The Great Woman Singer: Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican Music
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The Great Woman Singer: Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican Music
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822373469 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/06/2017 |
| Series: | Refiguring American Music |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 312 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Great Woman Singer
Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican Music
By Licia Fiol-Matta
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2017 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7346-9
CHAPTER 1
GETTING OFF ... THE NATION
In a 1973 interview, the mercurial Puerto Rican singer, entertainer, and entrepreneur Myrta Silva stated, "I'm a winner. I only failed at the beginning of my career ... ever since I became a public figure, I have never once failed." Despite the singer's confident declaration, Silva was well aware of the entanglement between "figure" and "failure." She learned that failure was always around the corner when she set foot in New York City as a barely teenaged immigrant, circa 1938. She emigrated, she said, to become an artist. Born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, in 1923, Silva lived in poverty in the big city along with thousands of Puerto Rican and Latino immigrants, working an average of twenty-five revue shows a week as a means of support and a way to initiate her music career.
In a milieu Ruth Glasser lucidly describes as dominated by U.S. recording companies and their demand for "ethnic music," Silva advertised her talent to RCA Victor as a guaracha singer. She staked her claim on her special affinity with the genre by describing herself as matching the genre's temperament in personality terms: "On my own initiative, I went to the RCA Victor offices, and asked to speak to the head of the Latin department, making it clear that if he did not see me they would lose out on the best guaracha singer there was, of this new Latin American genre." Approximately three decades after Silva's daring stunt, in 1966, TV Radio Mirror would run a bilingual spread on Silva, "The Fat Golden One/La Gorda de Oro."
In 1939, a young lady walked into radio station WARD in Brooklyn, said she was a great star and so impressed people that she was put to work singing and doing commercials. After her first show, for which she was paid one dollar, she sent herself one hundred fan letters. The young lady was Myrta Silva and she was thirteen years old. Today, Myrta doesn't have to send any fan letters to herself, since she has one of the most devoted audiences in television. Myrta's show, An Hour with You, is aired live over Newark's WNJU-TV, the New York metropolitan area's first commercial UHF television. And that hour — Monday evening from 9 to 10 — is seen by over 90 per cent of the area's Spanish-speaking viewers.
In 1967, Silva was awarded the TV Radio Mirror prize for producing TV's Top Variety Show in New York, and WNJU-TV received the award for Outstanding Programming in the Broadcasting Arts, for The Myrta Silva Show. Silva had become a beloved representative of the Puerto Rican community in New York of the 1960s. While hers was a Spanish-language show, the prize was for all New York–area television, not just Latino TV. Puerto Rican newspapers ran the news, citing the magazine's circulation of six million and the prize's standing as the oldest such prize at the time in the U.S. radio and TV industry. Silva is quoted as saying,
I accept this prize in the name of all us hispanos who live in New York City, so that it may serve as an incentive, so that you can see that your sacrifices and struggles have not been in vain. I am humbly grateful, because, above all things, this prize equals the recognition of Puerto Rican talent wherever we may find ourselves. Personally, I can say this is the greatest prize I have received in my twenty-seven years in show business. Most significant is the fact that this prize has been awarded to me in this city of New York, the greatest city on earth, and where I started my career going hungry and earning a miserable salary of fifteen dollars a month.
From the beginning of her career, she had cared about Latinos in the city. She had been one of them. Silva debuted at the Atlantic Theater in Brooklyn in 1939, became a regular in New York venues like the Teatro Hispano, Teatro Puerto Rico, and Carnegie Hall, and kept a residence so she could maintain New York as the home base of her artistic operations. Among her many leadership actions in her crowning, 1960s years, she joined a protest against Playboy magazine for running a spread offensive to Cuban women and led a protest against Ed Sullivan in 1968 for derisive remarks about Puerto Rican women in one of his TV broadcasts.
