new
elements such as the choral versions of the repertoire in the recordings of Cantares
de Colombia. His production Musica in colores (c.1953) inaugurated the new style
mixing the standard ESTUDIANTINA string instruments (guitars, tiples, bandolas)
with the violins, clarinets, flutes and other orchestral instruments common in
dance orchestras.333 In the same years their competitor in Bogotá, Sello Vergara,
issued a series of discs that reflected the relative weight of the different national
song repertoires. And of course, an emblematic song, Brisas del Pamplonita, was
chosen by this company to launch its first 10-inch LP in December 1950, in an
arrangement by Francisco Cristancho for an orchestra of forty-two players and a
vocal ensemble that grouped together the male Argentinian quartet »Los Cuatro
Amigos« and the local female trio »Las Hermanas Garavito«.334 Other duets such
as »Espinosa y Bedoya« opted for a middle-solution using light orchestration and
electric organ only on occasions but keeping the traditional tiple and guitar ac-
companiments most of the time. Others, like »Garzón y Collazos«, preferred to
follow tradition strictly but it is worth mentioning that if Uribe Bueno introduced
bold orchestrations into »Obdulio y Julian’s« recordings, they adhered to tradition
when they performed live and Julian even wore a CARRIEL (See Part One, III).335
The continuity of the older romantic repertoire was entrusted – as we have men-
tioned – to the »old style« duets. Thus, discussions of authenticity took place be-
tween BAMBUCO performers in the same way that there were heated arguments
within the US Country music scene, which would eventually entangle Bob Dy-
lan’s career in 1966.
But if modernization was in full swing, an alternative – also well-fitted to na-
tionalism – was recurring again to »primitivism«, with song texts composed ALLA
RUSTICA imitating the lexical turns and vocabulary of Colombian peasants, a

