Eternally grateful for Tropicaneando (Con Paola) for his restless never ceasing music sharing spirit, I now share a wonderful little study on the history of Cumbia and how it started and branched out across South and Central America and to where we are now, internationally online.
“Cumbia: The Construction of a Musical Genre in the Mid-twentieth Century” is presented by Juan Sebastián Rojas. He discusses and explains the history of Cumbia in quick but really informative detail. This is the best source for Cumbia’s history that I have encountered. It is in English and it also features field recordings conducted by George List in the 1960’s on Colombia’s Caribbean coast.
You have to go to this link to listen to the 28:50 podcast because I can’t stream it here. Also below the player is the transcript for those who want to read or translate it. I’ll help you here actually. If you navigate to the top of this page you can select your language and press “Translate,” to simply read it on here.
Cumbia: The Construction of a Musical Genre in the Mid-twentieth Century
Transcript:
SCRIPT WITH MUSICAL AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES
Audio references will be marked with bracketed numbers and can be found as endnotes.
(1)
Hello! Juan Sebastián Rojas with you, for the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University.
Today, we will make a trip to the Caribbean coast of Colombia, in northern South America, home of an exciting and very popular music style: cumbia!
Cumbia is one of the most widespread Latin American music genres. It originated in Colombia among Black and working-class populations during the Spanish colonial period. Despite being marginalized for centuries by Colombian elites, by the 1950s it had become a musical symbol of the nation. (2)
Cumbia emerged as a traditional music and dance style in the rural communities of the Caribbean coast.
In general, cumbia is characterized by the persistent beat of a hand drum on the upbeats of a two-four time and the accompaniment of a shaker or scrapper.
This rhythm trespassed the traditional ensembles and was adopted by urban orchestras, with which it became massive by the mid twentieth century. (3)
During this period, due to growing audiences, music producers successfully introduced cumbia to international markets. As a result, important cumbia scenes emerged in other parts of the Americas, like Texas, Peru and Mexico.
That is why when speaking about cumbia, people with diverse origins picture diverse musical sounds; like this one from Peru… (4), or this one from Argentina… (5).
Colombians, nonetheless, would imagine something closer to this… (6) or this… (7)
And many contemporary neo-cumbia radicals would probably think of sounds such as this… (8)
All this is cumbia…
But back in the 1960s, when commercial cumbia songs had just begun moving within international contexts, musical traditions in the countryside of the Colombian Caribbean region were still vibrant. These peasant communities, most of which have strong Afrocolombian and indigenous descent, had been playing this music for generations.
Their contributions fashioned the cumbia sound, which was later taken by producers to the rest of the world. (9)
Cumbia is the result of generations of interactions between many musical styles, and the foundation of this music is to be traced to rural Colombia’s Atlantic coast, like this song, “Las cinco notas,” “the five notes”, recorded in 1964 by Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto.
It was a vibrant music industry – established in the Colombian Caribbean region since the 1940s, which actively encouraged the transformation of cumbia from traditional and local musical styles to the commercial sounds of the jazz-bands.
Cumbia, along with other rhythms like porro or vallenato, became the trademark of Colombian music since the early 1950s, replacing the old paradigm of Andean Colombian music as the national sound (10).
Colombia’s Caribbean coast was the arrival territory of the Spanish colonial rule since the early sixteenth century. During the wars of conquest, the Spanish crown violently subjected and dominated indigenous groups of the region.
Around the same time period, Cartagena de Indias, a Spanish fortified city on the Caribbean coast, became the main slave-port in the Americas, hosting thousands of Africans and their descendents (11).
One result has been centuries of complex multi-cultural interaction, creating a diversity of regional cultures… and musical styles… (12)
Before the national cumbia craze of the 1950s, when commercial big-band cumbia captivated the ears and bodies of middle and high-class citizens of the major Colombian inland cities, working-class people from the Caribbean coast had been dancing to cumbia and its related musical styles for generations.
