ARTICLE: "Bumbún" and the beginnings of plena music
Edward-Yemíl Rosario
appropiate to repost the following. This essay also appears in Salsiology,
Vernon W. Boggs, Ed. (New York: Excelsior, 1992): 59-67; and Divided borders:
Essays on Puerto Rican identity, Juan Flores (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1993)
Also available, is the documentary "Plena is work, plena is song," created by a
NYC group dedicated to the spread of PR culture. among those working in this
group is the scholar, Roberta Singer, author of the important study, (1983).
Tradition and innovation in contemporary Latin popular music in New York City.
Latin American Music Review, 4(2), 183-202.
Flores, J. (1988). "Bumbún" and the beginnings of plena music. Centro Boletín,
2(2), 16-25.
(Full text) Mon, Rafa and Maelo are gone. The death of those three master
pleneros -- Mon Rivera, Rafael Cortijo and Ismael Rivera -- in recent years
marks the end of an era in the history of the Puerto Rican plena, that form of
popular music which arose at the beginning of the century in the sugar-growing
areas along the southern coast of the Island, and which within a generation, by
the 1930s, came to be recognized by many as an authentic and representative
music of the Puerto Rican people. Despite the unfavorable odds dictated by its
evidently African-based features and its origins among the most downtrodden
sectors of the population, plena rapidly supplanted the traditions of both bomba
and musica jibara as the favored sound among many poor and working people. Plena
even superseded the danza as the acknowledged "national music" of Puerto Rico.
Tomas Blanco's 1935 essay "Elogio de la plena" was a landmark in this process of
intellectual and cultural vindication, which is itself part of a larger project
aimed at acknowledging the fundamental role of African and working-class
expression in the history of Puerto Rican national culture.
The story of the plena comprises three chapters, each spanning a period
of about twenty-five years.[1] The first quarter-century, which extends to the
earliest recordings of plena around 1926, saw the emergence and consolidation of
the distinctive form and its spread to all regions of the Island. Between 1925
and 1950, when Canario and then Cesar Concepcion were at their peak, plena
continued to extend its popularity, reaching the salons and ballrooms, gaining
intellectual recognition by sectors of the cultural elite, and establishing
itself among Puerto Ricans in New York. In this period the onset of recording
and radio were of key importance, and involved the commercialization of the
music with an attendant departure from plena roots. The third stage, spanning
the 1950s and 1960s, constitutes a return to those roots, both in the
working-class point of reference and in the renewed moorings in bomba and
Afro-Caribbean rhythms. Mon Rivera, Rafael Cortijo and Ismael Rivera, while
making full use of recording technology and contributing ingenious innovations
to the style, brought plena back to the streets and among the poor workers and
unemployed masses from whom it had sprung. The social world of plena, and the
monumental significance of Cortijo, has been captured memorably in the
testimonial account of Cortijo's funeral by Edgardo Rodriguez Julia.
Though the story of the plena since the days of Canario is familiar to many,
very little is known of that first, prerecording stage, when plena was first
emerging from its folk roots and establishing itself as the most popular and
typical genre of Puerto Rican popular music. Here the towering practitioner was
the semi-legendary Joselino "Bumbún" Oppenheimer (1884 - 1929), whose very name
suggests his place in plena history: Oppenheimer, an unlikely surname for a
black Puerto Rican worker, was adopted from that of German immigrant hacendados
and attests to his direct slave ancestry, while the nickname "Bumbún" echoes the
thudding beat of his pandereta, the tambourine-like hand drum which was
idiosyncratic of the plena, especially in its beginnings. "Bumbún" Oppenheimer,
a distant memory to the few remaining survivors of his times, was the pioneer of
the whole tradition, the first "king" of plena, the forger of the style and
creator of some of the all-time favorites of Puerto Rican song.