333 Música en colores, Sonolux LP 138, 10-inch LP, features instrumental works by Morales
Pino, Floresmiro Florez, Hernando Sinisterra and Uribe Bueno himself.
334 El Tiempo, Bogotá, Monday 4 Dec. 1950, p. 21.
335 Photograph in Obdulio y Julián, Primavera.
248
technique that had a long tradition in Colombian poetry and had been introduced
into the recorded repertoire in 1914 and continued in the late 1910s by »Wills y
Escobar« who were the first to disguise themselves as peasants for their public per-
formances.336 And in fact that track was followed by »Los Tolimenses«, a duet es-
tablished in 1951 that also specialized in vernacular comic sketches – another illu-
strious niche in the international recorded repertoire – who continued that tradi-
tion.337 A piece that – due to its musical values – can be rescued from this
stereotyped repertoire is Chatica linda (1951), a BAMBUCO by Camargo Spolidore,
a composer, director and arranger who – as we have seen – worked professionally
within the Medelín and Bogotá recording and broadcasting scenes and from 1954
in Bogotá, as resident director of the house orchestra of the »Nueva Granada« ra-
dio station, a member of RCN.338 Another of his pieces, Celos (c.1954), can be
taken as an example of the BAMBUCOS of this period. As it has been for more than
half a century, Camargo maintained intact its rhythmic, harmonic and formal
structure (ABAB) alternating minor (A) and major (B) sections, punctuated by an
interlude. The scheme can include repetition for different texts, this case being the
less common. But in spite of its lush instrumentation, its text brings us back to the
1910s, jealousy and unrequited love to the extreme assimilation of the be-
loved/hated object to a religious image: »your eyes that look at me indifferently/do
not know that mine keep weeping/in those sad, dark and silent nights/ when I
whisper your name like in praying«.339 Romanticism and exaltation of natural idyl-
lic beauty reigned in the songs of José A. Morales (1910–1978) who started his
career as a tiple player accompanying requinto soloist Pacho Benavides (perform-
ing frequently in peasant’s attire) and had worked part-time as a public relations
officer for Sonolux in Bogotá since around 1954.340 His well-known hits Matica de
caña dulce (BAMBUCO, 1954), Maria Antonia (BAMBUCO, 1949), Pueblito Viejo
336 The work recorded is Viaje de un indio a Bogotá (spoken word), in Joyas, 4, 19. For Wills
y Escobar, photographs available in Añez, pp. 183, 186.
337 On their career see Rico Salazar, pp. 614–15.
338 Album Shell de Ritmos Colombianos, 4, Bogotá: Shell de Colombia, 1960–61, B. 2; Rico
Salazar, pp. 265–66, Pinilla, p. 275.
339 »Tus ojos que me miran indiferentes/no saben que los míos viven llorando/en esas noches
tristes, negras, silentes/cuando digo tu nombre como rezando.« Album Shell, 3, 1959–60,
A, 6.
340 Tiple and requinto are four-course metal string guitars, tiple is tuned (from highest
course): e’e’e’–b’bb’–g’gg’–d’dd’; and requinto: e’e’–b’’b’’b’’–g’’g’’g’’–d’d’. See E. Bermú-
dez, Los instrumentos musicales en Colombia, Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia,
1985, p. 92.
249
Egberto Bermudez
(waltz) and Doña Rosario (PASILLO) were recorded for Sonolux by »Garzón y Col-
lazos«.341
Again according to Saenz Rovner, industrialists (mainly based in Medelín) re-
doubled their use of the media in the 1950s, particularly radio (as RCN, one of the
two national chains, belonged to them and they had big interests in Caracol, the
other one) when faced with new fiscal and economic challenges posed by the mili-
tary government in1954.342 Naturally following this trend, BAMBUCO texts began
to exhibit more and more overtly nationalistic punch-lines that generally coincide
– by simplifying them – with the industrialists’, coffee-growers’, merchants’ and
traders’ claims. This we find in one of the emblematic songs mentioned in Part
One III (Rafael Godoy’s BAMBUCO Soy colombiano) where we hear: »Do not serve
me foreign liquor/it is expensive and doesn’t taste good/and because I always want
first/whatever is national«.343 Moreover, proud of their cultural singularities Anti-
oqueños – as we have also discussed in Part One, III – played with words about an
indigenous heritage that was more mythical than real but overtly reinforcing the
Spanish matrix of their local culture. Godoy included a line about the beauty of
Antioqueño women described as: »blonde with fair eyes and soft mountaineer’s
skin«. This must have been a very widespread stereotype because in 1957 Doris
Gil Santamaría, the daughter of one of the owners of LA VOZ DE ANTIOQUIA was
elected Miss Colombia and duly celebrated in a song by Lucho Bermudez.344
However, she married and resigned her place in Miss Universe to the first run-
ner-up, Luz Marina Zuluaga (representing Caldas, the coffee-growing epicenter)
who obtained the world title in 1958 boosting Antioqueño racial pride and by ex-
tension –with the help of the media – Colombian self-esteem. In no time Luz Ma-
rina, a BAMBUCO by Carlos Mejia and Francisco Bedoya was recorded by the
composer’s duet »Espinosa y Bedoya« for Codiscos (Zeida).345
341 Puno Ardila Amaya, Un tiple y un corazón. Semblanza biográfica del maestro José A. Mora-
les, Bucaramanga: [Author’s Edition], 2001, pp. 73, 119–27 and Appendix 4, Rico Sala-
zar, pp. 340–46.
342 Eduardo Sáenz Rovner, Colombia años 50: Industriales, política y diplomacia, Bogotá: Uni-
versidad Nacional de Colombia, 2002, p. 151.
343 »No me den trago extranjero/que es caro y no sabe a bueno/y porque yo quiero siem-
pre/lo de mi tierra primero«. Restrepo Duque, Las cien, p. 27.
344 »Una mona de ojos claros/de suave piel montañera«. Restrepo Duque, Las cien, p. 27;
José Portaccio, Matilde Díaz. La única, Bogotá: [Author’s Edition, 2000], p. 166. There
is uncertainty about the text, attributed also to Matilde Díaz herself.
345 Bambuco. Espinosa y Bedoya, A, 4.
250
As a result of protectionism (in the form of import substitution) and in accor-

