"Authentic" Spanish folk

Folk Songs of Spain, Vol. 3
Seeco, New York, CELP-450
Made in USA, 1960

The performers on this record are unnamed. Searching on-line for this record does not reveal the identities of the performers either, the record is listed as "Various Artists". Listening to the record it appears to me that all the "various" artists belong to the same group (or troupe). I believe only a handful musicians and an additional handful of chorus singers make up this group (I expect that also a handful of dancers are associated with the group), and the same people perform on every song on the record. The very same musicians that also play on Volume 1, and Volume 2, of the series released by American Seeco label, formed in 1943, specializing in Latin American music. In the liner notes I come across the word "authentic", which 90 times out of 100 means exactly the opposite. And here the use of "authentic" indeed confirms its suspect nature. These recordings are not "authentic" in the real sense of the word. The only thing authentic about this record is that the performers are real "Spanish" musicians. The very same musicians who play "authentic" music from the land of the Basques, the southern cities like Sevilla, Galicia, and Catalonia. I believe the musicians heard on these records are a performance group, possibly sponsored by the Spanish government, like a "National Ballet" touring the world. They were probably recorded for this record in New York City. The performers are professionals, very good in what they do, and all the songs are definately of high quality. But not authentic. The song I picked from this record is a bolero called El Parado. The bolero, of course, has become a world wide phenomenon through the gigantic success of the French composer Georges Bizet's take on the traditional Spanish dance. The inclusion of a recording of Bizet's Bolero in the film 10 in which Bo Derek makes love to the melody, didn't hurt the status of "one of the best known classical melodies" either. Bizet quotes the traditional Spanish melodies quite literal but I do believe that the group performing on the Seeco label takes as much back from Bizet as from their own tradition. That said I have to admit that I really like records like these. They often come with real great "authentic" photos from the old home-land.

Rosa Balistreri

Amore tu lo sai, la vita è amara
Back cover

Rosa Balistreri – Amore tu lo sai, 
la vita è amara
Cetra, LPP 184
Made in Turin, Italy, 1971

While Rosa Balistreri is not as generally known as, say Edith Piaf, locally in Sicily, and throughout Italy, she is as highly regarded by the people as any of the 'chanteuses' that acquired a world-wide recognition. What she has in common with some of the greatest European (female) folk singers, such as Piaf and Amália Rodrigues, is that she is of the people (meaning: grew up in poverty, had a life of hardship and sorrow, and eventually the triumph of the individual). Rosa Balistreri was born in 1927, grew up in a very much brutal, feudal Sicily. As an escape she began to sing Sicilian folk songs but it took her through many inhumane jobs and relationships before she was, at the age of 39, able to make a recording. Balistreri fled from Sicily to Florence in the 1960s, but moved back again in the 1970s. She died in Palermo in 1990.

I find it very strange that I never came across this singer, never in my 30+ years of interest in European folk music. While I have several records of musicians she's associated with, and even a Sicilian folk record or two (be it that of the celebratory tourist kind), I had never heard of Rosa Balistreri before.

The song below is called Mirrina and it's an agricultural song (and that's the extend to which I can translate the Italian liner notes).

'Twas the Season

Odetta: Christmas Spirituals
Vanguard, Stereolab, VSD-2079
Printed in U.S.A., 1960

The following text is from 'Tis the Season that I wrote for Berry's Top 100 in 2010. I was still in Ohio then and bought the Odetta record at the Family Store in Cleveland.

      'Tis the season for thrift stores to organize their records. Once a year the Christmas records are separated from the secular records. I enjoy this, it makes it easy, I only need to browse through a considerable smaller selection to try to find something I like than I do the rest of the year. So why did I browse through the bin with Christmas records the other day? God only knows but there she was, the embodiment of the Afro-American presence in the 60s folk scene in America: Odetta. A Christmas record indeed, the songs are all 'Negro-Spirituals' and most songs are about the Virgin Mary giving birth to Jesus. The song Virgin Mary Had One Son may very well end up in the Top 100 and become the first ever Christmas song in the Top 100 history. God bless Odetta. The album is called Odetta: Christmas Spirituals and was released by Vanguard.

Hungaroton Records

V. Magyarországi, Táancház Találkozó 
Fourth Hungarian Dance-House Festival
Hungaroton, SLPX 18101
Made in Hungary, 1985

What puzzles me is the proportion with which Hungarian records appear in thrift stores in Southwest Florida. There is no indication to me that there is a large Hungarian community in the area, so where do all those records come from? But the records keep coming. By now I could have dedicated a whole blog to the folk music of Hungary which I will leave it to one who has more affinity with such music and to one who can read the Magyar language. There are some sites out there, not too many, and not many who update very often. But the standard of records with Hungarian folk music as their topic seems consistently high. It's not that such music is superior to that of other countries/regions, it's just great music, all the way across. Hungarian music was put on the map early as Hungarian composers Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók did a lot to document the music. And maybe unlike many other countries the Hungarians, as a nation, are proud of their musical heritage. Another musician who did a lot for Hungarian Folk music is Ferenc Sebő. He is from a later generation than the aforementioned composers. In September I documented the album Folk Music from Lőrincréve with arrangements by Sebő. I mentioned there that he launched the career of Márta Sebestyén. At the time I didn't include a track on which Sebestyén could be heard but this time I can't overlook her again. Sebestyén is currently the best known musician in the field of Hungarian folk music, probably the best known living Hungarian musician in general. Sebestyén's mother, a musician too, had studied under Kodály.  

