Pierre Lefranc was Professor of English Literature at several universities in France, North America and Africa. His interest in flamenco began in 1955 and approximately two hours of recordings made by him between 1961 and 1964 are included in the Tartessos « Historia del Flamenco ». He is the author of the book El Cante Jondo published in French ((Facultad de Letras de Niza, 1988) and Spanish (Universidad de Sevilla, 2000, 2001).

The following conference was delivered by Pierre Lefranc as part of the programme of an « Andalusian Week at Harvard » (« Semana Andaluza en Harvard »), which took place in March 2004 at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

It was organized by Elvira Roca Barea, of the Department of Romance Languages, Harvard University, and sponsored by the Viceconsejería de Cultura de la Junta de Andalucía and the Ayuntamiento de Sevilla.

The event included a « Flamenco Seminar » which featured talks by Ramón Soler Díaz and Pierre Lefranc, each of which was followed by live performance of cante by Tomás de Perrate with Antonio Moya on the guitar.

The contribution of the Gypsies to cante flamenco
Prof. Pierre Lefranc

First part

The challenge presented by « flamenco » to serious students is, Find the culture, if there is one, behind the market and behind the entertainment.

Enrique el Mellizo

When the flamenco entertainment market thrives as spectacularly as it does now, that challenge may seem somewhat stiff and even probably superfluous. But flamenco as a culture continues to exist in a world quite other than that of mass-produced entertainment or of “the charts” : a world in which rich traditions can be identified, located and followed. Groups, when successful, belong wherever their inventiveness takes them. As of now, hundreds of thousands of records are sold as “flamenco” which contain not a trace of the genuine article, and the time may come when the word flamenco will have to be abandoned to the industrialists (i).

Fortunately, at a safe distance from such prospects, I have good news to report. During the last fifty years or so, somewhat miraculously, cante has been fully charted as a culture. One consequence of this is that the Gypsy contribution to it has been mapped out in detail, which will be my central theme. Two more indications before I begin : I shall avoid two types of quicksand, those involving terminological discussions, and those leading into controversies. Time is too short for such excursions, especially when new facts are available in plenty.

Hundreds of thousands of records are sold as “flamenco” which contain not a trace of the genuine article

Silverio Franconetti

The National Competition of Cante Jondo, organized in Granada in 1922 by Manuel de Falla, had publicly underlined the need to save something, but there had been no follow-up. The country then drifted into the Civil War, and a truly interminable posguerra. As regards cante, the early 1950s saw the lowest of the ebb. The great Pastora Pavón, Niña de los Peines, made her last recordings in 1950 and retired. Two years later, her brother Tomás died, which she interpreted as meaning that God had called the cantes gitanos back to Heaven and they would never return (ii).

Yet the following year, 1953, a French aficionado named Roger Wild organized the recording, in Madrid, of the first Anthology of cante ever, which was published in Paris in 54 and became known later in Spain as la Antología de Hispavox (iii) . This marked a beginning. The aim of Roger Wild was to preserve for all time what was best in cante, in the midst of an ocean of commercial vulgarities. Naturally, the recent invention of the long-playing record was an important factor, since it multiplied by ten the time available in each recording.

The decisive years were 1958 to 1988, during which a total of one hundred and thirty records of cante came out (iv). The main impulse behind that Great Recovery came from the Gypsy singer Antonio Mairena, who was born in 1909 and died in 1983. But two generations of other talents, Gypsy and non-Gypsy, added their contributions or brought confirmations. The harvest thus collected was without precedent.

Pastora Pavón

What was recorded, too, presented highly original characteristics. Those songs were not impersonal fragments detached from some anonymous collective folklore, but individual songs generally ascribed to creators, always related to places, and in most cases dateable. Some information about them was available, and it was often given to the public in texts of presentation.

While those records were being produced, some of the backgrounds were explored, too. Between the summer of 1961 and the spring of 1964, my wife and I had the exceptional good fortune of being taken by a Gypsy friend, Anzunini del Puerto, into about a dozen Gypsy families or circles between Cadiz and Alcalá de Guadaira. There, to our surprise, we were adopted as Gypsy cousins from France, the reason being that I had done my homework and could identify many of these songs. This left our hosts so utterly astonished that the only possible explanation was la sangre : Gypsy blood. (By this time it was too late to issue a denial, which would have been ill received in any case). We spent in their company a total of about three months, alternating between total immersion and brief visits, taking it all in, discussing cante for hours, catching it as sung behind closed doors (often without a guitar), and making tape recordings, some of which were published as documents in 1995-96 and 2001 (v). During the same period, 61 to 64, the writer José Manuel Caballero Bonald also explored the same area, from which he brought back recordings, and the all-important notion of the singing families, las familias cantaoras (vi).

