16 - Weaving Words and Meanings for the Colombian Countryside: Jorge Velosa's Carranguera Lyrics

Summary

One cold afternoon in 1976 a group of friends got together to play some music at one of the plazas of the National University of Colombia in Bogota. They began playing protest songs from Cuba, Argentina, Chile, and Venezuela to express their nonconformity with the situation of the country and with the political discourse that prevailed at the time. After playing a few songs, Jorge Velosa, a young boyacense who studied veterinary science, made the point that they should be using their own rhythms and melodies instead of imitating those of others. He took the requinto de tiple and played some merengue campesino from the Andean highlands of Colombia. Soon after, a new genre called carranguera music was born, with Velosa as its most important pioneer.

This fictional anecdote, reconstructed from accounts of how the genre was born, serves to illustrate one of the main purposes of its creation: that of advocating the autochthonous expressions from the Andean countryside. Velosa took the merengue campesino, the most popular rhythm in the rural areas of this region during the 1970s and 1980s, and combined it with innovative lyrics, structured in the traditional form of copla, full of anecdotes and idioms that reflect the region's speech, lifestyle, and worldview. What gave carranguera music its identity and made it distinct from the Andean merengue was that Velosa gave an especial emphasis to the role of the requinto, a traditional instrument that, by then, was almost forgotten and out of use, thus creating a new musical genre that he named carranguera.

This music developed in the countryside and as a peasant cultural expression in a marginalized context. This is because in Colombia many areas of the countryside lack utilities, education, roads, or medical services. In addition, often when the peasants migrate to the city, they arrive to fill the lower segments of society as urban marginal groups. Furthermore, in the context of Latin America with the advancement of capitalism and modernity, when nations grew more urban and technologically advanced, the traditional peasant community and culture became excluded. Thus, carranguera music developed as a cultural expression of a subordinate group within society.