dance with a typical monopolistic profile, foreign music repertoires (Cuban and
Dominican dance items, Mexican RANCHERAS, TANGO and BOLERO) were li-
censed to the few local phonographic firms that also acted as representatives of in-
ternational companies having easily displaced or absorbed individual agents in the
late 1940s.346 Thus we see that for three decades and a half (1930–60) the Colom-
bian music industry – centered in Medellín – was not only industry and market
»oriented« but also openly industry and market »dominated«, following policies
given by the industry clearly identified with the political conservative, nationalistic
and catholic camps. As we have indicated, sponsored musical programmes occu-
pied most of the airtime and songs were played over and over, even up to twen-
ty-seven times a day, as one radio critic from Bucaramanga complained in 1954.347
Restrepo Duque admits that the total control that the phonographic industry
exercised on the market allowed them to easily manipulate the balance between
national and foreign song repertoires.348 Old catalogue recordings (foreign and na-
tional) were reissued at the expense of holding new trends already popular interna-
tionally, such as rock and roll, shaping a nationalistic and conservative profile that
only began to be seriously challenged in the late 1960s. One of these challenges –
in the mid-50s – was that of Noel Petro (1936) a Costeño composer and perfor-
mer who lived in Bogotá and Medelín, and who accompanied himself with locally
assembled electric REQUINTO (treble guitar used in trios) thus creating a new –
highly accepted – style. Edmundo Arias (1925–93) – author of PORROS and BO-
LEROS – recorded Petro’s hit Cabeza de hacha (c.1952) with his orchestra.349 Some
years later, another of Petro’s hits was Lamento naúfrago (c.1956) a PORRO by Ra-
fael Campo Miranda (1918), also author of Entre palmeras (c.1948) and Playa
(c.1945).350
346 In the mid-1970s, the only foreign companies present in the Colombian industry were
CBS and Phillips and imports only amounted to 1% of annual sales. See Fernando Gas-
telbondo, Elementos para la caracterización de la industria fonográfica en Colombia, Bogotá:
Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, B.S. Thesis, 1978, pp. 4, 20. I thank
the author for kindly supplying me with a copy of his work.
347 Cogollo, loc. cit.
348 Cano, p. 22.
349 Pinilla, pp. 333–34 and La Leyenda de le Esmeralda. La Antología de la Música Colombia-
na, n.l [Japan]: Bomba Records, 1990, CD BOM 3003, 3. According to Restrepo Duque
(A mi cánteme, p. 325) the song is an adaptation of an old Argentinian song to the Vene-
zuelan merengue scheme.
350 Rico Salazar, p. 247. Torres Montes de Oca, II, pp. 1–37.
251
Egberto Bermudez
Campo Miranda’s PORROS are very different from those discussed above and
could be considered part of an international – mainly Caribbean – trend in the
1950s – of romantic exaltation of »exotic tropical« landscape and natural beauty
using – paraphrasing Alejo Carpentier – post-card musical poetry.351 This category
includes songs by other Costeño composers such as Paisaje (1947) and Cumbia
sobre el mar by Rafael Mejia (1920–2003), Luna de Barranquilla and La Guacherna
by Esther Forero (1912) as well as many by Lucho Bermúdez and Pacho Galán.352
This was, in Colombia – as in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Trinidad and Brazil – a
very profitable trend. By the mid-1950s both Colombian and foreign leading in-
dustrial companies were also sponsoring music in the coastal region (Barranquilla,
Cartagena) the other important pole of the national entertainment music indus-
try.353
Previously, PASEO and MERENGUE composers had greeted Rojas Pinilla’s peace
plan and amnesty with optimism and enthusiasm. In late 1953, a few months after
the coup and performed by »Bovea y sus Vallenatos«, the MERENGUE El Presidente
(Sello Vergara 2041A) by Julio Bovea (1934) was issued with a photograph of the