Aurelio de Cádiz

A little later, a truly monumental series of TV programmes, totalling 38 hours, was put in hand for Televisión Española, under the title Rito y geografía del cante (vii). It gives a remarkably complete and balanced view of most aspects of cante and of their backgrounds in the early 1970s, a time when Spain was beginning to change fast. The timing of these explorations was fortunate, too : ten years later it would have been too late.

The offshoot of all this activity was that, in spite of a scarcity of the usual type of written evidence, the musical material and background information now collected permitted not only study but multiple crosschecking and therefore solid conclusions. The two main traditions involved could be described in detail.

Another characteristic of the Andalusian songs is that they are more elaborate, less abrupt and vehement, than the Gypsy songs

Within what is conventionally called cante flamenco, one must distinguish between cante gitano or Gypsy cante, and cante andaluz or non-Gypsy cante. Naturally, the Gypsies of that area are Andalusian Gypsies, but it does clarify matters to speak of Gypsies on the one hand and either Andalusians or non-Gypsies on the other. This distinction rests on the fact that the Gypsies are different, intend to maintain a separate identity, and resist assimilation.

Fernanda de Utrera

Within the one hundred and thirty records I have mentioned, the Gypsy songs count for two-thirds and the non-Gypsy songs for one. The two repertoires or stocks of songs are different but there have been contacts. The Andalusian songs come from a wider geography – the eight Andalusian provinces plus that of Murcia –, and they are cultivated in an equally wider social sphere, which extends into the bourgeoisie and even the aristocracy. They are nearly always derived from folklore : certain traditional songs have been worked upon and refashioned into cantes, by singers whose names, here too, are generally known. The greatest figure among those Andalusian creators was Antonio Chacón, who died in 1929. To give one example : the malagueña of the first half of the 19th century was a festive dance based on the fandango form; from about 1860, it was slowed down into a series of songs, of which there are now two dozens, all attributed. Another characteristic of the Andalusian songs is that they are more elaborate, less abrupt and vehement, than the Gypsy songs: as a consequence they have their own public, which prefers them. The repertoire they form, in these various ways, is different.

Yet there have been contacts between the two traditions, in areas or places where the two groups lived together. Two obvious examples can be mentioned. On the great estates, for instance around Jerez and Lebrija, and probably over several centuries, there used to be gangs of workmen, called cuadrillas or gañanías, some Gypsy, some non-Gypsy, who lived in the same quarters and worked side by side for months on end every year. Also, in the towns and suburbs, Gypsies and non-Gypsies were permanently in contact in the corrales de vecinos. Those were buildings which generally included a floor or two, in which the doors of individual lodgings gave out on galleries overhanging a central patio, a type of habitat which entailed a good deal of living in common (viii) . La Perla de Cádiz in the 60s and 70s lived in one of those corrales in Cadiz, of which Rito y geografía gives a few glimpses, and I remember one evening, in April 1962, when about twenty of her neighbours, Andalusian most of them, drifted into her rooms to listen.

Second part >>

NOTES
i. In 2001, to a journalist who sounded him about « flamenco » in general, Manuel Mairena, the last-surviving of the three great brothers, replied : « I don’t want to hear that word even mentioned » (« No quiero ni oir hablar de esa palabra » : El Olivo, 88, 2001, p. 8). This is what comes out of using a single word for decades to cover all kinds of products, good or bad, traditional or fabricated. The term « flamenco » has become not only dubious but disreputable in the eyes of some.

ii. This is suggested by two recordings made by her husband, Pepe Pinto, « Semblanza de Tomás Pavón » and mainly « Siguiriya de Tomás » (VSA, 7EPL, 13.075), which says : « Los cantes gitanos, Dios mío, / ya no vuelven más, / Dios ha querío llamarselos al cielo, mare, / junto con Tomás ». When I exchanged views with her in April 1961, she did not believe that an interest in cante might be re-awakening.

iii. See my article on the genesis of that anthology in Candil, 146 (2004), pp. 5251-60.

iv. This total comes from a counting of the records published between those years which brought something new, as listed in the discography of my book, El Cante Jondo […], Universidad de Sevilla, 2000, 2001, pp. 214-18. (Naturally, an album containing 8 records counts for 8).

v. Within the 40 CD’s published as « Testimonios flamencos » together with Historia del flamenco (5 vols., Sevilla, 1995-6), see nos 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. More came out in Sonidos Viejos del Campo de Gibraltar (Calé Records, 2001) : see nos 1-4, 8-9 and 17.

vi. See his brochure for Archivo del cante flamenco, Vergara, 1968.

vii. This was published in 1997 by Alga Editores, Murcia.

viii. On these corrales, see the admirable book by Francisco Morales Padrón, Los corrales de vecinos de Sevilla, Universidad de Sevilla, 3rd edition, 1997.

(*) The Photograph that appears with the headline banner was taken in El Puerto in 1961 and shows, from left to right: Pansequito, Yane Lefranc, Anzunini, Rancapino, unidentified youth, José Heredia Montoya, Orillo del Puerto, Panseco (Pansequito’s father) and El Negro

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