Mexican corridos: Enchantment with ballads leads to CD

DANIEL BUCKLEY
Tucson Citizen
April 11, 2002
Jim Griffith isn't sure exactly when he heard his first corrido - the Mexican ballad.
He's pretty sure it was the late 1950s or early '60s. But he was well aware of the art form by the early '60s when he was living in Colima, Mexico. There was a memorable couple who used to play at the Magdalena Fiesta, and they knew a particular corrido Griffith wanted to hear.
"He was a very Indian-looking guitar player and she was a very blonde, very European-looking accordion player and singer," Griffith recalls. "He looked very rural and she looked very urban."
It wasn't just the contrast in their looks, he recalls.
"They charged me double their usual fee because it (the corrido) was so long."
The style stuck with him.
"I'm a sucker for a story anyway, and I'm a sucker for a ballad in English," the retired founder of the University of Arizona's Southwest Folklore Center says. "In there somewhere is the fact that I'm a sucker for the very unemotional, detached ballad style in whatever language it is. Traditional singing corrido style in Spanish is totally different from ranchera belting."
In 1976, Griffith was at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. for the Festival of American Folklife's Southwest Week. There he met a man from Blythe, Calif. - Alfredo M. Figueroa Jr. - a corrido composer who had worked with Chicano activist Cesar Chavez, among other folks. In 1990, their paths crossed again, and Figueroa remembered Griffith's work. He introduced him to a wonderful corrido singer from Caborca, Son., named Luís Méndez, whom Griffith scrambled to record. Little did he realize but he had just laid down the first tracks of what would become a collection of corridos from this region - the just-released "Heroes and Horses: Corridos From the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands" (Smithsonian-Folkways 40475 - see the CD review on page 5).
"We got about eight to 10 corridos, many of which were good performances of real interesting rare corridos," Griffith recalls of the sessions in Méndez's Caborca home.
With field recordist Jack Loeffler, Griffith gradually began selectively snagging corridos here and there.
So what is a corrido?
"A corrido is a Mexican song that tells a story that quite often is about a real-life event," Griffith says.
Around since the mid-19th century, and in full flower by the turn of the century, these characteristically detached story songs became sort of a musical newspaper. There are tons of them about the Mexican Revolution, and in recent years, the topic has turned to drug runners in popular "narcocorridos" by such superstar norteño bands as Los Tigres del Norte (see Elijah Wald's recent book "Narcocorrido: A Journey Into the Music of Drugs, Guns and Guerrillas," Rayo Press 2002). But that wasn't what Griffith was searching for. He was looking for corridos that tell the story of Sonoran life.
"We had to include mining if we could find anything involving mining," he says. "I wanted to include the sea because the sea is a neglected, in folklore at least, part of Sonora. I wanted to include the Revolución but I wanted it to be a Sonoran Revolución corrido."
And, of course, horse races, which are an essential part of life in this area. With a little luck and perhaps some divine intervention, he managed to find 16 corridos that fit the bill. And with a little more luck, he found people who knew what they meant, and was able to cobble together fuller stories than their lyrics alone attest. The enhanced CD, when placed in either a Mac or PC computer, gives the full lyrics and translations, and plays fine in any standard CD or DVD player. It also includes a 30-page booklet on corridos, the performers and the historical framework of the songs. The result is both a pleasure to listen to and a living history lesson.
Along with Méndez, Griffith found a variety of talent who knew the songs. Local singer Antonio Federico, originally from Sasabe, was one of the first tapped, backed by Hipólito "Polo" Romero, Paul Romero, Francisco Moreno and Alfonso Molina. Federico's cousin, Francisco Federico and his accompanist, Antonio Gonzáles, both of the Altar Valley of Sonora, were also recorded. Tucsonans Bobby Benton and Oscar Gonzáles added their talents in sessions in Griffith's living room, while the Bahia Kino and Sonora norteño band Los Ribereños del Golfo (The Gulf Shoreliners) recorded their fishing corridos in an abandoned hotel dining room in Kino Bay.
"I'm happy with the quality of the performances," Griffith says. "I'm happy with the spread of singing styles as well as accompaniment styles because there really is a difference. There's some straight norteño singing. There's some very old-fashioned, perfectly straightforward solo and harmony singing."
And in the end, though Griffith will likely be steamed I said it, the collection also reflects the ideals of the man who brought it into being.
"I always function on an intellectual level, an aesthetic level and a romantic level," he comments at one point, almost as offhandedly as one of the corrido singers. "They're awfully hard to get unscrambled."