new leader on the label which also read: »as a homage from Sello Vergara«, Bo-
gotá’s only competitor to the Medelín monopolists.354 A good choice it seems, as
the Medelín industrialists were never totally attuned with the economic ideas of
the populist general and in the end were instrumental in their demise four years
later.
Two PASEOS (by then the adjective VALLENATO began to be current) of this
period show two different worldviews, that of the provincial patrician vs. that of
the rural journeyman and urban worker. In the first, La casa en el aire (Atlantic,
1953) by Rafael Escalona (1927), the composer sets the task of building a house
»in the air« for his daughter so undesirable suitors cannot disturb her and if some-
one dares, he says: »he has to be an aviator if he wants to visit her«.355 In the
second, Contestación a locas aventuras (Fuentes, 1954) by Luis E. Martínez, he in-
vites his friend – the dedicatee of the song – to emigrate to Venezuela where by
then, the text says, their music would be appreciated by locals and many Colom-
351 Alejo Carpentier, »Literatura cantada (1956)«, Letra y Solfa, I: Visión de América, Buenos
Aires: Ediciones Nemont, 1976, p. 36.
352 On Forero and Mejía Romani see Torres Montes de Oca, I, pp. 63–147. Ruiz Hernán-
dez, »Rafael Mejía y Era Martha la Reina«, in Personajes, p. 185.
353 Ruiz Hernández, »El carnaval que se bailó. A lo oscuro«, in Personajes, p. 33.
354 Oñate, pp. 216–17.
355 »Este tipo tiene que ser aviador/para que pueda hacerle una visita«. Oñate, CD, 15.
252
bians, who had fled their violence-ridden country attracted by the new Lat-
in-American Mecca, a society propelled by the boom in oil prices, public works
and urban development. La muerte de Eduardo Lora (1957) another PASEO by
Andrés Landero (1931–2000) is yet another option, a tribute to the tragic death of
a friend described in crude but powerful verses and musically related to the tradi-
tional music of his native region (San Jacinto) the home of the famous »Gaiteros
de San Jacinto«, that in those years had just been grouped for a foreign tour.356
Trios (with »Los Panchos« as model from the mid-1940s) were also important
in the performance of this repertoire. »Buitrago y sus Muchachos«, »Bovea y sus
Vallenatos« had started as such and their repertoire (PASEOS, MERENGUES, POR-
ROS) imposed the change of MARACAS for local percussion (GUACHARACA). In the
mid-1950s »Los Isleños« appeared as an offspring of another trio and during the
decade their performances combined MÚSICA BAILABLE and VALLENATO with
BOLEROS and even the canonic (BAMBUCO, PASILLO, waltz) repertoire, many of
their songs their own compositions.357
Colombian fusions (and new genres) continued to appear in the 1950s spurred
on by the fast-growing music market. One of theses genres was the MERECUMBÉ
(MERENGUE and CUMBIA) created by Francisco »Pacho« Galán in 1955–56, per-
haps with the most notable of all, Ay Cosita Linda, as a token model followed by a
series of imaginative and less imaginative imitations.358 Their texts exhibited the
already-mentioned style of ESTRIBILLO, making them very difficult to be consi-
dered as fully-fledged songs. Strong competition for access to recordings and the
radio was stimulated by direct participation of the industry through special
projects thus opening recording and exposure opportunities for musicians. Big and
small industries had also stimulated the production of jingles from the mid-1940s
and most used the music of popular hits in which the leading singers and compos-
ers participated.359 One example is that of Croydon – a Cali prestigious rubber
shoeware company established in 1937 – that offered one of these contracts to
Efraim Orozco (1898–1975) who reestablished himself in that city after a long
musical sojourn in Buenos Aires. In 1958 he brought Argentinian singer Lita Nel-
son to his »Orquesta de las Americas« and with her obtained immediate recogni-
356 Oñate, CD, 15, 16 and 18.

