IN THE VILLAGE SQUARE, up on a wooden stage, dancers from a local group were hard at it, in and out, round and round, the line bellying and then contracting like a garment in the wash or perhaps a jellyfish on the water’s edge, dancers’ feet tapping or shuffling on the back-and-forth in complex patterns. The dancers, mostly women, wore thick bright skirts; music came from a one-man band – the traditional fife and tabor – heart-breakingly plangent sometimes, sometimes faster, cheerier, racing away. All the while, the fife and tabor man was playing one tune on his three-holed fife and quite another on his drum, in contrasting rhythms – something the musical community takes for granted but which I’ve always thought incomprehensibly clever.
We had seen the stage going up a day or two back and, now, hearing these familiar tunes, not the amplified pop more customary in the summer, we headed downhill to the village, with Paul and Anne, Edinburgh friends who were staying with us. Given the Scottish capital has a festival all its own, we hoped this entertainment wouldn’t seem too tin-pot.
Rows of folding chairs filled up the whole of the little square. All were occupied. A World Cup football game was underway on a TV screen above a bar. Nobody noticed. Those present were – how shall I put this? – not quite the usual crowd, but seemingly a little more refined, even the tiniest touch aspirant. Maybe it was just the clothes, though. People in and about the square are normally in working gear, even if they are going to a funeral.
Dogs scuffled. The air darkened. Swifts still screeched around the corner between the village ‘town hall’ and the grand but somewhat dilapidated church. Javier, a local builder friend, watching with his wife from the doorway of a shop, kept us briefed on the proceedings. First a cluster of sierra groups, then a troupe from Valladolid, three hours’ drive away, in Castile, for heaven’s sake. Some in this group were from Salamanca, though, which is only half-way, from a deeply rustic area called el Campo Charro.
Among the local groups, green, yellow, orange, bright red red and yellow. The Valladolid performers were more sombre, with a lot of black in their costumes. They brought us songs and routines from the Campo Charro itself. Two hundred years ago this district had produced the finest guerrilla cavalry leader of the Peninsular War, Julián Sánchez, ‘El Charro’ by nickname, a focus of loyalty even today. Sánchez’s own costume as a freelance fighter, and those of his guerrilla band, had buttons all down the front, in the local style of the day, still used for full-dress ceremonial like weddings.
Their buttons are supposedly the origin of the buttons of the Mariachi singers of Mexico, transported there by warriors and other emigrants from the Campo Charro in the days of empire. No buttons on view tonight but the regular dances were a delight. So were the stick dances, close cousin to English Morris dancing.
Children played their part.
The first group we saw contained a small girl in local sierra costume. She kept out of the way, but only up to a point, while essaying the dance herself with considerable freedom. It was impossible not to watch her as the troupe wound their way around her, never tripping. There were plenty more quite small children in the square, some also in costume, playing together or talking like little adults, flamboyant beyond their years.
Paul and Anne could not be dragged away, even for the latest of late Spanish suppers, declaring later it was an absolute highlight of their trip.
For Gaby and myself, the story had begun a long while back. 1992 was the year of the Barcelona Olympics and the great Seville Expo. I say ‘great’ because it was our first year in the sierra and I soon found myself venturing out – to Seville itself, arriving on a very hot day. I had a genuine task to perform, rather flattering to my ego: to conduct ‘an international press conference’ on the Sierra de Gata. All Spain’s autonomous regions had their own pavilions at the Expo, along with many foreign countries. Britain was among them. Glamorous happenings were in the air. For my press conference, a young man turned up from the paper in Badajoz – capital of Extremadura’s southern province – explaining with sad face that he had been told off by his news desk to cover all events whatsoever in the Extremadura pavilion. I waited but nobody else came. Not one. It was like Miss Marty’s party. I gave my presentation to the Badajoz journalist who bore up well.
Any disappointment, however, received recompense from the next event, a performance of Extremaduran folk-song and dance. This was a first chance to hear the wild cries and quirky drumbeat of the fife and tabor, to watch the dancers chancing and advancing, retreating, tapping out the beat.
Both men and women wore short embroidered waistcoats, even in the 40 degree heat, and white shirts, pleated, with raised patterns in white. The women wore the heavy felt skirts we had just seen with Paul and Anne, red, yellow, blue or green, topped with applique patterns of thinner felt, black or white against the clear colour beneath. With energetic movement, these skirts bounce out at the hip, not flattering for the fuller figure. But if the skirts were thick, this was nothing compared to the thickness of the deeply encrusted, crocheted stockings below. Shoes were also covered in deep embroidery and they looked hot as well. The dancers sweated a lot, it’s true, but the performance, complete with music and singing, was a completely unexpected thrill.
In our own area, Salvador Becerra, engaging ‘town clerk’ of the village of Pozón, pop. all of a thousand, had got a group together and they performed here and there among the villages that summer. We got to know their repertoire quite well. One song in particular, performed by Salvador himself, was striking and genuinely moving, with fine musical phrasing. A touch of ‘Hearts of Oak” combined with the romantical tragical as in the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens. The children were always humming it at home and in the car – and on the hills when we could get them out. After a time – they being, as we were, neophytes in the sierra – they wanted to know what the words meant, specially the tremendous, declamatory, first line. We told them, with regret – ‘Un vaso de leche’. A glass of milk. It was the end of the road for that particular song.
