¿Conoces este disco de papi con Johnny Rodríguez y su trío?: Ansonia Records and Puerto Rico [Part I]
“At the home of Ralph Perez.” Justo A. Martí Photographic Collection, 1948-1985. Archives of the Puerto Rican Diaspora, Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College, CUNY.
Editor’s Note: The following essay belongs to a series exploring the history of Ansonia Records, an independent, family-run music label which was founded in New York City in 1949. The Ansonia catalogue, recently digitized, boasts an impressive and influential collection of Puerto Rican jibaro music, Dominican merengue, and other folk and popular music genres from throughout Latin America. Further research will no doubt uncover the role Pérez and the Ansonia label played in the development of Latin music within the recording industry. See below for the full series:
¿Conoces este disco de papi con Johnny Rodríguez y su trío?: Ansonia Records and Puerto Rico [Part II] by Dr. Mario Cancel-Bigay
Ansonia Records and Dominican Merengue’s Place in Latin Music History by Jhensen Ortiz
The Latin Music Legacy of Ralph Pérez and Ansonia Records by Néstor David Pastor
Author’s Note: With much gratitude to my mentor Kevin Fellezs, Souraya Al-Alaoui, Jhensen Ortiz and Néstor David Pastor for the many exchanges of ideas, my wife Edline Jacquet for her support and kind feedback, and Millito’s family for their love.
“¿Conoces este disco de papi con Johnny Rodríguez y su trío?” I had never been a fan of boleros even when they featured my mentor Emilio ‘Millito’ Cruz. A virtuoso player of the classical guitar, Millito had also mastered the Puerto Rican cuatro. Among other things, he had been the soloist during the premiere of the only two concertos for Puerto Rico’s national guitar and symphonic orchestra: Ernesto Cordero’s Concierto Criollo para Cuatro y Orquesta Sinfónica and Sonia Morales’s Paisajes.¹ Though I came to love a few boleros (I was always moved by Felipe Rosario Goyco’s “Madrigal” and Sylvia Rexach’s “Yo era una flor”), most struck me as terribly depressing and filled with romantic cliches. Moreover, performing with Millito since age thirteen—when I became his student in the Libre de Música School in Hato Rey—I had participated in countless bohemias. Then, amidst cups of wine, my teacher and his fans would invariably end up singing many boleros. Too many.
“Do you know about this album where dad is playing with the Johnny Rodríguez trio?” Whether it was Enid or her younger sister Nicole who asked this question, I do not remember. But it was around August 25, 2018, a few months after Millito’s death on June 25. His daughter Enid had invited me to perform during an homage to Millito held at the Fundación Nacional para la Cultura Popular in Old San Juan. While Puerto Rico mourned the passing of a prominent musician—many still remembered Millito for his performances with diva Lucecita Benítez in the 1970s and 1980s, and her “¡Suénalo, Millito!” [sound out that cuatro, Millito!]²—Enid and Nicole mourned the passing of their father. I, in turn, mourned the passing of a man who I came to love like one.
A few days later, I was back “home” in New York City. Accompanying me was my cuatro, and a copy of Johnny Rodríguez y su trío. Playing the CD, I was greeted by an unknown Millito: a nineteen-year-old musician playing the complex arpeggios and scales of a requinto and singing third voice. We had met in 1996. Now, it was 1959. 1959 in 2018. Millito’s first album had been released by Ansonia Records.
It would take a few years, though, before I noticed the label. On October 21, 2020, I received an email:
My name is Souraya Al-Alaoui and I'm reaching out on behalf of Ansonia Records. . . I'm reaching out because I came across your article about Rafael Hernandez's ‘Lamento Borincano’³ and I was wondering if you might be interested in writing about a few albums for us, specifically of our música jíbara artists and albums, such as Ramito, Chuito, La Calandria, etc.
