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A shared catharsis, for which I have found no parallel or equivalent anywhere else: suffering in its various forms is sublimated into art

The songs the Gypsies sing between themselves are of two kinds. One consists of the festive, playful, often elegant and inexhaustibly dynamic bulerías, through which they recapture at will the joy of living, sometimes for hours on end. The other kind is formed of what I shall call the higher group of songs – higher in their estimation –, which are often referred to as cante jondo : these are the tonás, siguiriyas and soleares. The tonás are the oldest and most austere songs, and are unaccompanied by a guitar ; the siguiriyas are the most tragic cantes, while the soleares often deal with gentler emotions, between sorrow and melancholy. In addition to these, those Gypsies will sing in private a few saetas around Easter, but nothing else, unless some other song happens to be someone’s speciality in the household : bulerías, soleares, siguiriyas and on occasion a few tonás, such is their standard fare.

D. Antonio Chacón

What makes these higher songs unique is their treatment of suffering under its various aspects, including the unbearable, within a wide emotional spectrum extending between melancholy and revolt. Those song-forms are flexible melodic structures that the singer is expected to refashion each time, not in order to achieve variety and try to please, but to express and stylize emotion while deriving from each song-form what it can yield and giving it its due. Each interpretation of a song is a new creation, which will vary according to the mood of the singer, the circumstances, and of course the listeners. The songs are instruments, into which and through which emotion is summoned, heightened, stylized, periodically exacerbated, before it is calmed down and brought to rest for the benefit of all present. What takes place is a shared catharsis, for which I have found no parallel or equivalent anywhere else: suffering in its various forms is sublimated into art. Any form of showing off, any excursion into theatricals, any attempt at being brilliant are dismissed as irrelevant. What is expected from the singer is that he or she should deal truthfully with his or her emotions and “reach the soul” of the listeners : “llegar al alma” or simply “llegar”. The most severe judgement one can hear about singers who merely perform is, “no me llega”.

The Gypsies of Andalusia provided a voice to the suffering of many.

The processes I am describing are so intense, and make such demands on the inner resources, that most singers are more willing to draw on them in a closed room and among a few friends than on a stage, at set times, and before an audience of strangers they often cannot see. A few outstanding temperaments, like Terremoto and Fernanda de Utrera, had so much fire and passion in them that, on a stage, they would withdraw into themselves, forget the audience, and valiantly give their all no matter what; but such extreme cases remain exceptional. Drawing in public on a double fund of private culture and personal emotion is not exactly natural. In front of an audience, the tendency often is to give less of oneself, and to take shelter behind one stock of songs for public occasions, the more demanding and the more personal ones being reserved for private sessions.

The songs themselves – the song-forms – are the object of a sort of quiet worship on account of what they can do, which is to express emotion, discipline it, and give it form. To tamper with them would be to sin against their very perfection as instruments. Mysteriously, the Gypsies hold that no more songs will be created – their saying for this is El cante está hecho, meaning, the creation of cante is over –, as if some inscrutable gods had ceased to walk the earth and vowed never to return (there is no rational reason why no new songs should appear, but it is a fact that none has appeared since, approximately, the 1930s). One detail gives a suggestive idea of the reverence in which the songs are held. Some Gypsies left behind them five, six, seven songs; each of these has been sung, and refashioned, hundreds or thousands of times; and yet not only the basic structure but periodically the individual style of each creator remain recognizable in each song.

Songs were born in families and handed down from one generation to the next for as long as there was in each family a voice that could sing them

I have identified a total of 99 forms of those higher songs, the tonás, siguiriyas and soleares, to which one more is being added by Ramón Soler Diáz. Other workers in the field, like he and his uncle Luis Soler Guevara, have found more songs (ix), but personally, as a precaution, I require at least a second independent witness for each of them. Apart from this difference and a few local details we are essentially in agreement over the whole corpus.

Among those songs, the tonás are assumed to be of Gypsy origin, but (with one exception) they are the earliest surviving forms, and the memory of their creators and origins has vanished. Probably the oldest among them is the martinete, which is a song of the Gypsy blacksmiths. Among the siguiriyas, 94 per cent are Gypsy creations, as are 78 per cent of the soleares. Conversely, 6 per cent of the siguiriyas and 22 per cent of the soleares are of Andalusian, non-Gypsy, origin. This is the case of siguiriyas and soleares created by two non-Gypsies, Silverio Franconetti and Aurelio de Cádiz, which are often sung by Gypsies in Jerez and in Cadiz, because they find that those songs meet their requirements and have adopted them. But there also are Andalusian creations that the Gypsies never sing, particularly among the soleares de Triana, many of which reflect a local Andalusian flowering of the soleá. This again confirms that the Gypsy and non-Gypsy stocks of songs remain separate but that there have been contacts. Similarly, a great Gypsy of Cadiz, Enrique El Mellizo, is the creator of a superb malagueña, which is quite unrelated to the fandango song-form, and is sung by Gypsies and non-Gypsies alike.

