Hispanic Folk Music of New Mexico and the Southwest: A Self-Portrait of a People

Prologue

PROLOGUE Enrique Lamadrid John Donald Robb loved the soulful music of Los Pastores like a child loves a lullaby. These Christmas plays with shepherds, angels, devils , and the Holy Family in search of epiphany are performed all over greater Mexico on both sides of the border. Robb visited and recorded all of them he could find. He sang A la ru, the cradlesong of the Holy Child, to his own grandchildren. His New Mexican folk opera Little Jo began with the song and featured two dozen others he learned from his fieldwork . He hoped that his opera and Joy Comes to Deadhorse, the musical that followed, could become as popular as Oklahoma!, but they were performed only a handful of times. Yet his hopes proved to be well founded. When rights to the musical were sold and the lyrics de-Hispanicized, it morphed into The Fantasticks , the longest-running off-Broadway musical ever. After this, Robb turned his attention to the larger legacy—his life's work of collecting, composing, and performing. One of his last visits to the University of New Mexico was to see Filomena Baca's longterm production of La Gran Pastorela de Belen, hosted by the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology . The curators graciously placed two chairs well forward so that Robb and his wife, Harriet, were literally part of the play. The cast surrounded them as fellow shepherds and angels and regaled them with song in a touching tribute, a musical farewell. We still remember that ephemeral moment. But Robb's tribute to Nuevomexicano folk music is more substantial, as borne out in these pages and scores, compiled as Hispanic Folk Music of New Mexico and the Southwest:A SelfPortrait of a People. The publication of a facsimile edition of a book well after its initial publication is a veritable sign that it has become a classic. John Donald Robb's magnum opus has held its own over more than a quarter century of scrutiny by critics and consultation by musicians and scholars. Now that the field recordings on which it is based are instantly available on the website of the Center for Southwest Research at UNM's Zimmerman Library,6 there is new interest in the massive collection, which is both a snapshot and landmark of the mid-twentiethcentury regional folk music landscape. Previously , the only available sampling of the vast archive was a single LP issued by Folkways Records in 1952. The musical scores and transcriptions could have been reset electronically and translations improved for the new edition, but the basic genre-based scholarship still stands up, even though it has been long surpassed by performance studies and more thorough ethnomusicological analyses. The long-awaited book was widely and thoroughly reviewed after University of Oklahoma Press published it in 1980, a good measure of its broad impact. Kudos from border folklorist John O. West and folk singer/teacher Jenny Wells Vincent were soon forthcoming. Merle Simmons, the great scholar-historian of the corridos of the Mexican Revolution, was also generous with his praise. But the in-depth critiques of Robb came from Texas and the camp of Americo Paredes, although the don of border folklore and music never weighed in personally. Tejano ethnomusicologist Manuel Pena correctly characterizes Robb's overall approach as textual/descriptive rather than ethnographic/analytical. He appreciates the fascinating variety of indita and corrido ballads in the anthology, but asserts that more complete historical information is needed to assess the very genres through which people express their sense of history. Robb also recorded a number of popular songs without discussing the dynamic interaction between commercial and folk music. James Leger, a New Mexican student of Paredes, commends the encyclopedic breadth of the collection, but he laments its thin contextual documentation and scant analysis , which he attributes to Robb's ambitions as a composer and his background in Western art music. While musical transcriptions are abundant , they tend to simplify melodies and other 6. www.econtent.unm.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection /RobbFieldRe. XV PROLOGUE more complex performance features such as folk polyphony, or harmony singing, and widespread double-stop playing on the folk violin. Robb articulates a romantic view of folk music that emphasizes its archaic qualities, values Spanish over Mexican origins, and overlooks the role of popular music in the cultural process . Curiously, rival collector Ruben Cobos never reviewed Robb's book, even though his own archive is frequently referenced in its pages. Contextual documentation is notoriously limited in the Cobos...