I was thrilled. As a cuatro player and a singer-songwriter I had grown up listening to Flor Morales Ramos “Ramito” and Jesús Sánchez Erazo “Chuíto el de Bayamón.” How many times had I not played jíbaro music styles such as a seis mapeyé, a seis chorreao, a seis celinés, a seis fajardeño, a seis llanera, a seis con décima or an aguinaldo orocoveño or cagüeño accompanied by the guitar and the güiro? And Ramito and Chuíto sang them all as two of the major interpreters of the peasants’ repertoire. How many times had I sung Ramito’s “Qué bonita bandera” along with thousands of Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico and New York City, a song celebrating our national flag and culture? Furthermore, these artists had also crossed paths with Millito. In a Youtube video from the 1970s watched so far by 422,568 viewers, one can see my maestro, alongside Puerto Rican nueva canción singer-songwriter Alberto Carrión, accompanying Chuíto el de Bayamón.⁴
I was excited by Souraya’s request but also concerned. My expertise, and the topic of my dissertation then as a graduate student in the Ethnomusicology Program of Columbia University, was not on jíbaro music. It was on Puerto Rican nueva canción, an anticolonial and leftist movement born in the 1960s and 1970s developed by socially aware singer-songwriters/poets/activists whose commitment to social justice and decolonization had led them to be put under surveillance by Puerto Rico’s colonial regime (see Marrero 2018). While the nueva canción repertoire was inextricably tied to jíbaro music, and other national and global musical genres, these were still two very different things.
Intrigued by Souraya’s email, though, I checked my CD and LP collection. I realized that most of my CDs featuring Ramito had actually been released by the Puerto Rican New York City-based label. I had acquired several of these thanks to my friend and interlocutor, the Puerto Rican nueva canción singer-songwriter Américo Boschetti, who had secured a generous discount for me at a local store. It was also then that I saw the word “Ansonia” on the cover of Johnny Rodríguez y su trío.
“Yes, I would be interested in writing album reviews for Ansonia.”
Reflecting on Ansonia’s albums has led me to listen to some of the ways in which Puerto Rico and its diaspora sounded from 1949 to 1989. It has also led me to listen to the ways in which my own life is entwined with these songs. The story that I have been telling, and that continues below, is the story of these points of encounter: that space where the bifurcated stream of Puerto Rican history meets the tide of my life’s experiences.
I.
Though I was familiar with Ramito and Chuíto, writing album reviews for Ansonia was revealing in myriad ways. For one thing, I discovered new aspects of these trovadores and of jíbaro music in general. Concerning Chuíto, I learned that he had performed in New York, Boston, Chicago, New Jersey, Hawai’i, Spain, Cuba and other Latin American cities (Rodríguez León 1979: 57) recording more than forty LPs (Malavet Vega 2015: 346). Listening more carefully to his music, I also came to appreciate his works beyond his witty lyrics; the rich cuatro arrangements developed by Ladislao “Ladí” Martínez (of whom more later) were key in his repertoire. Regarding Ramito, I learned that, along with his brothers Luis Morales Ramos “Luisito” and Juan María Morales Ramos “Moralito,” he had performed not only in the United States, but Cuba, Dominican Republic and Mexico, among other countries. Indeed, according to Jesús Vera, Ramito had performed in twenty Latin American republics and around thirty states of the US, including Hawai’i (2002: 39-40). That jíbaro music had such a global appeal was surprising to me, and yet, as will become evident, Ramito and Chuíto’s experiences were not unique.
