Colombia Is Located in the Northwestern Corner of South America, and Has Extensive Caribbean

Colombia

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Colombia

Population: 39,309,422 (1999)

Colombia is located in the northwestern corner of South America, and has extensive Caribbean and Pacific coastlines. A so-called ‘country of regions,’ its historical geography is central to its popular music. The central Andean region, focus of population and industry, is split into three mountain ranges by the Cauca and Magdalena rivers which divide hot valleys from cold paramos (high plateaus). This region was the main center of Spanish settlement; it is home to the capital Bogotá and the major cities of Medellín and Cali and is politically and culturally dominant. Late nineteenth-century nationalism exalted its melodic strings-based music as quintessentially Colombian. In the twentieth century, this glorification was contested by music from the tropical Caribbean coastal region (comprising the littoral [the coast] and its deep hinterlands, which are based on agriculture, stock raising, and some manufacturing and extractive industries). The region has a mostly urban population concentrated in several cities, whose integration into global networks of cultural exchange gave them an edge over the cities of the Andean interior in the race toward ‘modernity,’ both economic and musical.

The hot, humid Pacific coastal region, west of the Andean Cordilleras (mountain ranges), heavily forested, little urbanized and inhabited mainly by Afro-Colombians and indigenous peoples, remains infrastructurally underdeveloped, although undergoing rapid change. Its heavily African-influenced music, despite its richness of rhythms and dances, was less significant in the development of Colombian popular music in the twentieth century. East of the Andean region, the llanos (plains) and Amazonian rain forests, dedicated to cattle raising and colonization, have contributed the guitar and harp-based joropo style, identified as much with neighboring Venezuelan as with Colombian popular music.

With independence in 1819, Colombia inherited an Hispanic legacy which valued Spanish language, Catholic religion, European culture and racial whiteness. From early colonial times, Spanish, African and indigenous peoples had mixed to produce a majority of mestizo (people of mixed blood), but the white/mestizo Andean interior had a dominant position over the ‘blacker’ coastal regions, where African slave labor had been important. Indigenous peoples were largely Hispanicized, although in the 1990s indigenous languages and cultures were still vibrantly present in the Pacific, llanos and Amazon regions and in some rural Andean areas. African languages became submerged, with only one very localized Creole language persisting. According to the 1993 census, the indigenous population made up about 2 percent of the total population of some 33 million. In 1998, the National Planning Department estimated Afro-Colombians as constituting 26 percent of the population. Whites are often said to account for 20 percent, the remainder being mestizos.

From independence, urban Europeanized elites dominated the emerging nation and a very unequal society emerged, based on agriculture (especially coffee, from the late nineteenth century), natural resource extraction and, in the twentieth century, industry and drug-trafficking. During the nineteenth century, transport was very slow, and the country remained regionally divided, with frequent regional political conflicts. This not only fed into the violence rooted in the inequality of the expanding economy (which developed into state--guerrilla conflicts from the 1950s), but also consolidated regional cultures, with different musical traditions. From the 1920s, communications slowly improved, and the migration of people, ideas and musical styles became more fluid, nationally and internationally. This was spurred partly by immigration into the major cities -- particularly Barranquilla on the Caribbean coast -- from Europe, North America and the Caribbean.

The traditions that shaped Colombian music derived from native American, African and European styles, with the latter forming the dominant context. Apart from the traditional music of indigenous groups and of the Afro-Colombian people of Palenque de San Basilio (a village in the Caribbean coastal region) who speak a Creole language (palenquero; see Schwegler 1996), all folk and popular music use Spanish for any lyrics. The indigenous influence on musical styles has generally been rather less than the African influence which, as in the Caribbean, was central to the development of dance music in the twentieth century.

Urban Popular Music in the Nineteenth Century

In urban areas during the nineteenth century, the older Hispanic styles of couplets, verses and romances (lyrical poems), sung to the accompaniment of stringed instruments, gradually lost ground to European music, including light operatic pieces and other songs popular in Europe. These often circulated among the Colombian middle and upper classes in sheet music form with arrangements for voice and piano, although the six-string guitar was also used. Equally, dances originating in Europe, such as the waltz, contradanza, polka and mazurka, were popular in urban areas, played in the salons of the well-to-do on piano and stringed instruments. Influential in the popularity of these new styles were the immigrant merchants, explorers and technicians who increasingly came to Colombia -- often to the Caribbean coastal region -- looking for commercial opportunities in the new Republic. These European forms were sometimes ‘creolized’ to produce new forms, such as the pasillo, a form of waltz popular in Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador (Riedel 1986).