Folk Music from Lőrincréve was released in 1986, and this Fourth Hungarian Dance-House Festival is from the year before. Interestingly the identification number of the former SPLX 18102 comes directly after the 18101 of Dance-House Festival. The two tracks shared here are both from side B; Somogyi és Nógrádi dallamok is a medley of short tunes featuring a bagpipe played by Zoltán Juhsz and a fiddle by Márta Virágvölgyi and Szállj el feskemadár a voice solo performed by the aforementioned Sebestyén.

Saliha

Saliha
Soca, SO 330

About every other week I add a new reason to: "What constitutes a good a day at the thrift store?" This week's goes like this: "When I need more time browsing through the records than Maria does looking at the whole store." Needless to say: "We are collectors!" When she goes to one without me she often checks for records, checks if I should go too. Sometimes she even brings a record or two home for me. And I gotta say this: "I'm usually not disappointed." She brought me this wonderful Arabic cassette tape. I always loved the music on it but could not post it here because: (1) I didn't know anything about it, not even the singer's name, and (2) I did not know how to create an MP3 out of a cassette tape. These two issues are now overcome, at least to a certain extent: (1) The singer's name is Saliha, and (2) I downloaded and learned to use Audacity.

Saliha is a Tunisian icon born Salouha Ben Ibrahim Ben Abdel Hafidh in 1914, at the village of Nebr, in Kef. Saliha was born to a poor family and had only one sister called “Eljia”. She recorded between 1938 and 1958 (the year she died). I chose the bit more introverted track 2 from the cassette to share.

The Lament at a Funeral

The Columbia Library of Folk and Primitive Music
Collected and Edited by Alan Lomax, Volume IV: France
Edited by Cl. Marcel-Dubois and Maguy Andral
Columbia Masterworks, KL-207, made in U.S.A., 1952

Funerary lamentation is a widespread practice among catholic countries/regions. It is said to have originated in Roman times but the origins of the singing at wakes and funerals may well go further back than Christianity does. A lamentation is an improvisation of an unaccompanied female wailing voice. The singer is often a relative of the deceased but also could be a hired professional "wailing" woman. In Ireland she's called a "keener", in Romania a "bocitorre", and in this example recorded in Corsica "voceratrice". Laments can be divided up into two categories: that of the wakes and funerals for adults, and for those of children. The adult ones are mournful while children's laments can have a festive quality to them as it is celebrated when a child "becomes an angel" without having experienced the hardships and impurities of life. The practice has become nearly extinct now but it used to be a tradition in nearly all catholic societies. It could be found throughout the Mediterranean, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and other pockets of Catholicism that existed around the globe. I grew up in the Catholic Netherlands, but I don't think lamentation was ever practiced there. It certainly wasn't  when my grandparents died while I was still a little boy in the late 1960s. The Netherlands had a sober kind of Catholicism, it had the introverted ascetic characteristics of it but not not the extroverted spirituality. The folk music in Mediterranean and Latin American countries were influenced by a rich spirituality and a cult of the death. In the sound example below you can hear the 80 year old "voceratrice" Barbe-Marie Monti perform a funeral lament. She is sitting at the foot of the table with the corpse when she starts: Permettetemi un Momuntu. It was recorded in Corsica in 1948. The accompanying text that goes with the lament on the album The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music: France states that in Corsica funeral laments are often the start of a vendetta or family-feud. The improvised laments can contain inflammatory incriminating lyrics, especially if the death of the relative was a violent one.

The World Library

The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music
Collected and Edited by Alan Lomax
Volume VII Indonesian Music
Edited by Dr. Jaap Kunst, Indisch Museum, Amsterdam
Columbia Masterworks SL-210, 1954, Made in U.S.A.

Academic style field recordings from all over the world have been and continue to be the main focus of my record collection. Within these records I like the older ones the best, recorded and collected at a time when there still was little influence of the Western popular music styles onto the traditional music of a certain ethnic group somewhere on this planet. A whole bunch of academic  ethnomusicologists, as well as hobbyists with high ideals, traveled around the world in the middle and later parts of the 20th Century, to record and catalog the music they thought of as a fast disappearing local cultural identity. One of the most prominent collectors out there was Alan Lomax, who spent his life collecting and recording the folk music of the most remote regions of the world. He started documenting the various folk styles of the most remote areas of the US but soon broadened his scope to the whole world. His ambition was to have a giant library that collected all the traditional musics from around the world. He was part of the Library of Congress that focused mainly on the music of the US including all of the various immigrant group's traditional music identities, and founded the World Library of Folk and Primitive Music. All the music had to be available to any and every person interested. The scope of that library was broad and ambitious but only 18 volumes were ever compiled by the Columbia label. All 18 of these are sought after and very hard to come by. I just scored my second in a second hand record store in Miami: The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, Collected and Edited by Alan Lomax – Indonesia, Edited by Dr. Jaap Kunst, Indisch Museum, Amsterdam is the full identifying title of the record in front of me. The record is divided into four geographical sections: New Guinea, Moluccas, Borneo, and Bali. The first song from this album to share here is an Ewa dance song and is from the Papua part of New Guinea, it's a song by Roro natives, who live scattered in small villages along the South Coast and on Yule Island. The song was recorded by Reverend A. Dupetrat of the Catholic Mission at Yule Island in 1951.The second exerpt from the album comes from Borneo and is a Rice song performed by a group of Land Dyak women. This was recorded by a team from UNESCO-UNO also in 1951.