My research also led me to discover that some seises were not as old as I originally thought. In my mind, all seises had been created in the nineteenth century. I was wrong. The seis llanera, for example, one of more than ninety seises—although only forty-five continue to be regularly played (Bofill-Calero 2013: 48-49)—had been composed by Ramito and Tuto Feliciano as recently as 1953.⁵ Ramito had released this seis in El Cantor de la Montaña Vol. 1 (1958). It can be appreciated in the tracks “Quererte como te quiero” and “Mensaje a la mujer.” I was particularly fond of this seis. In 1972, Puerto Rican nueva canción singer-songwriter Andrés Jiménez had sung revolutionary lyrics to the same melodic material in “¡Coño, despierta boricua!” If Ramito’s lyrics were concerned with praising the beauty of women, Andrés’s, written by Francisco Matos Paoli, Andrés Castro Ríos and Guarionex Hidalgo Africano, called for Puerto Rico’s decolonization and outright revolution (see Cancel-Bigay 2021: 180-202). As I wrote my review for Ramito’s album, I wondered what the trovador would have made of this. After all, he was not a supporter of Puerto Rico’s independence from the United States. Indeed, as noted by Licia Fiol-Matta, throughout the 1950s, Ramito, and other trovadores such as Ernestina Reyes “La Calandria,” had participated in good will tours to the United States in support of Governor Luis Muñoz Marín’s Commonwealth of Puerto Rico founded in 1952 (2017: 121-170).⁶ Known on the Island as the “Free Associated State” (in Spanish Estado Libre Asociado), a remix of this reformed colonial status continues to linger on. If its democratic qualities and claims of local autonomy were always suspect given the presence of the US military and federal institutions in Puerto Rico, and the economic subordination of the Island to American interests—all outcomes of the American invasion of 1898—the creation of the Fiscal Control Board in 2016 has further reduced the level of autonomy and democratic rule purportedly granted to the Island. It is, after all, the aforementioned Board, an unelected political body, which has the last say in the country’s internal affairs.
Writing album reviews for Ansonia also led me to study in more depth La Calandria’s work. Though I was somewhat familiar with her—in 2017 as part of my graduate studies I had had the fortune of reading Fiol-Matta’s The Great Woman Singer, where a full chapter was dedicated to the singer—now I had a chance to listen to her more carefully. Studying her album Brisas navideñas (1960), I was struck by her powerful voice, the poetic quality of songs such as “Sólo tú y yo” (a seis milonga in its major key iteration) and “Por un beso” (a son montuno). I was also in awe of the ways in which she sought to challenge the stereotype of women as weak and dependent on men in “El que se va no hace falta.” La Calandria, like Ramito and Chuíto, had also had a successful career. As highlighted by Miguel López Ortiz from the Fundación Nacional para la Cultura Popular, she recorded forty-five albums, touring extensively in the Hispanic theaters of New York, New Jersey, Chicago and Philadelphia, performing as well in Hawai’i,⁷ where US colonialism had led to the migration of around five thousand Puerto Rican contract plantation workers at the beginning of the twentieth century.⁸
But Ansonia’s jíbaro music catalogue went beyond the famous “trio” of Ramito, Chuíto, and La Calandria. It also included Germán Rosario, the jíbaro of Yumac (Yumac being the town of Camuy spelled backwards). During the 1960s, my favorite jíbaro music composer had released two albums for Ansonia: Germán Rosario Vol. 1 and Germán Rosario Vol 2. Volume 1, available through Bandcamp, includes the witty and lyrically sophisticated “Esdrújula” and the anti-imperialist aguinaldo jíbaro “A Puerto Rico”: “Oh, Borinquen bella/quiero saludarte/bajo el estandarte/de una sola estrella” (Oh, beautiful Puerto Rico/I want to greet you/at the feet of the banner/that has only one star”). Germán also had a global influence. According to Michael Birenbaum Quintero, his music, along with that of other jíbaro artists, had a major impact on the Afro-Colombian music known as champeta (2018: 14). Not unlike Ramito, Germán would also overlap with Puerto Rican nueva canción. In 1971, the duo Pepe y Flora, known for their protest music and their political activism in Puerto Rico and New York City, credited Germán as the author of their “Controversia,” released in their album Tengo Puerto Rico en mi corazón (Paredón 1971). Interestingly, the same duo had repurposed Ramito’s plena “Qué bonita bandera,” released by Ansonia Records in Acontecimientos (1971), by adding revolutionary anticolonial lyrics as can be heard En la lucha (Disco Libre circa 1972). So did nueva cancion group Taoné later in their album Cantos de lucha de Puerto Rico released in 1976 by Discos NCL.