Regional variation in this sort of music was not very marked, but there were also urbanized versions of more regional rural styles. In the Andean interior, for example, these were based on stringed instruments: guitars, tiples (treble guitars) and bandolas (mandolins); with these, bambuco, a dance song in 3/4 or 6/8 meter in moderately quick tempo with a syncopated rhythm and a duet of male voices singing in parallel thirds, became popular in Bogotá and other cities of the interior from the mid-nineteenth century (Restrepo Duque 1988, 529). In contrast, in the Caribbean coastal region, rural and indeed plebeian urban styles (usually labeled fandango or currulao in contemporary sources) showed a strong African influence and were based on drums, indigenous and African cane flutes, plus rattles and scrapers; this influenced the emergence of styles such as cumbia and porro in the late nineteenth century. (Although cumbia is usually assumed to be an ‘old’ genre, the name itself does not appear in documentary sources until the late 1800s.)

Equally important in urban areas were the brass bands, of military origin, which became increasingly popular from the early nineteenth century. With instruments imported from Europe, these bands played marches, waltzes, polkas and new styles such as the danza (later often called habanera) which became popular all over the Caribbean and Latin America. Bands played in middle- and upper-class salons, but also in festivals in small towns, often sponsored by local elites who paid the musicians and in some cases imported instruments and sheet music. These bands spread popular European styles into rural areas, especially those linked into international trade networks, such as the Caribbean coastal region (Bermúdez et al. 1987, chs. 5--7). The musicians were generally local part-timers of humble origin, often led and taught by a trained musician (in some cases an immigrant, perhaps from Puerto Rico or Cuba). The porous boundary between tutored and untutored musical production allowed the development of regional styles that combined elements of European and folk traditions to produce hybrids such as the porro of the Caribbean coastal region.

The accordion was an important addition to the instrumentation available, appearing first and most commonly in rural and small-town areas of the Caribbean coastal region from about the 1880s. Considered a very plebeian instrument, it was used in town festival contexts, as well as by wandering minstrel figures, to interpret a variety of verses and songs and probably to accompany traditional rural lineups.

The Early Commercialization of Popular Music

The early decades of the twentieth century saw the participation of Colombian musicians in the emerging international record industry, alongside other Latin American musicians. In their Latin American recording tours, Columbia and Victor included Colombian artists, and these musicians also journeyed to New York. Local retail agents of the record companies sometimes acted as intermediaries in these interactions.

Musical nationalism was in vogue in Colombia, as elsewhere in Latin America, and the bambuco of the politically and culturally dominant Andean interior had assumed the mantle of Colombia’s national music. It was integrated into nationalist art music by conservatory musicians such as Guillermo Uribe Holguín, but was primarily played in popular contexts by string ensembles led by such figures as Pedro Morales Pino, Emilio Murillo, Jorge Añez and Justiniano Rosales. The latter four were among those who traveled to New York in the years 1910--19 and the 1920s, recording bambucos, pasillos and other aires colombianos (Colombian tunes). Angel María Camacho y Cano was the first artist from the Caribbean coastal region to record tunes that bore names derived from regional styles, including cumbia, porro and mapalé. Although certain ‘national’ repertoires existed in the New York-based international Latin American music scene, the reality was highly eclectic, and these Colombian artists also recorded boleros, fox trots and tangos, playing with a variety of other Latin American artists.

In Colombian cities at this time, social clubs provided a main venue for live music for the elites, while cafés, brothels, public bathhouses, bars, billiard halls and public parks offered live and recorded music to the middle and working classes. Street festivals were also important, notably the carnival in Barranquilla which had become an organized affair since the late nineteenth century. Cinema, a public event from the second decade of the twentieth century, also had a significant musical component. The musical repertoire in Colombia at this time was dominated by North American, Cuban, Argentinian and Mexican styles, but also included bambucos and pasillos. ‘Jazz bands,’ similar to the urban dance orchestras emerging worldwide, were very popular and, from about 1920, began to form first in Cartagena and Barranquilla, but also in Cali. Alongside these bands or orchestras were duos, trios and small groups playing a similarly eclectic repertoire. Colombia’s Caribbean coastal cities felt most keenly the impact of Caribbean, European and North American immigration and cultural influences: Barranquilla led the field in the rapid modernization affecting Colombia at the time and in its leanings toward cultural modernism.

The jazz bands mixed orchestral arrangements of local styles into their international repertoire. In the Caribbean coastal region, porro, gaita, fandango and cumbia began to appear in the performances and recordings of urban local orchestras between 1920 and 1940. Central figures in this process included Lucho Bermúdez, Pacho Galán, José Barros and Antonio María Peñaloza, all musicians whose musical careers included membership of local brass bands. In Bogotá, Cali and Medellín, musicians such as Emilio Sierra, Milciades Garavito and Efraín Orozco played rumba criolla and bambuco fiestero, ‘hotted up’ and orchestrated versions of bambuco.

From 1929, radio stations emerged from a growing amateur network of radio enthusiasts picking up broadcasts from the United States, Cuba and Mexico. The first station was founded in Barranquilla by an electrical engineer, son of a US immigrant entrepreneur. The stations were generally limited in broadcasting range, but funded by commercial interests; with advertising central from the start, they spurred the consumption of popular music. They played all the major Latin American popular genres, including some Colombian genres such as bambuco and porro. In their in-house theaters (open to the public), they provided a venue for jazz bands (often house bands), trios and duos, whether national or international. From 1941, a national state radio existed, focusing on ‘high’ culture, with limited space for Colombian and international popular styles.