Bumbún was a plowman. For years in the early decades of the century he drove
oxen and tilled the fields of the huge sugar plantations outside of his home
city of Ponce. In the mornings he would leave La Joya del Castillo, the Ponce
neighborhood where he lived, and be off along the paths and byways leading to
Hacienda Estrella. He hitched up the plow and prepared the oxen for the day's
work. Then he was joined by the cuarteros, the young laborers hired daily to
help the plowmen by walking ahead to keep the oxen moving and by clearing the
furrows of stones and cane stubble. Bumbún's cuarteros were always in earshot,
though, for they also served as his chorus in the coplas (couplets) and plenas
he sang to the beat of ox and mule hooves and the rhythmic thrust of the plow:
No canto porque me oigan
Ni porque mi dicha es buena.
Yo canto por divertirme
y darle alivio a mis penas.
Bumbún composed many plenas while tilling the fields of Hacienda Estrella.
Patiently he would teach the song choruses to his plowboys, who would repeat
them in energetic response to the "musician-plowman" as he went onto sing the
solo verses of his new song. After work, Bumbún would make his way back to La
Joya del Castillo where, at night, he would introduce his latest compositions to
the many pleneros and fans who gathered in the homes and storefronts of his
neighborhood in those years. Thus the plenas of Bumbún Oppenheimer, rather than
falling into quick oblivion, have endured as treasures of the plena repertoire.
The plowman Joselino Oppenheimer was king, "Rey de la Plena." In a history
boasting such better-known royalty as Cortijo, Canario and César Concepción,
Bumbún stands at the threshold. In addition to his countless original
compositions and performances of plena standards like "Cuando las mujeres
quieren a los hombres," "Tanta vanidad" and "Los muchachos de Cataño," Bumbun
led the first plena band and became the first professional plenero when he
decided to set down his plow and dedicate full time and energy to music. He was
also one of the earliest masters, some would say unsurpassed, of the pandereta.
Though he could also play accordion or güiro as the occasion demanded, Bumbún
was a virtuoso panderetero. In the midst of a vibrant improvisation he would
rest it suddenly on his shoulder, bounce it off his head, or roll it along the
floor, all the while twisting and jerking his body in a wild frenzy.
And La Joya del Castillo, Bumbún's neighborhood in Ponce, is the
recognized birthplace of the Puerto Rican plena. There in the small wooden
houses, bars and supply stores is where the pleneros would gather for their
nightly tertulias, sharing their latest compositions and renditions to the
plea-sure of an appreciative, bustling public. In the first decades of the
century, musicians and enthusiasts from the surrounding areas, and eventually
from all parts of the Island, had to go to Ponce to find out about the plena,
and La Joya del Castillo was the renowned hub of the action. The regal name, by
the way, should fool no one; hardly a "jewel of the castle," La Joya del
Castillo is actually a euphemism, in true plena spirit, for Ia "hoya" del
Castillo: it was the "hole" occupying the ravine beneath the mansion fortress of
the famous rum-baron Serrallés. Expectedly, La Joya del Castillo suffered the
fate of so many working class barrios in twentieth-century Puerto Rico: it was
eventually razed without a trace by the forces of progress and replaced by
"modern" buildings and thoroughfares.
Most important to the birth of the plena, it was to that neighborhood, around
the turn of the century, that families of former slaves from the British
Caribbean islands of St. Kitts, Nevins, Barbados and Jamaica began to arrive and
settle, bringing with them musical styles and practices which were different and
exciting to the native Ponceños. Among these new arrivals was a couple named
John Clark and Catherine George. Mr. Clark and Doña Catin sang and played music
in the streets of La Joya del Castillo and came to be known as los ingleses, the
English people. Their daughter Carolina Clark, usually called Carola, was a
foremost panderetera in those dawning years, and she and her husband, the
popular plenero Julio Mora ("La Perla"), helped to fuse the novel strains
introduced by los ingleses with traditions and styles native to Puerto Rico.
Though it is not known how or why, it is clear that the "English" sound caught
on in Ponce and sparked the emergence of a new genre of Puerto Rican popular
music. Some theories of plena origins even contend that the very word "plena"
derives from the English exclamations "Play Ana" or "Play now" which accompanied
those early street performances.