While she triumphed in New York City, and pioneered Latino television in the United States, her beloved Puerto Rico had become viciously split about its biggest star. Viewers were quick to question her national allegiances and harbored an uncomfortable-to-repulsed attitude toward her unmarried, yet sexual status. Silva's declaration of her greatest love — for her mother, Mamá Yeya — surfaced on occasion as palliative: "Es lesbiana, pero buena hija" [She's a lesbian, true, but she's a good daughter]. Other viewers simply went into panic mode, ordering their children to "turn off the TV; we don't watch that dyke in our house." The epithet of the Fat Golden One encapsulates the quandary of simultaneous hatred and adoration: Being called fat in Puerto Rico was completely insulting, and certainly desexualizing, but the adjectival phrase "de oro" conveyed feelings of appreciation and a statement about sterling character.
Even today, music critics and journalists use this soubriquet that Silva resented, in addition to the infantilizing diminutive gordita or nuestra gordita. Beyond these problematic appropriations and rejections, perusing music history books yields the conclusion that Silva, arguably the single most successful Puerto Rican twentieth-century pop star, appears as a footnote to a history narrated around male figures, a history written in lockstep with national-popular teleologies of cultural identity and progress. Figures like Silva have merited only a few lines or, at best, cursory mentions in brief articles devoted to women artists or composers. How can this narrative be written otherwise? What did Silva crystallize as an artist, and how did it happen? What are the stakes of this career and why has its illustriousness been all but forgotten? This chapter steps back in time to provide an archive-based genealogy to contextualize this shocking oblivion — an account based on music culture, not patriarchal and heteronormative fantasies.
Silva had a developed and conceptual understanding of her voice. At her most memorable, she used this vehicle against enforced strictures of sexual and gender behavior, targeting dominant bourgeois morality. She was never malleable and saleable. Silva believed completely in her artistic, individual, and social autonomy while refusing to be expelled from belonging and her right to have opinions, no matter how unpopular. Silva's triumph despite gender strictures (including her accomplishments in the business arena of the music industry) made the establishment very uncomfortable indeed. This discomfort was displaced onto insidious characterizations of her personality and artistic temperament. The few authoritative accounts of Myrta Silva's career have contributed to naturalize the dominant culture's construction of Silva. This gendered writing hampers Puerto Rican music criticism more generally and becomes onerous in the case of Latin American women artists of the twentieth century, who have received scant critical attention but many sexist interpretations.
Concretely, Silva was accepted into the guaracha and marginalized in the bolero. Incredibly, as a songwriter of intimate, reflective music, Silva was constantly under suspicion as a fake or, worse, a thief. She responded by consciously playing with an equivocation not of her making, namely, the inappropriate relationship the public established between her person and her persona, on the one hand, and music critics between her comedic singing and her bolero songwriting. From the start, she worked in two parallel voices. One was the party, ethnic, singing voice of guaracha (where Silva's own contributions were often erased in legal credits) and the other the Pan-Americanist, universalist voice of the bolero (a songwriting voice recognized legally but from which Silva was discouraged as a singer).
As an individual, Silva was certainly stung by the public reduction of her musicianship and musicality. Addressing negative comments about her vocal instrument decades after her first hits, Silva retorted, "I've done pretty well with my lousy voice." Referencing her desire to sing the famous bolero "Júrame" by the acclaimed Mexican songwriter María Grever, she quoted a conversation between the two. Silva reportedly told Grever, "Since I don't have much of a voice, I can't sing some of your songs," to which Grever responded, "You have what it takes to sing my songs, and that is heart, not a great voice." Throughout her career, Silva called attention to voice as an entity that did not have to be only or primarily musically virtuosic in order to command an audience and own a song. Instead, she put into play a virtuosity that José Esteban Muñoz has linked to queer artistry: the brilliant, conceptual staging of negativity and failure.
During her first decade of work, Silva developed a rich musical repertoire, covering guaracha, rumba, son, and bolero. She cut her chops as a percussionist and bandleader. She worked under contract to Victor on hundreds of recordings from 1938 to 1948. She later jokingly referred to her identity in most of them as "Vocal Refrain," indicating an unrecorded history of musical labor. In the 1930s, she recorded several 78s with local bands in New York City until she met Rafael Hernández and he signed her to perform with his group, Cuarteto Victoria, in 1939. The standard tale is that Hernández "discovered" Silva, thus birthing her musical career. The discovery narrative, a common trope in the writing of women's artistic careers, might unwittingly obscure Silva's initiative, ambition, talent, and musical labor prior to getting her first big break. It was Silva's parody of "Ahora seremos felices" (We shall be happy, at long last), her very first RCA recording (with the Julio Roqué Orchestra), that drew Hernández's attention. Upon meeting him at a Roqué dinner party, Silva told him on the spot that his music for "Ahora seremos felices" was "a piece of crap" and that he should be thankful that she had written new lyrics. (The adult Silva spoke of her parodic lyrics as "abominable" and expressed regret at having "assassinated" Hernández's song, an action she ascribed to her youth. Yet the parody works brilliantly.)
