Latin American music has continually enlarged the culture of the United States and repeatedly tinted our various music genres, blasting in through New Orleans, Mexico, and later New York. Part of the United States is still Mexico, culturally, which we’ll come to shortly. New Orleans had French, Spanish and West African elements in its Caribbean gumbo. In fact, the city was under direct Spanish control from 1763 to 1803—compare the iron latticework on the balconies to those in Puerto Rico.
Afro-Latin rhythms have pulsed side-by-side with other styles of popular music, and often merged with them. They have ramped up our use of percussion, Africanizing our nation as Ford feared. And keep in mind as we proceed through the particulars that any music influenced by Spain was already influenced by the Arabs who occupied and ruled that corner of Europe for hundreds of years. Even flamenco turns out to have been influenced not only by its prime practitioners, the Roma, and obviously by Arabs and Berbers who ruled Spain, but also by the thousands of Africans who were captured and brought to Spain in the later European conquering period, where they lived in slavery until the 19thcentury.[i] This influence is widely ignored or denied in Spain to this day.
The strongest influences, stateside, come from Cuba, a highly Africanized Hispanic nation.[ii] Yoruba religion survives there, and so does the music, the most basic rhythm of which is the clave (pronounced cláh-veh). It has many variations; let’s look at the “son” clave, common in both son and salsa (see below). Learn this one yourself by slapping your thigh with your left hand on every beat, counting one to eight, then starting over. Then slap with your right hand on the following beats: beat 1, between beats 2 and 3, beats 4, 6 and 7. Or get a partner and split it between you. Or just clap on the italic words in “Shave and a hair cut, two bits.” Take it slow. Then try clapping or vocalizing this rhythm over various US musics, and see how it variously fits. You just saved the price of a Popular Music Appreciation class. Unless you’re in one. (Don’t quit.)
This is a basic clave, an alternation of three beats and two. There are many clave variations, showing up as the basis of salsa and lots more. The next most common variation is the reverse clave: emphasis on beats 2, 3, 5, between 6 and 7, and 8.
A French version of the English country dance was brought by Spain to Cuba in the form of the contradanza, which gave birth to the habanera.[1] Afro-Cubans made it swing, and it swung into the U.S. as early as 1865. The habanera rhythm is close to that of the cakewalk; Louis Moreau Gottschalk, widely-traveled pianist and composer, combined cake and contra in “Ojos Criollos,” written around 1850, during the first cakewalk craze, forty years before ragtime.[iii] And leave us not forget the Spanish-American War—first prize: Cuba. Black regiments helped beat the Spanish and brought a bit of the Cuban beat back home—just in time for the birth of jazz.
[1] Named after Havana.
But more directly influential was the son (pronounced sone), which led to the rumba boom of the thirties and forties. When it came from the Cuban countryside to Havana in the 1920s, it fell under the influence of a new urban music it found there, called jazz. It then hopped the sea to repay the debt.
Next came the mambo—derived from Congolese religious groups—and the chachachá, both from Cuba. After that came the Communism, and Cuban rhythms, always subversive, were embargoed by the U.S.
From the Dominican Republic came a syncopated polka, the merengue. Puerto Rico incorporated Cuban and Haitian beats into its mix and passed them along, along with a million and more messengers, to the U.S. Result: salsa. Among the Puerto Ricans who came to New York were musicians who would play with Duke Ellington, and others who played together with Cubans in Latin bands, giving birth to a new, mixed, New York style.
Brazil contributed the samba, based on a ring dance (remember the ring shout), and then the bossa nova, a creation of jazz-oriented folks, mostly White Brazilians, influenced by “cool” west coast jazz.
From Argentina came the tango, an innovation dating to the 1880s (banned at Yale in 1914 but popular on Broadway).[2] Allow me a digression here, or perhaps just a wider angle view to enlarge our perspective on U.S. cultural history by considering another part of the hemisphere, likewise colonized and peopled by kidnapped Africans and their kidnappers, along with assorted more or less innocent bystanders. Let’s talk tango. The habanera was an influence, and so were Black Argentines, a factor as widely ignored as the African is in flamenco.