From the mid-1930s, Antonio Fuentes, a Cartagena-born entrepreneur, radio station owner and musician, dabbled in recordings of local artists; he founded Discos Fuentes, which acquired its own presses in the early 1940s. The cities of Barranquilla, Medellín and Bogotá soon followed with Discos Tropical, Sonolux and Discos Vergara. The Caribbean coastal region’s lead in radio, record industry and modernism made itself felt in the rapid conquest by música costeña (Costeño or coastal music) of Colombian commercial popular music, a process bemoaned by conservative upper and middle classes in the Andean interior who disparaged the music as ‘black,’ vulgar and strident (Wade 2000). Nevertheless, the orchestra of Lucho Bermúdez, among others, played elite clubs in all the major cities, and his porros (for example, ‘Carmen de Bolívar,’ ca. 1947) were international hits.

Costeño music also included songs, labeled merengue, son and paseo, played either on the accordion, often accompanied by a guacharaca (scraper) and a caja (small drum), or by small guitar groups. Since the accordion was considered a plebeian instrument, this repertoire of songs about local people, events and male--female relationships was popularized in the recording industry mainly through guitarists Guillermo Buitrago and Julio Bovea. They became nationally known, often singing the songs of Rafael Escalona, the best-known composer in this genre. All three men were light-skinned and of non-plebeian origins. Accordionists such as Pacho Rada, Alejo Durán, Abel Antonio Villa and Luis E. Martínez, who did record their music but had a much more local following, were all of peasant origin and were black or mulatto. By the late 1940s, this style of music became generally known as vallenato, partly due to the origin of many of its exponents in the region around the city of Valledupar in the eastern part of the Caribbean coastal region, and partly due to claims by people such as Escalona that the music originated there. It attracted attention as an authentic ‘folkloric’ tradition of the area, and Gabriel García Márquez, a writer and critic from this region who later won the Nobel prize for literature, began to write about it in the national press. There is some dispute about whether vallenato is a ‘traditional’ style that became commercialized or a style that emerged as such with the commercialization of local artists by the music industry of the Caribbean coastal region (Araújo Molina 1973; Gilard 1987, 1993).

The Consolidation of Commercial Popular Music

From the 1950s, Costeño styles were very important to Colombian popular music, especially dance music. Music from the Andean interior -- bambucos played by guitar duos (for example, Garzón y Collazos) or string ensembles (estudiantinas) -- had a declining but significant audience, usually in the interior itself. In many rural and small-town areas of the interior, guitar-based styles heavily influenced by, and mixed with, Mexican ranchera and corrido were very popular. Música llanera, mainly joropos played on tiples and harps, redolent of the rural cattle-farming life of the llanos region, also commanded an audience. Much competition also came from abroad: tangos, boleros, rancheras, corridos and ballads, sometimes performed by Colombian artists, enjoyed continuing popularity. Tastes were fairly regionalized, reflected and encouraged by local radio which by then was widespread. Vallenato, for example, had an almost entirely Costeño, and mainly rural and small-town, audience.

Costeño styles such as porro and cumbia, however, managed to break through this regionalism, gaining airtime on local radio outside the Caribbean coastal region. Costeño music was increasingly played by musicians from Cali, Medellín and Bogotá -- for example, by Edmundo Arias, whose orchestra was popular in Cali. Several Venezuelan orchestras (e.g., Los Billo’s Caracas Boys) specialized in Costeño music and played in Colombia and other Latin American countries.

The music industry experienced rapid growth, helped by a protectionist regime and increasing national industrialization. The populist military dictatorship of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (1954--58) pushed forward modernization and national integration, including the development of television. The record companies contracted national and international artists and made licensing arrangements with foreign companies. Medellín had become the center of the record industry by the early 1950s -- Discos Fuentes moved there too -- and most Costeño music, now an important cultural commodity, was recorded there. From the 1960s, CBS and Philips began recording activities in Bogotá, and Costeño music was a significant element.

Lucho Bermúdez and Pacho Galán continued to be very influential, and Galán developed merecumbé, a fusion of Colombian merengue and cumbia (e.g., ‘Ay Cosita Linda,’ 1955), as a ‘new’ style. Bermúdez appeared on the first Colombian television station in 1954. Porro found exponents in Pedro Laza y sus Pelayeros, which included musicians such as Climaco Sarmiento and Rufo Garrido; Laza, Sarmiento and Garrido were all old-timers who found commercial success only after 1950. This orchestra played in a style similar to that of Bermúdez, but also produced a rougher, more gutsy sound that recalled more immediately the brass bands of the Caribbean coastal region. These bands later became better known as bandas papayeras or bandas pelayeras (the latter named after the town of San Pelayo, the ‘cradle of porro’ according to some).