357 Ruiz Hernández, »Los Isleños. El primer trío de Colombia«, in Personajes, pp. 208–13;
Oñate, pp. 85–93; Rico Salazar, p. 603.
358 Torres Montes de Oca, »Ay cosita linda«, en Tertulias, II, p. 128 and Ruiz Hernández,
»Aquellos tiempos del mere cumbé«, in Personajes, pp. 152–58.
359 Ruiz Hernández, »La guitarra de Guillermo Buitrago«, p. 19.
253
Egberto Bermudez
tion with Palo bonito, the hit of the Feria de Cali that year. Shortly afterwards they
recorded Pasiban Doncroy, the first example of another new genre, PASIBAN, a fu-
sion of PASILLO and BAMBUCO. It is understandable that its »retro« big-band
swing sonority and lame rhythmic scheme did not make any impact on a dance
scene already saturated by offbeat PORROS and Cuban music. Additionally, the
song title was a quasi palindrome of the name of the company and the text was
only too short of just overtly promoting the sales of tennis shoes, then a new and
coveted commodity in the Colombian market.360 In the same year (1958) Restrepo
Duque had warned about the futility of searching for successful new genres (RIT-
MOS NUEVOS) through mechanical reproductions of previous hits. Nonetheless,
dance fusions and »new genres« of this type kept appearing – JALAITO being the
next to come in 1959 – and continued to play a major role in the dance repertoires
of the decades to come.361
Finally we will see how outside the radio and recording circuits Colombian
song was also alive. Anthropological field recordings in Colombia started early in
the century and first covered isolated indigenous communities recahing in the
1950s, small and medium urban centers. In 1951 Andrew H. Whiteford, as part
of his anthropological research in Popayán (southwestern Colombia), gathered an
interesting sample of music played domestically by low and middle class amateur
and semi-professional musicians. Its repertoire clearly shows the popularity of Cos-
teño MUSICA BAILABLE and the acceptance of instruments like the accordion, ma-
racas, timbas (TUMBADORAS) and guiro into what traditionally has been the Co-
lombian string orchestra of the type of ESTUDIANTINAS or LIRAS mentioned
above. Whiteford describes a dynamic musical scene in what has been considered
as one of the most traditional and conservative Colombian cultural and social cen-
tres. Boleros and Cuban RUMBAS and BOTES, and Colombian »bailable« PORROS
had been rapidly incorporated into the standard local repertoire (BAMBUCO, PA-
SILLO and waltz) that already in the 1930s had adopted the FOX INCAICO.362 Ap-
360 Cristóbal Díaz Ayala, Cuba Canta y Baila. Encyclopedic Discography of Cuban Music 1925–
1960, Section N–O, p. 16 in: http://library.fiu.edu/latinpop/downloadfiles.html ; and Rico
Salazar, p. 283.
361 Restrepo Duque, Radiolente, No. 1, (February 1958), reproduced in Cano, p. 21 and
Alberto Burgos Herrera, Antioquia bailaba así, Medellín: [Author’s Edition], 2001, p.
135. For a listing of the main new genres and fusiones of Colombian música bailable in
the 1960s and 70s see José Portaccio, Colombia y su música. Vol 1: Canciones y fiestas de las
llanuras Caribe y Pacifica y las Islas de San Andrés y Providencia, Bogotá: [Author’s Edi-
tion], 1993, Ch. IV, pp. 117–78.
362 Music of Colombia, New York: Folkways Records, FW 6804, 1961, 10’’ LP. Liner notes, pp. 1–2.
254
parently this enormous flexibility kept being the norm in such groups, at least that
is what we find in recordings made amongst the peasant local population in the
late 1990s, where Mexican RANCHERAS and examples of the Colombian revivals of
this period have been incorporated into the already rich palette of musical genres
described above.363
In the same years, American anthropologist Thomas J. Price Jr. documented
the popular music tradition of the island of San Andrés, a Colombian possession
in the Western Caribbean since 1821. As Price noted in his liner notes these songs
not only reveal a clear connection with the English Caribbean popular music tradi-
tions (CALYPSO, MENTO) and a noticeable influence of American popular music
(hillbilly), but also the deep inroads made in the island by Colombian »national«
repertoires from PASILLOS to PORROS.364 In November 1953 the installation of the
San Andrés tax-free trading zone (PUERTO LIBRE) by General Rojas Pinilla arose
high hopes expressed musically in a CALYPSO that hailed the president for thus
having granted »liberty« to the islanders (»Que viva Rojas Pinilla/él nos dio la li-
bertad«). This CALYPSO was still current orally in the repertoire of the local music
groups in the early 1970s and by then it was clear that musical emotion had not
been sufficient to grasp the long-running implications of the PUERTO LIBRE status
and its disastrous economic and social impact within the local community.365
Some writings of these years seem to suggest the need for a critical stance to
tackle music and texts but apparently these early attempts did not gain momen-
tum. In a short article of 1951, literary critic Hernando Téllez proposes a discipli-
nary approach to song texts accepting the analytical problem caused by the separa-
tion of the »organic unity« of music and text. He accepts that a demanding »musi-
cal belt« conditions songs’ low-quality texts and that it is one thing to listen or to
dance to them and another to read and analyze them.366 Other attempts show di-
vergent results, such as García Marquez’s article of 1950 disqualifying the weepy
363 Correrías y alumbranzas. Flautas campesinas del Cauca andino, Bogotá: Fundación de Mu-
sica, 2000, CD MA TCOL 005.
364 Caribbean Rhythms, New York: Folkways Records, FW 8811, 1957, 12’’ LP. Liner notes
p. 1–2.
365 E. Bermúdez »La música de las islas«, Gaceta. Colcultura, 13, (May–Jul. 1992), p. 52–53.
In the mid-1980s, local ONGs started to challenge official Colombian policies towards
the archipelago. Cf. Sons of the Soil Movement (SOS), El Plan Secreto del gobierno de Co-
lombia para San Andrés, Providencia y Santa Catalina Islas, Norh End (San Andrés Isla):
Sons of the Soil Movement, 1987.
366 Hernando Téllez, »Canciones y palabras«, in Literatura, Bogotá: Oliverio Perry y Arturo
Puerta Editores, 1951, pp. 191–94.
255
Egberto Bermudez
BOLEROS widely accepted in Latin America as a »rhythmic punishment« coming