In addition to Germán, Ansonia’s catalogue included Odilio González, the jíbaro from Lares, and Baltazar Carrero, artists of whom I knew very little. Between 1960 and 1962, Odilio released three albums with Ansonia: Ni de madera son buenas, El jibarito de Lares, Vol 2., and Ecos del pasado. At some point in the 1960s, after ceasing to work with the label, Odilio shifted from singing jíbaro music and plena to boleros. His boleros became “anthems of the jukebox” (Ramos 2019: 170; my translation), transforming Odilio into a major star in Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela and Dominican Republic.⁹ So impactful was this jibarito from Lares in Dominican culture, for example, that according to Miguel López Ortiz, he is considered a key figure in the emergence of Dominican bachata along with the Puerto Rican singers José Miguel Class (El Gallito de Manatí), Rafaelito Muñoz and Emilio Quiñones (2007 [1998]: 129). Other jíbaro artists who recorded with Ansonia include Toñín Romero, the aforementioned José Miguel Class, Joaquín Mouliert and Luis Miranda “Pico de Oro” who, according to the label’s catalogue—shared privately with the researcher—released at least five albums with Ansonia.
If some of the jíbaro singers recorded by Ansonia had shaped my musical imaginary growing up in Puerto Rico, and my adulthood in New York City, so had the cuatro players who recorded in these albums. Among these were Nieves Quintero, considered one of the most influential cuatro players of the twentieth century along with Ladislao “Ladí’ Martinez and Joaquín Rivera Gandía (see Sotomayor Perez 2013: 200-207). I was familiar with Nieves Quintero on account of his contributions to Puerto Rican nueva canción. He was the featured cuatro player in Group Taoné’s Canción del pueblo (Disco Libre 1972), and Andrés Jiménez’s first album Como el filo del machete (1972) where he played Ramito and Tuto Feliciano’s seis llanera to Jiménez’s aforementioned “¡Coño, despierta boricua!.” He also recorded several albums with Antonio Cabán Vale “El Topo,” the composer of Puerto Rico’s unofficial national anthem “Verde luz.” For Ansonia, Nieves Quintero recorded several albums with Ramito, among which 78 pueblos borincanos (1979); with Chuíto el de Bayamón he recorded Chuíto El Decano de los Cantores, Volume 7 (1966). According to Ansonia’s catalogue, Nieves Quintero also released several solo albums for the company, where he played danzas and mazurkas, in addition to an album entitled Método de guitarra y cuatro. The latter, which I was able to buy on Ebay, is a method for guitar and cuatro where Nieves Quintero teaches the listener how to tune the instrument and how to play the chords correctly.
I was also familiar with the aforementioned Ladislao “Ladí” Martínez. How much did I enjoy playing with Millito his mazurka “Natalia” in the characteristic waltz-like tempo, particularly the third section, when the minor key would give way to a radiant D major. The first cuatro player to play the contemporary five double string cuatro on the radio in 1922 during the inauguration of WKAQ, Puerto Rico’s first radio station (Sotomayor Pérez 2013: 203),¹⁰ Ladí was also a brilliant arranger. His cuatro arrangements in Chuíto y Natalia (Los decanos de los cantores) released in 1965 are mind blowing. Harmonized cuatros play a particular melodic material when Chuíto sings his décimas—the characteristic ten line octosyllabic poem sung to the seis¹¹—and another melody when Natalia Rivera replies with her own décimas. Furthermore, in order to accommodate the singers’ vocal registers, several songs modulate back and forth from one key to another.
Another cuatro player who recorded with Ansonia was Yomo Toro, often described as the Jimi Hendrix of the cuatro. During the 1970s, Yomo would become the most emblematic cuatro player of salsa thanks to his collaboration with Fania Records. Yomo’s incursion into the world of salsa was rather fortuitous. According to the cuatro player, he had been asked to bring an electric guitar to a recording session with Héctor Lavoe and Willie Colón. Instead, to Willie Colón’s delight, he brought the cuatro (see Mirós 2014: 379-380).¹² In Ansonia’s catalogue Yomo is credited as the requinto player in José Antonio Salamán’s Recuérdame (Year unknown).