But the vaso de leche was fair enough, we thought, their mother and I, given that our village had been a traditional goat-herding community in times gone by with milk and cheese the common coinage.
I suppose it’s not surprising that with all this in mind I’ve turned back to Alan Lomax since our guests departed.
Lomax, of course, was a protean folk song field collector for a full 60 years, leaving behind him a huge archive, a vast achievement. He was a wonderful man despite – or notwithstanding – a current effort to denigrate his legacy with charges of selfishness over copyright issues. Born in Austin, Texas, in 1915, he came to Extremadura in 1952. He had already made the prison recordings that many will know well, working first with his father and later solo, the two of them encountering, for instance, Lead Belly in Louisiana’s Angola Prison Farm. Muddy Waters, recorded at his home in Mississippi, was another find. He became an intimate and helper of singers like Woodie Guthrie and Pete Seeger, a mentor for a generation and personally for Bob Dylan. He was an early innovator on radio (one of the inventors of ‘vox pops’, known then as ‘the man on the street’) and later a dominant intellectual of the international folklore scene.
In 1949, Lomax and others were named in the right-wing press, and in 1950 in an FBI edited journal, as communist sympathizers. This was the first stage in the evolution of the infamous McCarthy-ite blacklist which killed off the artistic careers of so many liberals and leftists. Without acknowledging the reason, Lomax, who was undoubtedly a leftist (whence his identification with the prison population) set off for Europe and spent most of a decade there.
One of his great recording trips involved seven months in Spain where he visited a number of country districts and, most unusually, spent something like a month in Extremadura. The area was at that time more or less completely off the map, bound in deep poverty and deep political, religious and social repression. This was the time of General Franco’s military dictatorship, just 11 years after the end of the Spanish Civil War.
Lomax is fully accepted these days in Spanish folk-song circles, revered is not too strong a word. as a pioneer whose efforts in collecting and conserving give an unrivaled overview of the state of Spanish folk music as it was mid-20th century. Modern studies have gone on beyond, of course. There is a specialist slot on Spain’s classical music channel on national radio, RNE (Radio Clásica). What people rather forget in this development of the field are the circumstances of Lomax’s recording, particularly perhaps in Extremadura.
His footsteps here were dogged by members of that fearsome paramilitary police force, the Guardia Civil (today serving a democratic government in a more civil manner). Their attentions frightened off some of the singers he hoped to record. But many did perform for him, bringing us a scattering of the songs we had heard in the village square just recently and in Seville 22 years earlier – and many, many more. They tell sad stories of love, they deal with girls left behind by the departure of the lads for military service, the untimely death of lovers – all of that. There are ballads like broadsheets telling us the news – often the news of long ago, poeticised, full of aristocratic names, bearing clear traces of the 16th century Renaissance. In one of them there is a passage identified by my own rather tentative studies as deriving from the 12th century (for aficionados only: this passage comes, or I think it has to, from the book of Pseudo-Turpin, made up of fictions about the 8th century Frankish emperor Charlemagne, found in full form in the manuscript of the Liber Sancti Jacobi in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela). There is a clear cross-over in some pieces with Sephardic Jewish music, with origins gong back at least to the late 15th century when the Jews were expelled.
Then there are the bawdy bits, frequently about priests, evidently current despite the repression, and quite often with ludicrously indelicate, Chaucerian-style outcomes. There are satire and folksy tales. There are odd, ungraspable refrains like abstract poetry. In mood, it swings around, sometimes sad, sometimes the reverse. I can’t myself pick up the general sense of sadness people say they find in it, claiming this comes from the proximity of Portugal with its mournful fado. But I do sometimes catch a dryness of tone, a sense of restraint, which some allege is a deep part of the Extremaduran character. However you look at it, listen to it, rather, this is a treasure house if you pay it proper attention.
Add the immediacy, the authenticity of the recordings. In one of them an old man sings a very long ballad in a quavering voice . He must have grown embarrassed. ‘Shall I go on?’ he says to Lomax. ‘Sí , sí , sí ‘ says Lomax, as quietly as he can, not wanting to disturb the atmosphere of the performance.
‘Sí , sí , sí’. Extremadura has changed, how it has changed, and this is true for some of the music too, But its roots go very deep.
Lomax later wrote about his visit: ‘For a month or so I wandered erratically, sunstruck by the grave beauty of the land, faint and sick at the sight of this noble people, ground down by poverty and a police state. I saw that in Spain folklore was not mere fantasy and entertainment. Each Spanish village was a self-contained cultural system with tradition penetrating every aspect of life…..’
The Alan Lomax Collection. The Spanish Recordings. Extremadura. ROUNDER 82161-1763-2 (2002). www.rounder.com