Hernández knew he had found a musical gem. He hired her as Cuarteto Victoria's female lead on a tour to Puerto Rico and Colombia, single-handedly raising the group's profile exponentially throughout the Americas. Even at such a young age, Silva had a canny understanding of what makes a music performance work and was an innate talent scout (for example, she discovered Bobby Capó singing in Old San Juan, and it was at her bidding that he became male lead for Victoria for a brief stint, launching his own, illustrious career in Latino pop). Hernández met Silva as an impossibly young female migrant who had become an artist against all odds. Silva earned ten dollars a record with RCA and five dollars a show with the Cuarteto Victoria. The older Silva vividly recalled these years:
I'm an artist thanks to God's gift to me, namely, my stage presence, which I learned by working in theater. At age thirteen I became a presenter without ever having done it, simply because dire need forced me to. I was asked: do you know how to host a show? And I said: Are you kidding? I'm the best! But, have you hosted a show? I'm telling you, since I was born! In truth, I had never set foot on a stage. But I did then, and I was hired, and I spent three months as the MC of a show in the Teatro Hispano, on 116 and Fifth Avenue, yes, in the place where children were skinned alive. I was a child, and I survived; I'm still alive.
The gritty, hypersexual, and harsh delivery that later listeners reflexively came to associate with Myrta Silva's personality grew out of an intersection between her naturally subversive temperament and the spaces she first worked in, where sentimentality and romanticism were completely out of place. Even at thirteen years old, Silva understood how critical persona was to success. She read the guaracha as framing especially well in the context of the rising recording industry, with its hunger for an ethnic Latino market along with dominant, predatory male fantasies of the woman singer.
Silva had gained fame by the time she began recording under sole billing around 1942. For decades, she maintained a unique and ultimately successful focus on building a whole enterprise aimed at financial and artistic independence. She achieved artistic independence in a few short years. RCA Victor paid tribute to Silva in Buenos Aires in 1950 as their best-selling artist for the Latino/Latin American market in 1947, 1948, and 1949. Financially speaking, however, things had been quite difficult throughout the 1940s, despite her fame. It was a time when the music industry extracted profit from underpaid artists and songwriters pretty much at its will.
Most specialists regard the 1940s as Silva's finest musically. She recorded dozens of 78 records during this time and had her greatest hits. When Silva started adding her cunning improvisations to song lyrics, her contributions to lewd songs went beyond simply acting the part of the Lolita that had been the basis of her early hits. As the 1940s wore on, she wrote elaborate recitative segments and provided song sketches to Cuban composers, most notably Ñico Saquito (Antonio Fernández). The child sex object figuration gave way to a fully developed, autonomous creation with no easy categorization, defying concepts of authorship confined to the legal songwriter.
In 1943 Silva became the first woman timbalera certified by the American Federation of Music, quite an achievement. She was a self-taught musician que tenía la clave (could follow the beat, usually 3/2). Silva's percussive approach to voice, particularly in her interpretations of guarachas, constitutes a breakthrough for female singing. She was an extraordinary sonera and, adding to her innate musical ear, understood the conceptual density of cadence (known by its various vernacular names, such as el tumbaíto and mi cantao). Playing the timbales, soneando, and bandleading: These musical capabilities inched her toward the masculine position in pop (and let's not forget that this was, decidedly, a man's world). Except for the occasional all-girl band, Silva's positioning was simply unheard of. Her genius lay in her uncanny and differently gendered ability to connect with the audience beyond passing entertainment value. She describes it as a capacity for improv: "I've always worked without a script. I am only great if the audience is. If the audience isn't into it, neither am I. ... As we say in musical jargon, I work ad lib. The band can't keep time when I work, it can't bend me to its will, because I work ad lib."