However that may be, the historical significance of this "English" influence is
paramount. After abolition, the former slaves were set adrift throughout the
Caribbean. They moved toward coastal cities and plantations and, increasingly as
the century neared its end, abroad to other islands or neigh-boring regions on
the continent. Venezuela, Cuba and of course Panama were common destinations,
but Puerto Rico also drew contingents of immigrants, especially from the
English-speaking Caribbean islands whose economies had been languishing since
British imperial interests turned emphatically to India and Africa. The southern
coastal city of Ponce was the main port of entry for these "free" laborers,
particularly as of 1898 when that whole part of the Island became blanketed by
huge capitalist plantations in the hands of U.S. and Creole-owned sugar
corporations.
The Clarks and Georges and the other ingleses who settled in La Joya del
Castillo were part of this migratory movement. The infusion of their musical
expression into the popular music of Puerto Rico, though a mystery in its
specifics, illustrates the multiple intersections and blending of cultures as
working people scatter and relocate. New, "foreign" styles, instruments and
practices arrive, attract attention for their newness and find imitations. The
role of external sources in the beginnings of plena history, which has been
ignored in most accounts of the tradition, deserves attention because it points
up the regional, Caribbean context for the emergence of twentieth century song
forms in all nations of the area: son, calypso, merengue and many other examples
of the "national popular" music of their respective countries were all inspired
by the presence of musical elements introduced from other islands.
As the case of the plena shows, the foreign influence served as catalyst.
The real roots of plena, as is universally acknowledged, are in the bomba: all
of the early pleneros, including Bumbún, were originally bomberos, and the most
basic features of plena derive directly or indirectly from bomba. Moreover, the
historical development of plena proceeded primarily in its interaction with
other genres of the "national," Puerto Rican tradition, notably the seis and the
danza. The varied musical expression of the slave population, the peasantry from
the mountainous inland and the national elite make up the direct context for the
birth and growth of plena, while the "imported" elements brought by '05 ingleses
constituted a spark igniting the appearance of a new genre at a time when the
regional, racial and class divisions under-lying the relative separation of
those traditions were in the throes of abrupt change.
The emergence of the plena coincided with the consolidation of the Puerto
Rican working class; it accompanied and lent idiosyncratic musical expression to
that historical process. The first two decades of the century, when plena was
evolving from its earliest traces and disparate components into a distinct,
coherent form, saw the gravitation of all sectors of the Puerto Rican working
population -- former slaves, peasants and artisans -- toward conditions of
wage-labor, primarily in large-scale agricultural production set up along
capitalist lines. More and more workers, formerly inhabiting worlds separated by
place and occupation, came into direct association, both at the workplace and in
their neighborhoods; their life experience and social interests were converging,
and assumed organized articulation with the founding of unions, labor
federations and political parties.
Many of the best-known plenas, from the earliest times on, tell of strikes,
working conditions and events of working-class life; they give voice, usually in
sharp ironic tones and imagery, to the experience of working people in all its
aspects Topical events, seized upon in all their specificity, take on general,
emblematic meaning to Puerto Rican working people of varied stations, places and
times because of their shared social world and perspectives. Even the musical
features of the plena, with its boisterous syncopated rhythms, improvised
instrumentation and vigorous call-and-response vocal cadences, testify to this
working-class base, as becomes clear in the derogatory outrage voiced so often
by the cultured elites when reacting to the "primitive" and "vulgar noise" of
plena.
Integral to the qualitative change in employment conditions, of course,
was unemployment and the presence of a reserve of poor people without work.