[2] Vernon and Irene Castle, at the request of a society grand dame,
bleached the tango down to the Innovation, a non-touching version.
We think of Argentina as a White country – what happened? During chattel slavery, Africans comprised 50% of the population in many Argentine provinces. Today it’s down to a few neighborhoods in Buenos Aires: San Telmo, Merlo, Ciudad Evita. Some Argentines who otherwise don’t want to talk about the historical Black presence will admit that it was severely reduced by yellow fever in 1871, foreshadowing Memphis. Africans were also sent in great numbers to wars against Spain (early 1800s), and later Paraguay (1864-70). Mostly what remained were the women, who intermarried, partly thanks to a massive European immigration. Blacks, depending on someone’s subjective definition, are now 2%. “There are no Blacks in Argentina,” say many Whites, including former President Carlos Menem, who added “Brazil has that problem.”[iv] We can see from this who has a problem, and also what it is.
Buenos Aires, like New York, is a melting pot. The culture is melted from contributions from Genoa, London, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, and Mbanza Kong and Lwangu, the two capitals of Kongo, a huge African kingdom (1390-1914, roughly) that comprised parts of modern-day Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, and Angola. Among other important achievements, they exalted dance, as observed by Portuguese visitors/conquerors in the 16th century. People from this kingdom were enslaved and shipped to, among other places, Argentina and the United States.
By 1820 there were five organizations representing these central Africans in Buenos Aires. These groupings were called candombes,[3] as were their music/dance/religious gatherings. They represented the whole of their African culture. (Later, their cousins in central Africa used the same word in their resistance against Belgium, in the 1940s-50s.) In the Argentina-Uruguay border area, candombe, the dance, joined with milonga and other dance developments to form the tango. Robert Farris Thompson tells us that “Kongo speech, music, instruments, dance, gestures, and even drum syllables were present in Buenos Aires at the birth of the tango.” He goes on to compare the dancing of Juba, observed by Charles Dickens at P.T. Barnum’s show, with similar moves in Argentina around the same time, and describes similar moves in the early tango, around 1903.[4],[v]
[3] Not candomblé, a religious tradition in Brazil.
[4] Even the very name can be traced across the water.
Of the many words sourced from the Ki-Kongo tongue,
tango can be traced to variations of tanga,
from tangala to tanganana, with various overlapping meanings
having mostly to do with different styles of walking.
The Ki-Kongo mambu became the Cuban mambo,
and the name candombe in Ki-Kongo means “pertaining to Blacks.”
It is not any more odd to think of dance moves, rhythms, or words showing up thousands of miles apart, and thousands of miles from their cross-Atlantic source, than it is to note traditional English or Scottish ballads and dances turning up in Appalachia and Australia. Given the efficacy of the Facebooks of the day, neither should we be surprised that no less than the cakewalk filtered south from the US early in the 20th century. It featured the leaning-forward-and-backward moves typical of Kongo dancing and later of tango. George Reid Andrews, in the The Afro-Argentines, 1800-1900, described the practice in candombe of “bodies alternately thrown forward and back,” like in the cakewalk, as being continued into the tango.[vi] “Today,” Thompson tells us, “white Buenos Aires is not supposed to know about such things.”[vii]
The tango intermeshed with ragtime; the Charleston is derived from both the cakewalk and the tango, and possibly the cotillion, as performed in Black dance clubs like the “Jungle Casino” in New York.[viii]
Mexico was heavily influenced by European music, especially French, which was important in the 18th century. There were Germans, too, with their polkas and waltzes. But there were also mixes of indigenous and African forms. 20,000 Africans were there by the mid-1500s, mostly in the Gulf region, and this area belongs to the Black Caribbean in a way the rest of Mexico does not. In the 19th century, Cuban rhythms sailed in and prevailed in cities throughout the land, and as of the late 20th, Colombia’s African-influenced cumbia dominated the dance floor.
