Guantanamera: A Song History

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"Guantanamera" is a guajira, and a plain, easily remembered one.[1] Its fame dates from the 1930s, when Joseíto Fernández, a singer from Havana, began performing it on his radio show, keeping the refrain about a country girl but making up new verses each week on the news of the moment.[2] By one account Fernández registered the song as his own in 1942.[1] Its authorship has been contested.[1][3] In 1993, after Fernández's death, the Guantánamo musician Herminio García Wilson claimed that he had created the first four bars in 1929, and a lawsuit was filed on his behalf against Fernández's heirs.[1][3] According to these two Cuban sources, the claim failed in the provincial court in Guantánamo and again before Cuba's Supreme Court, leaving Fernández as the credited composer, though a 2024 CubaNet opinion piece still calls the result unjust.[1][3]

View across a river to the low buildings of a town, with a bridge at the right

Guantanamo from across the Guantanamo River, Cuba, stereograph, 1899. The town of Guantánamo, shown for the song's title.

The Spanish-born Cuban composer Julián Orbón later replaced the improvised topical verses with stanzas from José Martí's Versos sencillos.[2][4][5] Sources differ on when he did this, from the late 1940s to around the time of the Cuban Revolution.[2][4] On July 15, 1962, at Camp Woodland's folk festival in Phoenicia, New York, Héctor Angulo, a counselor at the camp who was then studying music and would go on to a distinguished career as a Cuban composer, taught the song to Pete Seeger and talked through its words with him.[2][6] Seeger later performed it at Carnegie Hall and included it on a popular album, and audiences across the United States learned to join in.[2] One Cuban account dates his first American performance of it to 1963 and credits the idea of using Martí's verses to Orbón.[1] The vocal group the Sandpipers took the song up from Seeger, and their recording reached No. 9 in the United States and No. 7 in Britain, where it first charted in September 1966.[2][7]

Cubans treat it as an unofficial anthem, and its hundreds of recordings include versions by Celia Cruz and Wyclef Jean.[2] Shelley Stevens includes it in Baker's Dozen #6: World Music, a collection of thirteen mountain dulcimer arrangements from eight countries, all in DAD tuning with notation, tablature and lyrics, published by Fingers Of Steel.[8]

Our book that contains the song "Guantanamera"

Sources

  1. OnCuba News: "The tribulations of Guantanamera".
  2. GBH News / PRI's The World: "How Guantanamera went from Cuba's unofficial anthem to a Swedish recycling jingle".
  3. CubaNet: "El Diablo Wilson y la mayor injusticia en la historia musical cubana".
  4. OnCuba News: "Guajira guantanamera".
  5. Britannica: "Guantanamera".
  6. University at Albany, M.E. Grenander Special Collections & Archives: "Folk Music of the Catskills, July 15, 1962".
  7. Official Charts: "Guantanamera" by the Sandpipers.
  8. Fingers Of Steel: "Shelley Stevens, Baker's Dozen #6: World Music".
  9. Image: Guantanamo from across the Guantanamo River, Cuba, stereograph, 1899. Library of Congress.

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