The geography of those Gypsy songs rests on two basic units: the family, and the village or urban district. See MAP 1 (“The locations of the Siguiriyas and Soleares”), which shows the most important forms of cante gitano as an archipelago or micronesia of mainly small local repertoires, with one exception. The numbers of the siguiriyas and of the soleares appear to the left and right of each place-name. The single exception is Jerez, with its eighteen siguiriyas.

MAP 1

The songs were born in families and handed down from one generation to the next for as long as there was in each family a voice that could sing them; after which they passed into the care of other Gypsy families in the vicinity and thus remained closely linked to their local background (their diffusion through records belongs to an altogether different world). The general picture is that of small groups of cantes enclosed in scattered homes, in a pattern characterized by some fixity. This first impression, however, must be qualified at once. Many Gypsies have at all times travelled around for professional reasons, others changed residences, and many would go regularly to the great fairs. Many songs moved about with them and became known in other places. Their movements can often be followed, for instance between Cadiz and Triana by the river before road communication prevailed.

The tonás, being unascribed, form a distinct group, but the siguiriyas and soleares represent the collective achievement of a few dozen creators, no more, whose names are known and who all lived between Seville, generally Triana, and Cadiz. They form a comfortably small and even familiar crowd as, in nearly all cases, some biographical information about them is available. Naturally, some songs have been lost but it is difficult to say with any certainty in what proportion.

The women we knew lived mostly in the home, in which most of them were like queens, and seldom went out

The social breakdown of the Gypsies of that part of Andalusia is well known (I insist on “that part” as they tend to regard the Granada Gypsies as a different sort). They became sedentary during the 17th century and can be considered as socially integrated, but the degree of their economic integration varies. The Gypsies at the top were those of the forges, los gitanos herreros. They had fared better than the others during the centuries of persecution because everyone needed ironware and they were the only suppliers. They were particularly well off and powerful in Triana, where on occasion they held their own in negotiations with the Seville Ayuntamiento (x). Below them came the Gypsies who had entered the butcher’s trade, at various levels: rich wholesalers, prosperous retailers, sometimes simply hired slaughterers. Lower down, one found the agricultural hands, some regular labourers, some very occasional workers, others from among whom the Jerez wine industry recruited and trained specialists for its production units, like makers of wine casks. The smugglers formed a separate category, and some of them carried business over surprisingly large areas.

Diego Clavel

The women we knew lived mostly in the home, in which most of them were like queens, and seldom went out. Those who sang did so only in the home or on family occasions, except when, by a special dispensation from father, husband, brother, or son, they were permitted to sing in front of strangers. Naturally, the rising professionalization of cante changed this. But La Perrata did not make a record before she was in her late forties, and it was only after Terremoto died, in 1981, that his sister, Maria Soleá, was able to make a name for herself.

Lower down in the social hierarchy, one enters a zone of precarious living accompanied with some unwillingness to become economically integrated. That crowd included sellers of lottery tickets, pedlars of all sorts, parasites, eccentrics, and a few psychological cases for whom cante was a therapy. Those among this motley crowd who sang were cantaores de mostraor, bar-room singers, who would sing a little something in exchange for a coin or two. Singing professionally was initially frowned upon, because the cantes are an essential part of the heritage and must be preserved. But the amount of money it brought to the artistas (and their families) laid many scruples to rest ; and one could always reserve the most precious songs for the home. Even so, many great Gypsies, like Terremoto, La Fernanda, La Bernarda, El Lebrijano, El Sordera and others, used to return home for months as often as they could, to find their roots and their feet and their culture again, between periods of psychologically unrewarding work in Madrid or elsewhere.

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NOTES

ix. See Luis Soler Guevara and Ramón Soler Díaz, Antonio Mairena en el mundo de la siguiriya y la soleá, Málaga, 1992.

x. See Torcuato Pérez de Guzmán, Los gitanos herreros de Sevilla, Sevilla, 1982 ; particularly pp. 73-5.

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