What Makes a Good Smithsonian Folkways Recording?

The Sound and Story of the Salvadoran Chanchona

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The joyous, homegrown, rough-hewn sounds of a chanchona ensemble playing Salvadoran cumbias and rancheras for their family and friends invite us to learn more about the story of Trinidad Lovo and his musician relatives. The music and its American setting are the jumping-off point to visit the back country of El Salvador—the hills of Morazán province that were the stronghold of leftist guerillas in the 1980s. Lovo’s home village of Pajigua Arriba in Guatajiagua municipality—“an ugly, ugly village with nothing but a few scattered houses,” in his own words—is still home to many Lovos, including a younger generation of chanchona musicians. Our team of three traveled the twisting, eroded, one-lane mountain roads that took us to the tough reality of the local people, the role of music in their lives, and insights into why many of them risk all to come to the U.S.A. We visited a chanchona performance by the Salvadoran branch of Los Hermanos Lovo in Guatajiagua in the wattle-and-daub hillside home of Trinidad Lovo’s father Francisco, the family patriarch. Through the musicians, we gained a better understanding of the difficulties of everyday life, of how the music offers respite from hardship, and of their brothers and cousins in the U.S.A. who continue to play chanchona music and send remittances to help the family back home.

In Guatajiagua and the entire Oriente (eastern) region of El Salvador east of the Lempa River, chanchona music is one of the greatest sources of joy and local cultural life. Though it has likely existed in the area for at least a century, it is all but unknown outside El Salvador. Government support for the music and scholarly research on it are virtually non-existent. Driven by two rustic violins accompanied by acoustic guitars, simple percussion, and the chanchona, the music is the soundtrack of regional humor and optimism. Long disdained by cultural elitists, its major ally has been a single radio station—Radio Chaparrastique—based in the city of San Miguel, in the heart of Oriente. In 1969, Radio Chaparrastique inaugurated a chanchona competition and festival that became an annual highlight of rural and poor people. This form of cultural resistance to outside commercial forces of change, and stubbornness to continue a home-grown form of cultural expression and identity, are also part of a storyline that needs telling.

To close, I have long felt that a recording with a good story as well as great music will have more impact in the world than one with only one or the other of these. The impact I hope for is to connect Salvadorans, particularly in the U.S.A., with a key touchstone of their ancestral home, their cultural heritage, and the living cultural and social ties that bind them together in dispersed locales far from their native land.  In a call-in radio show aired over dozens of radio stations by Radio Bilingüe highlighting the album’s release around Salvadoran Independence Day (September 15), the callers were nearly all Salvadorans, praising the availability of their roots music and hungering for more. (Click here to listen to the show) The recording “worked” when it reached the community in this way. I also hope that more non-Salvadorans will gain a greater familiarity with and insight into this American population group approaching two million people; I know of no other widely available educational resource on this roots musical tradition. If educators will use the music, liner notes, and accompanying website videos to learn and teach the “story” of Salvadoran immigration, creativity, and culture, then cultural barriers of misunderstanding separating us can be broached. Music is a heightened, powerful form of communication; pairing it with the power of a compelling story connects people to people as well as to music.

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