Working-class neighborhoods like La Joya del Castillo housed not only the
regularly employed but also, perhaps in still greater numbers, those living
hand-to-mouth on earnings from a range of other sources-from odd jobs, street
vending and occasional or seasonal work to ragpicking, hustling and
prostitution. It was this sector, largely descendant from slave backgrounds,
that figured preponderantly in defining the flavor and texture of cultural life
in the community. And it was among them, those most hard-pressed and forced to
the margins of the new socio-economic order, that plena found its earliest and
most characteristic social base. As one commentator has it, writing in 1929 when
the plena was taking all classes of Puerto Rican society by storm, "The plena
arose in the brothels; it was born in the most pestilent centers of the
underworld, where harlots hobnob with the playboys of the bureaucracy. But the
plena, after all, stands for the conception of art held by the common people, by
the illiterate masses. The plena reviews the public events of the day with
irony, and interprets them according to the effect they have on the lower
classes."
The same conditions that engendered this structural excess of unemployed
workers also propelled the emigration of growing numbers of Puerto Ricans from
the Island in search of work and opportunity. Migration, primarily to the United
States, has been an inescapable fact of life for Puerto Rican workers since the
first years of the century. It has also been a recurrent theme of plenas since
early on. The notorious expedition of hundreds of workers to Arizona in 1926,
arranged under contract and ending in dismal failure, occasioned several songs
and versions, including one attributed to Bumbún: "Dime Si tú no has pasado /
por el Canal de la Mona / Ahora tú pasará / cuando vayas pa' Arizona." And when
he learned of the support shown the destitute survivors of that voyage as they
returned to the Island, Bumbún composed "Los emigrantes": "Llegaron los
emigrantes / pidiendo la caridad / Unos venían en el Cherokee / y otros en el
Savannah." The well-known standard "La Metr6poli," also from those early years,
is one of many plenas about the arrival in New York, treating the migration
experience in more sanguine terms, though an undertone of irony is still
present: "En esta metrópoli / Se critica la vida / pero si nos vamos / volvemos
en seguida."
Thus the plena tells of emigration, and it also emigrates, taking root in New
York and enthusing audiences from all sectors of the Puerto Rican community by
the late 192Os. The migration of some of the foremost pleneros and plena groups
to New York, and the lure of recording possibilities, were decisive in this
shift, as the metropolis itself became the center for the further popularization
of the plena for the ensuing decades. The figure of Canario looms large in this
new stage of the tradition, as recording and commercial incentives resulted in
major changes in the sound and social function of the form. The hugely
influential presence of Canario and his group in New York during the 1930s, and
a decade or so later that of César Concepción, conditioned the development of
the plena through mid-century. But already by 1929, when that early commentary
appeared in the New York weekly El Nuevo Mundo, the plena had struck firm roots
in the emigrant community: "accompanying the continual stream of Puerto Ricans
to this city of the dollar," it says there, "like a ghost, or like some
left-over that it's impossible to get rid of, there sound the chords of the
plena. And at night in our Latin 'Barrio,' oozing out of the cracks in the
windows and blasting from the music stores, there is the sound of the Puerto
Rican plena, which has taken over everywhere, from the poorest and filthiest
tenements of East Harlem to the most comfortable middle class apartments on the
West Side."
Despite the many changes marking the history of the pIena -- diffusion to all
regions and social strata of Puerto Rican society, expanded and altered
instrumentation and thematics, the influence of recording and commercialization,
migration of its principal center of evolution to New York, continual
intermingling with other musical styles -- the humble beginnings of that story
need to be called continually to mind. When Bumbún Oppenheimer composed his
enduring songs while driving an ox-drawn plow across the caneflelds of Hacienda
Estrella, rehearsing his newly-invented verses with his chorus of plowboys, he
established the source of the plena in the process of human labor and
interaction with nature. It was work and the life-experience of Puerto Rican
working people that made for the substance and social context of the plena in
the streets and bars of La Joya del Castillo where it was born, and it is that
same reality which has remained the most basic reference-point for plena music
down to the present.
Notes
1. The main source for information on early plena is the book by Félix
Echevarría Alvarado, La plena: origen, sentido y desarrollo en el folklore
puertorriqueño (Santurce: Express, 1984). Based on interviews with many of the
surviving pioneers of the plena and their families, and containing photographs
and song texts, this unassuming work provides crucial new insights into the
history of the form and sets the record straight on many counts.