Furthermore, according to Gerry Glass, the grandson of the label’s founder Ralph Pérez, cuatro player, teacher and artisan Efraín Ronda also recorded with Ansonia. He was purportedly one of the first artists to record for Ideal Record Sales—as the company was known when it was co-owned by Steven Rodríguez (Martínez Torre 2002: 47). Indeed, according to a label sheet for a 78 rpm release from Ideal Record Sales, shared by Ansonia Records, Efraín collaborated as a composer, though the details remain murky. He seems to have been a part of the Conjunto Ideal.¹³ Efraín’s importance for Puerto Rican culture cannot be overstated. He published the first method for the Puerto Rican cuatro in New York City in 1933. La Antorcha, written in English and Spanish—Efraín had Irish-American students (Murray Irizarry: 2014: 188)— taught how to play the four string cuatro (called “primitive”) and the contemporary version of the cuatro which consists of five double strings (dubbed “modern” in the method) (see Ruiz-Caraballo 2015: 36-37).
It is also worth highlighting that guitar and cuatro player Juan Sotomayor, one of the co-founders of El Proyecto del Cuatro Puertorriqueño, and author of Cuerdas de mi tierra (2013), also recorded with Ansonia in the 1950s as first guitar for the Trío Los Duques.¹⁴ Finally, Maso Rivera, known for a prolific career and for his use of cuatros of different sizes, also recorded with the label. According to Ansonia’s catalogue, he accompanied Ramito in El comienzo and Las raíces de Ramito (years unknown).
But while Ansonia’s jíbaro music catalogue already represented a major contribution to Puerto Rican cultural and political history, I soon discovered that there was much more to the label than the beautiful “le-lo-lai” that so moved me.
Footnotes
¹ Cordero’s concerto had been performed by Millito in Cuba in 1986 whereas Morales’s was premiered in Dayton, Ohio in 1997.
² Lucecita’s expression can be heard when she sings Pepe Castillo’s anti-imperialist song “La verdad” also known as “Le-lo-lai”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SslhaCi5Gvo
³ The article can be accessed here: https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-recording-preservation-board/documents/LamentoBorincano.pdf
⁴ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kwQVibL4u0
⁵ http://cuatro-pr.org/node/212. See also López Cruz 1967, for more on the seis.
⁶ Chuíto, for his part, was a supporter of the political ideal that sought to make Puerto Rico a state of the United States (Rodríguez León 1979: 58).
⁷ https://prpop.org/biografias/ernestina-reyes-la-calandria/
⁸ See Darde Gamayo: https://centropr.hunter.cuny.edu/centrovoices/chronicles/how-first-puerto-ricans-arrived-hawai’i-island
⁹ See: https://prpop.org/biografias/odilio-gonzalez/
¹⁰ It is worth noting, though, that Rivera Gandía was the first cuatro player to ever record with the five double-stringed cuatro in 1916 (Sotomayor Pérez 2013: 198).
¹¹ The décima follows the rhyme scheme abbaaccddc.
¹² Yomo seems to be referring to the album Asalto Navideño released by Fania Records in 1971.
¹³ Ewin Martínez Torre confirms that the Conjunto Ideal was a part of Ideal’s catalogue. The label also included the Conjunto de Pepo Talavera, Orquesta Tropical, Orquesta Havana Riverside, Orquesta de Alberto Rosario, Juan Peña y su Conjunto, Trío René Marqués, Cuarteto Becker and the Cuarteto Coicuría, among many others (2002: 47).
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Ethnomusicologist, singer-songwriter and poet, Mario Cancel-Bigay was born in Puerto Rico in 1982. He learned to play the Puerto Rican cuatro, the archipelago’s national guitar, at age twelve at public music school Libre de Música in San Juan. In 2005, he earned a B.A. in Modern Languages (Portuguese and French) from the University of Puerto Rico; in 2014, an M.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies at New York University; and in 2021, a PhD in the ethnomusicology program of Columbia University. His dissertation was entitled “Sounds that Fall Through the Cracks, and Other Silences and Acts of Love: Decoloniality and Anticolonialism in Puerto Rican Nueva Canción and Chanson Québécoise.” Currently, he is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Music of Columbia University. He is happily married to his Haitian-American wife Edline Jacquet, and is the proud father of a Puerto Rican-Haitian girl named Gabriela.