October 4, 2009 Mercedes Sosa died

Los mareados (1942) is the perfect synthesis of Juan Carlos Cobián's music and Enrique Domingo Cadícamo's poetry in La Negra's voice. Mercedes began to study this tango in Mexico and, later, in exile, she sang it on Sundays a capella at the home of some friends from Salta.

Los mareados ( 1942)
Music: Juan Carlos Cobián
Lyrics: Enrique Cadícamo

Rare...
as if on fire
I found you drinking
beautiful and fatal...
You were drinking
and in the champagne's roar..,
mad, you laughed for not crying...
Sorrow
I was sorry to meet you
because when I looked at you
I saw your eyes
your eyes
with an electric ardor,
your beautiful eyes that I adored so much...

Tonight, my friend,
alcohol has intoxicated us...
What does it matter if they laugh
and call us the dizzy ones!
Everyone has their sorrows
and we have them...
Tonight we'll drink
because we won't see each other
to see each other again...

Today you are going into my past,
into the past of my life...
Three things my wounded soul carries:
love... sorrow... pain...
Today you are going to enter my past
and today we will take new paths...
How great our love has been!....
And yet, alas!
look what is left...

Mercedes Sosa was born in Tucumán on July 9, 1935, where she developed her profession as a singer since she was a child, due to her origins: descendant of Calchaquíes, daughter of a sugar industry worker and a washerwoman.

At that time, she lent her voice on the radio, at Peronist party events or in the circus, but her breakthrough - and the beginning of the definition of the paradigm she represented in Argentine folklore - came in Mendoza, where she settled in 1957 after her marriage to the musician Oscar Matus, with whom she had a son, Fabián.

Those were times of industrialized folklore, massified from the migrations from the provinces to Buenos Aires, which confronted for some looks with tango -also in times of advertising splendor- and port cosmopolitanism.

In 1962 Sosa released his first album, "La voz de la zafra" at the urging of musician Ben Molar, who convinced the management of the RCA label. Eight songs by Oscar Matus- Armando Tejada Gómez: (among them, "La zafrera" and "Zamba de los humildes") foreshadowed what was to be the New Song Movement, formed the following year.

With an avant-garde pulse, with a vocation to rebel against the manual of repetitions imposed by the folkloric canon and based on the conviction of singing with a foundation, the Movimiento del Nuevo Cancionero was an integrating proposal of Argentine music, pushed by Mercedes, Matus, Armando Tejada Gómez and Tito Francia.

They proposed "the search for a national music of popular roots, which expresses the country in its human and regional totality", according to the founding document signed on February 11, 1963 at the Círculo de Periodistas in the city of Mendoza.

"There is a country for the whole songbook. We only need to integrate a songbook for the whole country", postulated the text also signed by Víctor Gabriel Nieto, Martín Ochoa, David Caballero, Horacio Tusoli, Berla Barta, Chango Leal, Graciela Lucero. Clide Villegas, Emilio Crosetti and Eduardo Aragón.

"Canción con fundamento" (1965), the second album by Mercedes -by then already separated and settled in Buenos Aires-, expressed that bet.

The biographical reviews of Mercedes emphasize her appearance at the fifth edition of the Cosquín Folklore Festival in 1965, introduced by Jorge Cafrune in his space and on the last night, despite being resisted by the organization due to her adhesion to the Communist Party (although other versions of the fact are maintained).

"I am going to dare, because what I am going to do now is daring, and I am going to receive a slap on the wrist from the committee, but what can we do, I have always been like that, a galloper against the wind, I am going to offer you the song of a very pure woman, who has not had the opportunity to give it and that, as I say, even if there is a fuss, I am going to leave with you a woman from Tucumán: Mercedes Sosa", said the 'Turco' Cafrune on January 31, 1965 when introducing the singer from Tucumán, then 30 years old.

She sang alone with her box "Canción del derrumbe indio", by the Tucuman composer Fernando Iramain. She was ignored by the media at the time, but not by the public, who gave her a standing ovation. That performance paved the way for her to record her third album, "Yo no canto por cantar".

Then the history is better known, marked by popularity and some memorable records, such as the tribute to Violeta Parra recorded in 1971.

Censored by the civil-military dictatorship (1976-1983), she went into exile in Europe, where she continued her work with great Ibero-American singers. After her return to Argentina in the '80s, her sound ventured into tango, jazz and rock.

Her last work was "Cantora: un viaje íntimo" (2009), in which she performed 34 songs in duet with other Latin American artists. She died on October 4, 2009 as a result of a renal dysfunction that aggravated a respiratory crisis.

SOURCE: Telam