For the most part, peasant Afrocolombian communities, indigenous groups, and other mixed-race populations constitute the working-class.
From their cultural practices emerged a broad variety of local musics, rich in syncopations and highly developed drumming (13)… chants and laments of different styles (14)… and instrumental melodies inspired by the exuberant natural environments of the region (15).
Not all these styles are called cumbia, but many of them were used by musicians in the construction of the cumbiacanon, which became enormously popular at the national level in the 50s, and internationalized in the 60s. Many of the musical features from these grassroots traditions were adopted by jazz-bands. (16) (17)
George List was a professor of ethnomusicology at Indiana University Bloomington. During the 1960s he conducted research in the Colombian Caribbean coast, and with his tape recorder captured many of the diverse sounds that were part of popular celebrations in towns and villages. Many of the musical samples that we are presenting to you in this podcast come from his field recordings, now cared for by the Archives of Traditional Music, at Indiana University Bloomington.
… Listen, for example, to this beautiful cumbia, “Las Tres Marías” interpreted by Catalino Parra and Soplaviento’s cumbia ensemble in 1964. (18)
The wind instrument that leads this piece is the “caña de millo”, a widespread reed instrument made out of the cane of a local variety of sorghum. It has been protagonist of many cumbia parties since colonial times.
In his field research, ethnomusicologist George List accounts for the diversity of local musics in the Colombian Caribbean coast. He found out that cumbia was present in many musical traditions, but also, that it was only one rhythm, among many others, interpreted by local groups.
Other rhythms, like: gaita, bullerengue, chalupa, merengue, puya, mapalé, maya, and porro, just to name a few, were also part of their repertoire. (19)
Despite this variety, many musical styles shared aesthetic elements, like the traditional drums, certain styles of dancing, or some rhythmic and melodic features.
List also found similarities in the context in which these musics were practiced: in general, they were performed for communal celebrations in towns and villages for Catholic festivities, like Patron Saint celebrations and the Christmas season. Here is legendary traditional cumbia master Toño Fernández explaining the context of gaitamusical practice in an interview from 1964: (20)
“La gaita la tenían especialmente para esos bailes donde hacían ofrecimientos a los santos. Hacían una velación y la ofrecían con gaita. Con gaita, decían ellos. La gaita es el instrumento, pero el baile… es lo que los viejos decían gaita, que es lo que decimos nosotros cumbia”
(Translation):
“Gaita was specially used for dances that were offered to the saints. A wake was organized and gaita music accompanied its offering. They used to say gaita, but gaita is the instrument. The dance, is what we now callcumbia.”
However, these musics were also performed for secular events like Carnival, birthdays, weddings, or by contract. Many times, these performances were set as public street dances, where the community participated freely. The fronts and backyards of the houses were also often the stage for cumbiambas, or cumbia parties for days. (21)
Gaita music is a local tradition that was still vibrant in the 60s and that lent stylistic features to the commercialcumbia sound. Gaita refers to the music, as well as to the traditional flute, which is the melodic leader of these ensembles.
Even though tracing the origins of musical instruments and repertoires is a difficult task, archeological research has shown that “gaita” had been used by Pre-Columbian societies in many parts of the Continental Caribbean, even up into Mexico.
Here is “Isla Grande” a piece by the still active Afrocolombian gaita master Sixto Silgado “Paíto”, who published a new album just two years from now, in 2010, with his group “Los Gaiteros de Punta Brava”. (22)
This song, though, was recorded by George List in Silgado’s home on the island of Isla Grande, in 1968.
In a preservationist agenda, driven by the angst of modernity and the fear of the influence of urban life-styles in rural traditions, some intellectuals around the first half of the twentieth century idealized traditional cumbia styles as isolated from commercial repertoires and urban influences. Traditional cumbiambas, or street dance gatherings in which cumbia and other music was performed, were imagined as “pure” and markedly differentiated from commercial musical environments.