When Silva moved back to her native Puerto Rico around 1950, she achieved her goal of financial independence, becoming an influential and famous producer, TV host, and media personality. What is less known is that she helped scores of artists in their careers. She unfailingly supported new talent and featured all kinds of music and musicians in her show, from pop stars Olga Guillot, Eartha Kitt, and La Lupe to classical pianists Liberace and Jesús María Sanromá. Silva's musical breadth is simply remarkable. If to this we add her genius for the comedic in music performance, which she developed beyond music performance into television and print journalism, expanding the reach of her voice, a picture emerges of a figure far past her analytical due in Latin American and Latino pop and gender studies of music and ethnicity.
Silva was always regarded as "all body," and her singing coded along this presumptive excess. Initially the Lolita figure, she became the worldly sexual bombshell, and eventually and unwillingly morphed into the disgusting object, bodily signified through the culture's scandalous reaction to an overweight woman past her thirties who continued to be sexually explicit and outspoken. Figure 1.1 is an album cover featuring a very early, undated publicity photograph of Silva. Silva sports the tools of her trade, the maracas, and stands in front of a prop (what appears to be a fake conga). Obviously, both instruments immediately call forth consumption-driven latinidad, a spectacle of ethnic identity. Silva is the image of party, excess, and fun, a visual portrayal amplified by the inclusion of percussive instruments. The conga appears as a phallic visual prop, not an instrument she played competently; a flimsy-looking column (a frequent item in contemporary portraits of women singers) visually underscores the patriarchal framing. Silva was an expert maraca player, but the photographer probably had in mind the parallel between the maracas and breasts, a common sexual pun in the contemporary imaginary to this day. The maracas join dance music, Silva's body, and Silva's given name to sex and good times. Her name is scribbled on the side of the conga drum, taking on a life of its own independently of how Silva's body is framed, decisively aligning Myrta Silva with percussion in a conceptual, musical manner. Although her voice's incorrigibility is inseparable from Silva's success since her earliest artistic work, it's de-emphasized in this shot. Silva's mouth is closed as she grins.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Great Woman Singer by Licia Fiol-Matta. Copyright © 2017 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction. I Am Nothing 1
1. Getting Off . . . the Nation 16
2. So What If She's Black? 67
3. Techne and the Lady 121
4. The Thinking Voice 172
Epilogue. Nothing Is Something 226
Notes 233
Bibliography 269
Index 279
What People are Saying About This
"In this book Licia Fiol-Matta brilliantly engages the complex politics that unfold in the performances, vocal nuances, lives, and times of four extraordinary Puerto Rican female pop singers. The intense 'thinking voice' in her writing re/sounds the conceptual density of the singers she investigates, whose complex figurations are primarily approached through a psychoanalytic study of the voice. Her detailed historical research and analytical incisiveness uncover the many crucibles of the vocal archive generating a rich acoustic tapestry that constitutes a remarkable transformation of feminist, queer, and colonial music scholarship."
"In this book Licia Fiol-Matta brilliantly engages the complex politics that unfold in the performances, vocal nuances, lives, and times of four extraordinary Puerto Rican female pop singers. The intense 'thinking voice' in her writing re/sounds the conceptual density of the singers she investigates, whose complex figurations are primarily approached through a psychoanalytic study of the voice. Her detailed historical research and analytical incisiveness uncover the many crucibles of the vocal archive generating a rich acoustic tapestry that constitutes a remarkable transformation of feminist, queer, and colonial music scholarship."
"In this rigorous and original read, Licia Fiol-Matta puts a welcome nail in the masculine script dominating conversations about 'Latin' popular music and Puerto Rico’s musical history. Her critical biographical approach and her archive of the voice provide new standards for interdisciplinary research, while her treatment of female pop stars such as the giant, but largely obviated Lucecita Benítez, is simply moving and beautiful."
"In this rigorous and original read, Licia Fiol-Matta puts a welcome nail in the masculine script dominating conversations about 'Latin' popular music and Puerto Rico’s musical history. Her critical biographical approach and her archive of the voice provide new standards for interdisciplinary research, while her treatment of female pop stars such as the giant, but largely obviated Lucecita Benítez, is simply moving and beautiful."