from »the corner of idiocy«. His main argument railed against sentimentalism in
literature and poetry but his prejudice against this particular style of popular music
is evident whilst he defended the emerging VALLENATO with equal vehemence.
More sensitive and insightful about political uses of the same sentimentalism in
songs is Alfonso López Michelsen in his novel Los Elegidos of 1953, where one of
his characters – accepting to be called a demagogue – alludes to the importance of
sentimentality in political discourses and the central role played by music in the
development of Peron’s populism.367
And now coming back to the beginning of this essay, what are the contents of
the first LP of the Album Shell de ritmos colombianos of 1957? Of course, it has
many heraldic songs like Antioqueñita, Galerón Llanero and the GUABINA (Soy del
Tolima). Its first track El Cafetero (»The Coffee Grower«) – an instrumental PASIL-
LO by Maruja Hinestrosa (1916–2002) – is even more important, emblematic and
logical to be included in those years, the highest peak of exports and prices for Co-
lombian coffee.368 Lucho Bermudez’ Cármen de Bolivar and Danza Negra and José
A. Morales’ Maria Antonia are also there, as well as »oldies« such as Murillo’s El
Trapiche. The musical selection, made by Shell’s publicity Chief Arcesio Cabrera
Constain with Uribe Bueno as musical advisor, contains welcome novelties such as
the example of CHIRIMÍA (Chocó’s music ensemble) and two orchestral pieces by
Uribe Bueno himself, one of them (Pajobam) the winner of the 1948 eventful Fa-
bricato contest. But of all of Cabrera Constain’s choices perhaps the most signifi-
cant (as a disturbing subtext) is the piano BAMBUCO Palonegro described by E. A.
Duque as a »victor dance« of the Conservatives at the bloody battle that ended on
26 May 1900 and left around 2,500 dead, 1,500 liberals and 1,000 conservatives
(See Part One).369 It was clear that Cabrera Constain’s careful choice was in order
to create a collective memory. Taking advantage of the wide circulation and easy
reproduction of recordings he – and Shell – wanted, he wrote, »to perpetuate songs
and allow them to be known and loved at home« and even »to play an important
role in Colombian diplomatic and consular offices abroad«370. But what kind of
memory did they want?
367 For a longer discussion see E. Bermúdez, »Del humor«, II, pp. 68–69. The date of the
novel given as 1952 is erroneous.
368 Arturo Gómez Jaramillo, »Don Manuel y la Federación Nacional de Cafeteros entre 1958
y 1982«, in Don Manuel, pp. 30–31.
369 E. A. Duque, p. 260.
370 Cabrera Constain, [Introductory text], Album Shell, 5, 1961–62, p. 1.
256
Conclusions
As they became symbolic, emblematic or converted into folklore, Colombian