But the truth is that during the 60s, as well before and after that, local traditional musicians also borrowed from commercial styles and developed their own interpretations of cumbia in response to music that they heard from jazz-bands, radio stations, or records. (23)
This is the famous “Cumbia Cienaguera”, a trademark of Colombian popular music and a product of the music industry. This song had great commercial success in the 1950s, becoming a huge international hit.
In 1968, Antálcides Pérez and Maximiliano Caro performed this version for George List on the “carángano”, a handcrafted monochord bass, and the “hojita de limón”, or lemon leaf.
Let’s pay attention to the melody…
… And now let’s listen to the original version, recorded by Alberto Pacheco sometime in the 1950s. (24)
Local musicians and their audiences were fully aware of mass mediated cumbia and appropriated it for their local festivities. This way, commercial cumbia, which had evolved from the rural styles in the first place, fed back into the traditional performance contexts. And traditional musicians were cool with that, understanding their relationship, despite the anxiety of scholars… (25)
Cumbiamba celebrations involved a variety of musical ensembles led by traditional instruments like “gaitas,” “caña de millo,” and musical bows, or clarinets, accordions, and guitars, which interpreted rhythms like cumbiaand merengue, among others.
Colombian researcher Hugues Sánchez, in his article “From bundes, cumbiamabas and merengues vallenatos” argues that a coastal intellectual elite from the Cesar region separated Colombian merengue, paseo and other rhythms from the cumbiamba context into a different category around the 1960s. Their idea was to construct a musical genre that they could associate to their region as “traditional.” In this process, the accordion was privileged and part of its repertoire included into what now is the widely popular vallenato music.
In this process, cumbia was excluded from the vallenato canon, despite the popularity of a big repertoire of accordion cumbias. This exclusion was legitimized in 1968, when a selected group of cultural workers created the Festival Of The Vallenato Legend, institutionalizing this division and segregating accordion cumbia from the folkloric discourse.
However, people at the ground level had different ideas. Here are Víctor Soto, leader of an accordion ensemble, and Colombian folklorist Manuel Zapata in an interview with George List from 1968: (26)
VSD: “… Mi conjunto es típicamente vallenato, como está compuesto el de esta época, por tambor, guacharaca y acordeón… Es el conjunto par la cumbiamba…
MZO: “En una cumbiamba se puede bailar cumbia, merengue, sin, diferentes clases de ritmos…”
(Translation):
VSD: “My group is a typical vallenato ensemble, as they are organized today, with a hand-drum, scraper, and accordion. It is the musical ensemble for the cumbiamba.”
MZO: “In a cumbiamba you can dance cumbia, merengue, son… many different styles…” (27)
In the 1960s, the period when cumbia flourished in the international arenas, this wonderful Colombian music had already gone through complex processes of hybridization and could not be defined as a closed category.
Traditional ensembles were never “pure” and untouched. They actively participated in a multidirectional dialogue with political, commercial, and preservationist projects.
As a matter of fact, in the 1970s, probably as a reaction to the emergence of new international renditions ofcumbia, the recording industry started recording albums of traditional Colombian ensembles in order to represent “authentic” folklore in the market. The most famous group that participated in this process is “Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto”, whose third generation won a Latin Grammy in 2007 for “best folk album.”
Here is “Camino largo” one of their gaitas, recorded by George List in Cartagena in 1964. (28) (29)
In this journey, we explored from popular styles of commercially recorded cumbia to rural versions of this music.
Cumbia is not a unified concept. Cumbia is part of a complex musical history, that responds to centuries of interactions all over the Colombian Caribbean. Many musics that we call cumbia today were not labeled as such in the past. And musics that were once considered cumbia evolved into what we know now as different genres.
So then, what is cumbia?
Cumbia is a flavor, a flavor of celebration for the people. It is a dance of life: an expression of joy over sorrow that has developed for hundreds of years. And people feel it, embody it, and express themselves through it, without regard to geographic or cultural bindings.
… And its history continues.
This is Juan Sebastián Rojas, for the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University Bloomington.