But the important thing about Mexico to this story in progress is Texas. Remember, our Great Southwest used to be someone else’s Great Northeast. The cultures that met in Texas had in common the waltz, polka, and schottische—recall the discussion of common stock—and with the help of the German accordion, a great blending took place here. Germans engineered railroads in Mexico—bear in mind the Black and Irish railroad builders in Appalachia. Before that, another kind of train brought cultures together: the wagon train. As detailed earlier, cowpokes from Mexico and the U.S. had occasion to trade songs over the campfire, in between wars. By the time Bob Wills was swingin’, the northern Mexican feel had long since seeped into western styles: consider also the corrido-like sound of some of Woody Guthrie’s numbers, or Leadbelly’s guitar runs in the same connection.[ix]
There was another important occasion for Mexican influence on U.S. music. Not a war this time, but a fair: the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, New Orleans, 1884-85. The Mexicans sent a Cavalry band, dozens strong, that was the hit of the fair, with New Orleans publishers releasing sheet music for their numbers that sold thousands. But duly note: prominent among these numbers were the Mexican versions of the Cuban habanera. And next thing you know, some of the band’s members took up residence in the Crescent City, going on to play in early jazz bands. Among the fabled “creoles” were some who were actually of Mexican origin, including clarinetist Lorenzo Tio and Alcide “Yellow” Nunez.
Broadway, like jazz, was in the habit of latching onto foreign influences, though more often as exotic trivializations by New York pop songwriters; still, the cut and paste contributed to the ongoing integration of styles. And in the forties came the first wave of overtly Latin jazz, with Dizzy Gillespie adding Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo to his band, Nat King Cole adding bongos, and the rumba generally taking over. But as noted earlier, Jelly Roll Morton had already declared that any music without a “Spanish Tinge” couldn’t possibly be jazz. He played it on piano with a rumba beat in the left hand, syncopating with the right. When pioneering big band leader James Reese Europe recorded his first four songs in 1913, two were Latin—a tango and a maxixe. Europe also hired his entire clarinet section straight out of Puerto Rico.[x]
As for blues, W.C. Handy had been to Cuba in 1900, heard the son, and afterwards began to experiment with various Latin beats with his orchestra. He noted audiences’ “sudden, proud and graceful reaction” to the rhythms; as a result he slipped in a little of the rumba when formulating his version of the blues. Listen to the midsection of “St. Louis Blues,” our nation’s most famous tango: it’s a habanera.
Decades later in Jelly Roll’s town, Professor Longhair (Henry Roeland Byrd) mixed several Latin American influences in his piano style, which helped ensure the Latin presence in rhythm and blues.
So we can see that Latin music is folded into many of our important African-American-related styles. But more important is to hear it. Longhair’s music is good for that; listen to a whole album—it won’t be hard work—and hear how he divides two four-beat bars into three-three-two in the bass. (The Professor actually started as a tap dancer, then became a drummer before moving to piano.) Longhair also incorporated calypso, and credited some of his style to the “Spanish beats” used by a mysterious bandmate from the forties:
This other kid claimed to be Hungarian. That’s why I named my band Professor Longhair and the Shuffling Hungarians…he wasn’t white…he wasn’t really black either.[xi],[5]
[5] Could this Hungarian actually have been Rom?
Sometimes the Roma identify by their host nationality,
just to be on the safe side.
Now listen to Fats Domino, Dr. John, the Neville Brothers, and Little Feat. (Meanwhile, compare the famous Fats tune “Blueberry Hill” to the 1941 version by Gene Autry to see what a difference a beat makes.) You can hear this rhythm in any number of tunes that came out of New Orleans in the fifties and related decades.[6] It’s more blended and subtle in styles further afield. But listen. It’s there.
[6] See New Orleans Originals and Louisiana Piano, Discography.