The most valuable historical and political analysis of the bomba and plena
tradition to date is Jorge Pérez, "La bomba y Ia plena puertorriqueña:
¿Sincretismo racial o transformación histórico-musical?" Anales (Havana, Centro
de Estudios del Caribe, 1988). Pérez's essay is a first effort to set forth a
periodization of the plena tradition and also takes issue with many
methodological and theoretical assumptions underlying the treatment of the plena
in the standard writings on Puerto Rican popular music: María Luisa Muñoz, La
música en Puerto Rico (Sharon, CT: Troutman, 1966); Francisco López Cruz, La
música folklórica de Puerto Rico (Sharon, CT: Troutman, 1967); and Hector Campos
Parsi, La gran enciclopedia de Puerto Rico: Música, vol.7 (Madrid: Ediciones R,
1976).
Plena has become the topic of broad cultural and sociological interest
among Puerto Rican writers over the past decade or so. In his Literatura y
sociedad en Puerto Rico (1976), José Luis González signaled the key importance
of the plena, "the most representative genre of modem Puerto Rican folklore,"
for the study of Puerto Rican literature and culture in the twentieth century,
and announced plans for a book on the subject. More recently, Edgardo Rodríguez
Juliá's excellent testimonial, El entierro de Cortijo (Río Piedras: Huracán,
1983), has done much to kindle interest and understanding among a wide
readership, while the ongoing research by such scholars as Angel Quintero Rivera
and Rafael Aponte-Ledée promises to add significant new knowledge and
approaches.
The present sketch on plena beginnings was intended as part of a longer
essay to accompany the film on plena produced by Pedro Angel Rivera and Susan
(con't.)
Always,
Edward-Yemíl Rosario (Eddie)
acorn.org
workingfamiliesparty.org
"I'm sorry if this sounds a bit cynical
but most people with Shrub's SAT scores
are saying 'paper or plastic' not endeavoring
to be the leader of the free world."
- Eddie on G.W. Bush
tum...@telus.net
Yambu
Rosario) wrote:
>Considering the recent surge in interest re PR FOLKLORE music, I felt it was
>appropiate to repost the following......
>
Good stuff. And Happy D-Day.
-Mike Doran
tang...@yahoo.com
it's worth it or not.
tangent90
Gerry wrote:
>
> In article <393d1be7...@nntp.ix.netcom.com>, Edward-Yemíl Rosario
> <luc...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
> > Considering the recent surge in interest re PR FOLKLORE music, I felt it was
> > appropiate to repost the following. This essay also appears in Salsiology,
>
> Thanks for the docs. Is Salsiology still in print? Is it worth the
> cost?
>
> --
> \\\---
Gerry
> Considering the recent surge in interest re PR FOLKLORE music, I felt it was
> appropiate to repost the following. This essay also appears in Salsiology,
Thanks for the docs. Is Salsiology still in print? Is it worth the
cost?
--
\\\---
Edward-Yemíl Rosario
>In article <393d1be7...@nntp.ix.netcom.com>, Edward-Yemíl Rosario
><luc...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
>> Considering the recent surge in interest re PR FOLKLORE music, I felt it was
>> appropiate to repost the following. This essay also appears in Salsiology,
>
>Thanks for the docs. Is Salsiology still in print? Is it worth the
>cost?
<snip>
My main problem with Boggs is that he introduces the concept of transculturation
but never REALLY follows through with an in-depth treatment. At one time, I
would say get it anyway becasue at the time there was very little being written,
from a scholarly perpsective, on the music. Today, while there's still a dearth
of worthwhile material, there is certainly better pickins. I find the lit falls
into one of two camps: musicians inept at sociological analysis and sociologists
inept at musical analysis. there are exceptions: Ruth Glasser and Francis
Aparicio both offer what are probably the best the lit has to offer. Glasser
explores the music from a PR perspective up until the 40s, while Aparicio offers
a literary/deconstructionist treatment full of musical analysis. Both are not
solely "Ivory tower" academics, with Glasser and Aparicio responsible for
bringing the importance of the art to the fore.