songs were in due course »fossilized« and stripped of their real textual and musical
contents. Once commoditized, they were revered as a good example of Marx – and
Taussig’s – commodity fetishism.371 Fortunately not all was romantic garble
dressed in stereotyped music and sometimes – as we have seen – lyrics and music
went beyond the formulaic. The absence of criticism and their assured safe place in
the media allowed songwriters to repeat endlessly their successful recipes. Besides,
the canonic »Colombian« repertoire of BAMBUCOS, PASILLOS and DANZAS was
challenged and finally remained undisplaced by the Costeño bailable music reper-
toire that on its own right became canonic shortly afterwards. Only in the
mid-1960s did things begin to change.
The notion of confrontation between national vs. international repertoires and
their mutual exclusiveness also constitute a false dilemma. The naïve complaints of
rural schoolteachers in the 1930s about the »penetration« of foreign music through
VICTROLAS and discs hides only one thing: the creation of a monopolistic market
for recorded music that was almost exclusively flooded with »Colombian« songs
and dance music by the very same industry that represented foreign companies. In
1942, in her answer to the official questionnaire we referred to earlier, a school-
teacher from Corozal (then Bolivar, now Sucre) enumerates the titles and compos-
ers of the musical pieces she knows of »folkore nacional«. Including those of her
own region, all her examples were recordings of Colombian instrumental and vocal
hits from the mid-1930s and early 40s including some of the very first records
made in the country. To the dismay of purists’ – and perhaps all members of the
COMISIÓN NACIONAL DE FOLKLORE – she wrote: »All the musical pieces de-
scribed, I have known and heard through their phonographic recordings«.372 The
confusion was ready to become gospel through the mass media and in the follow-
ing decade »Colombian music« was »that« which was promoted by radio, TV and
the phonographic industry. The great variety of musics of dozens of Amerindian
groups, Afro-Colombian and other peasant local cultures, remained in the shadows
until foreign anthropologists and ethnomusicologists began to study them in the
mid-1960s.
371 Michael Taussig, The devil and commodity fetishism in South America, Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 1980.
372 Quoted in Silva, Sociedades, p. 23.
257
Egberto Bermudez
Songs have a great power to evoke memories and indeed one of the most valu-
able sources for this work is entitled Canciones y recuerdos (»Songs and Memories«).
However, memory is a tricky thing and as Gonzalo Sánchez admits when relating
it to our Colombian wars, it could have paralyzing and negative effects.373 Coriun
Aharonian clarifies that music helps to create social and collective memory, and
songs – having music and text – serve as double detonators of this process374. Sing-
ing or listening to old songs has to go beyond the superficial and obvious exercise
of nostalgia and evocation. Then, history becomes handy.
Palacios defines four pillars concentrating power in Colombian society through
the 1940s and 50s.375 Ranging from very important to just relevant, all of them are
pertinent to our story. The first (the industrialists gathered around ANDI) played
– as we have tried to show following Senz Rovner – a major role in the use of the
mass media and the development of the music business. The coffee-growers and
their federation (FEDECAFÉ) fought the formers’ ideas about trade but shared their
nationalism and are undoubtedly present in our narrative. Merchants and traders
(FENALCO) participated as well and small traders – as we have also indicated – ven-
tured culturally in remote areas to their business (fostering through publications
the continuity of poetic romanticism), but their commercial stance of course drove
them very near the industrialists’ interests. Finally, in a country without a music
patronage tradition, it is difficult to find the connections of financiers and bankers
to the music industry and song aesthetics. On the one hand, an example could be
the aesthetic and artistic interests and experiences of López Michelsen – perhaps a
very singular case – but on the otherhand the example could be the PORRO dedi-
cated by Lucho Bermúdez to a provincial banker, perhaps only one more in the
long list of praise songs that never achieved expected compensation.
And what about the rest of us? We should not simply believe that 90% of the
population did nothing but buy discs, exchange songs for coins in bars and listen
to the radio (and from 1954, watch TV) but apparently, and giving reason to
Adorno, unfortunately they did so. The signs of erosion of the music business and
the first cracks on the mass media through which this majority could start poking
their heads would appear only in the 1960s and 70s.
373 Gonzalo Sánchez, Guerras, memoria e historia, Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropo-
logía e Historia, 2003, p. 19.
374 Coriun Aharonian, »La resistencia y la música uruguaya: II. Memoria social y música«,
Músicas populares del Uruguay, Montevideo: Universidad de la República/Comisión Sec-
torial de Educación Permanente, 2007, p. 148.
375 Palacios, Entre la legitimidad, p. 174.
258
Why the insistence on the music business? Because the hat, white trousers and
red neckerchiefs of »Los Tolimenses« of the late 1950s only look grotesque against
the backdrop of the thousands of real peasants who died only in their own region
(Tolima) in the years of LA VIOLENCIA. Peasants (and by extension Colombian
Indians and the descendents of Africans) and their voices were very poorly
represented in Colombian popular song; the disguises of performers and dancers
and their imitations of vernacular language always managed to fool the majority of
the public. In the very few cases they made it to radio stations and recording stu-
dios, they were underpaid and their rights swiped and registered in other’s names,
generally those of the producers and industry owners. And, as many sad cases illu-
strate, they died in poverty.
To reconstruct the history of songs in Colombia we lack a lot of information
and historical data for its initial stages. But in the past century, being centered and
conditioned – as we have tried to show – by the radio and phonographic industries
and the social forces they represented, a good option can be to define it through
the national and international web of relations those forces and the media created.
Regional histories or those centered on musical genres, and worse still, those made
anachronistically projecting back in time styles defined in the 1960s and 70s, will
inevitably show their loose endsweaknesses.
Restrepo Duque knew this well and knew how disaffected to popular music
had been Colombian incipient music scholarship, however his untimely death –
and his research shortcomings – prevented him from writing his definite works.
Lost in a chapter while discussing something else, in 1971 he wrote that, as he
knew it and heard it:376
Colombian song has very little of peasant culture […] it was born in cities
and made by learned and fashionable poets, frequently with verses ex-
tracted from Spanish language foreign magazines[…] it is possible that its
melody and rhythm has roots in peasant music […] but nothing more, the
city absorbed all those influences.
Up to that date, and even after, it is the sole definition of Colombian song in
terms of real popular music. Let this essay be a tribute to his memory and his
groundbreaking work, without his pages, these could not have been written at all.
376 Restrepo Duque, Lo que cuentan, pp. 7–8, 94.
259