Jazz and pop music funneled Latin songs into the cultural body politic. Singers Bob Eberly and Helen O’Connell, with the Jimmy Dorsey band, were particularly Latin-inclined. They recorded “Amapola” and “Andalucia” (Spanish), “Besame Mucho” and “Maria Elena” (Mexican), and “Green Eyes” (Cuba). Artie Shaw did Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” and the Mexican tune “Frenesi.” Later, rock and roll writers Leiber and Stoller set “Anna” and “There Goes My Baby,” to the Brazilian baion beat.[xii] It wasn’t always so obvious: “What A Difference A Day Makes,” first a hit for the Dorsey Brothers in 1934, was a rewrite of a Mexican bolero, “Cuando Vuelva a Tu Lado.”
But the most important thing going on in the 1930s in the fusion of Latin and other U.S. musics was Spanish Harlem. Here the Puerto Ricans et al kept Xavier Cugat honest, if from a distance. He was thrillin’ the downtown crowds with half-baked rhythms that gradually got to cook better—hotter— as the Yankees developed the taste for it. Meanwhile back uptown, the Puerto Rican base, the New Yorquiños, kept their roots alive in their own dance halls. Spanish Harlem was also situated hard by non-Spanish Harlem, and the combination of sounds and spirit began to blend a bit, sometimes more than a bit. Latino musicians were featured in the bands of Benny Carter, Chick Webb, Don Redman, Fletcher Henderson, Cab Calloway, and Duke Ellington. [7]
[7] Among the first Anglo leaders of Latin bands were New York Jews,
including them Alfredo Menez, née Mendelsohn.
The forties brought more Cubans, and more Black Cubans. Singer Machito (Frank Grillo) and his musical director Mario Bauza hired arrangers who also worked for Cab Calloway and Chick Webb, and Cuban music with sax appeal and spiffy charts began to hit the charts. They also added congas. The New York hybridization process was paralleled by a series of Latin-themed Hollywood films that helped soften up the Yanks for the Latinization of northern music. Part of the blending was more like blanding: many tunes of Latin origin hit bigger as cover versions by the Dorseys, Glenn Miller, Gene Autry—some of them damped down, some with the Latin sources thoroughly bleached out.
The mambo surfaced in the late forties, along with Cubop—Afro-Cuban fusion jazz spearheaded by Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Kenton, and Machito. Fusion is perhaps a bit misleading, as there are differences between the north and south that are not easily bridged. Restructuring of arrangements and instrumentation often sits more easily on a traditional form than do changes in rhythm. The rhythms of African-Americans in the U.S. have some things in common with various Afro-Latin rhythms, and some things not. Some of what we hear here is Afro-Pan-American common stock, dating back through early jazz and beyond, especially in meeting grounds like New Orleans. Some of the African beat that persisted in Latin America, especially in Cuba, had to be recaptured up north where the drum had been banned. Max Roach went to Haiti, while Art Blakey went to North Africa, to study.
On the flip side, the commonalities that remained helped jazz to be adopted and adapted in Cuba, Brazil, and beyond, as it helped the habanera and other beats to resonate up North. But some of the rhythms are different; the blues and swing emerged in North America, not elsewhere. The results are unstable and the fusion experiments fleeting, but the long-term changes to all the musics involved are as subtle and pervasive as the Black and White common stock interplays of the previous century.
[i] Gurumbe: Afro-Andalousian Memories, dir. M. Angel Rosale. Intermedia Productions, 2016.
[ii] The following discussion relies heavily on that of John Storm Roberts in The Latin Tinge, Ch 1-5.
[iii] Roberts, 30.
[iv] “¿Hay negros en Argentina?” BBC Mundo, March 16, 2007.
[v] Thompson, 90.
[vi] Andrews, 1980, 74.
[vii] Thompson, 109.
[viii] Smith, Music on My Mind, 66.
[ix] Ibid., 97.
[x] Badger, 67.
[xi] Living Blues, No. 26, Mar-Apr 1976, 19,24.
[xii] Clarke, 431.