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FROM COLOMBIAN »NATIONAL« SONG TO »COLOMBIAN

Lied und populäre Kultur / Song and Popular Culture 53 (2008)

1936, Daniel Zamudio (1887–1952) composer and music educator, contributed

4 »Hacia el Americanismo musical: La música en Colombia«, El Correo Musical Sudamericano,

ry quality, especially in his carelessness in the treatment of sources.11 Orlando Mo-

11 Historia de la música en Colombia. A través de nuestro bolero, Bogotá: [Author’s Edition],

teño or »música bailable« repertoire as inserted in the media and phonographic

Part One: Hymns to God and the People

Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, London: Canto/Cambridge University

30 Caicedo Rojas, »Artículo XXV«, pp. 194–95.

It is worth mentioning that following Spanish colonial traditions, songs were

especially during its initial period of widespread international presence in the

44 Luís F. Molina, p. 13.

dance-music repertoires (PORRO, PASEO, MERENGUE) we find direct allusions to

66 Perdomo Escobar, El Archivo, pp. 115–16.

emblematic or heraldic song. La borinqueña, one of the Cuban-style HABANERAS

80 Ms. MI 1453, f. 63v; Bermúdez, Historia, p. 122, CD 2, 9.

89 Zamudio, pp. 12–14.

of musical Colombian negrismo, an echo of the »African«, »Cuban« or »slave laments«

102 Restrepo Duque, Las cien, pp. ; Rico Salazar, p. 310–11.

Ultramarine Trading Congress (»Congreso de Comercio Español en Ultramar«),

118 Vergara y Vergara, loc. cit.

Part Two: The Stage, Tertulias and Balconies

alcanza (1802) by Manuel García (1775–1832), an example of early Spanish ope-

133 Johnson, p. 151. James Radomsky, »García, Manuel«, www.groveonline.com

Ponce de León’s ZARZUELA of 1876 El castillo misterioso (»The Mysterious

155 C. Vega, Las danzas populares […], II, p. 67.

159 E. Bermúdez, liner notes in La Vieja Guardia de Riohacha, 1940–72, CD MA

recorded as a song with an anonymous text in New York in 1921 by Colombian

and PORROS. In the following decade, Campitos would concentrate on political

Gruta Simbólica gatherings and in 1909 established – with Manuel Castello – a

192 Gómez and Torres, pp. 21–38.

La gran obsesión (1955), a psychological drama produced in Cali (using color

Charles Empson describes – with surprising musicological insight – » extemporane-

where they improvised seguidillas to a BAMBUCO accompaniment. In his works

215 Pierre d'Espagnat, Souvenirs de la Nouvelle Granade, Paris: Bibliotheque Charpentier,

218 Rodríguez y Duarte, La vida, pp. 64, 160–66.

223 Añez, plates pp. 241, 78 and 163.

Part Three: The Groove and the Wave

232 De la Espriella, p. 200.

233 Añez, pp. 27, 217.

239 E. J. Gutiérrez, pp. 146–56.

conventional modulation but also through sudden harmonic changes, occasionally

bian-Panamanian singer and composer Alcides Briceño (1886–1963). They were

261 Spottswood, IV, pp. 1697–1709, 1777–78, 2275–78.

Herrera (1913–1987) and María Betancur de Caceres (?–1982) were joined by

However Guerreros’ La pringamosa (Columbia 2749–X) recorded by the Cu-

Andrés Paz Barros (1906–1977), author of La cumbia cienaguera (Fuentes 262)

286 Joyas, 21, 1 and 20.

At these initial stages (1930–40), recorded music represented almost 80% of

291 Pareja, pp. 21–24.

And precisely, in 1942 in her answer to the questionnaire mentioned earlier an

Esteban Montaño (1918–1998), Francisco »Pacho« Rada (1907–2003), Luis E.

299 Details in Oñate, pp. 465–68.

tended by Antioqueño ex-President Carlos E. Restrepo. The company – founded

304 Restrepo Duque, Lo que cuentan, p. 223.

309 Téllez B., pp. 36, 96–104.

318 E. Bermúdez, »Del humor«, I and II.

324 Interviews in Burgos Herrera, La música.

328 Betancur Alvarez, pp. 248–81.

331 Rico Salazar, pp. 242–43.

As a result of protectionism (in the form of import substitution) and in accor-

356 Oñate, CD, 15, 16 and 18.