Payadores on Record: The First Tango Recordings of Buenos Aires

Portrait photograph of the payador Gabino Ezeiza, about 1890

Before tango had orchestras on record, payadores such as Gabino Ezeiza, Higinio Cazón and Ángel Villoldo sang the first tangos into the recording horn, and a collector's cassette brought those discs back.

At a glance

  • El taita, a tango by the payador Higinio Cazón, sung by himself with Manuel Campoamor at the piano: Zonophone 13786, 1905
  • Gabino Ezeiza (1858–1916), hailed as the greatest improviser of his time, recorded his Tango Patagones for Zonophone in 1905
  • The oldest disc on the cassette is Ángel Villoldo singing his tango El pimpollo, a 7-inch Odeon of 1904

Fuente original: «Los Payadores, Vol. I - II» (Los Payadores, vol. I–II (cassette)) · Resumen en español ↓

Fuente original: «Siempre el tango... en el disco - Programa Nro. 1» (Siempre el tango… en el disco, programa n.º 1 (CD)) · Resumen en español ↓

Long before tango had its great orchestras, its first voices on record belonged to the payadores: improvising singers who accompanied themselves on the guitar, sang in verse duels and toured the cafés, circuses and country towns of Argentina and Uruguay. Some of the oldest tangos ever recorded were sung by them, around 1905, into the horn of a recording machine. The collector Héctor Lucci gathered these voices from his own cylinders and discs on a two-volume cassette, Los Payadores, whose booklet appeared on the old Club de Tango website. Its track list, with label, disc number and year for every item, is a small reference work on the beginnings of recorded tango history. This page follows that list and checks it against independent sources.

Singers who improvised in verse

The best known of them was Gabino Ezeiza, born in 1858 and, according to Héctor Ángel Benedetti’s portrait on Todotango, the most extraordinary improviser of his time. Benedetti describes contests that lasted for nights, such as the one with Pablo J. Vázquez in Pergamino that began on 13 October 1894, and the Saludo a Paysandú that Ezeiza made up to win over a hostile audience in Uruguay during a duel with Juan de Nava. Benedetti also notes that Ezeiza recorded from 1905 onwards for Zonophone, Columbia and ERA, and that he died on the day Hipólito Yrigoyen took office as president, in 1916.

Lucci’s booklet gives the other names: Higinio Cazón, José María Silva, Arturo de Nava, José Madariaga, Juan Pedro López, Ambrosio Río, Sócrates Figoli, Arturo Mathon, Ángel Greco, Evaristo Barrios and others. In his introduction he explains that two groups dominated the first recordings: singers and payadores who also recorded tangos, and performers of monologues and gaucho recitations.

How their voices reached the disc

Lucci described the technical side in an article later published on Todotango. The first discs with Argentine criollo numbers appeared in Buenos Aires in 1902; the waxes were recorded in the city and turned into matrices in Germany. In 1904, he writes, the Zonophone company recorded 10-inch discs in Buenos Aires with Ezeiza, Cazón, Madariaga, De Nava and Villoldo, which were pressed in Germany in 1905. Cylinders and discs coexisted until 1929. The machines behind all this, and the contest between them, are the subject of our article on the phonograph and the gramophone.

The first tangos of the payadores

The tracks on the cassette that matter most for tango are these:

Villoldo, born in 1861 and dead in 1919, stands between the two worlds. Néstor Pinsón writes on Todotango that he mixed with payadores, sang his stories to the guitar in cafés and went to France with Alfredo Eusebio Gobbi and Flora Rodríguez to record for the Buenos Aires store Gath & Chaves.

Much more than tango

Most of the 41 tracks are not tangos. There are milongas, waltzes, estilos and cifras (two forms of rural song), sung verse duels such as Pico a pico by Mathon and Francisco Raya (Columbia, 1912) and A dos laos by Evaristo Barrios (Victor, 1932), monologues such as Juan Pedro López’s El rebenque fatal (Nacional, 1922), and a two-part dramatic scene, El fusilamiento de Juan Cruz Cuello, by Mathon’s company (Odeon, 1932). Ezeiza is heard in his own Saludo a Paysandú (Artigas, 1913) and in an estilo, El gaucho (ERA, 1912). Two tracks by Sócrates Figoli come from Edison cylinders of 1906, and Ambrosio Río’s improvised Obsequio de Atlanta (1914) was never issued at the time. A guest from the opera world closes the first volume: the Basque tenor Florencio Constantino, who also appears on a collector’s CD about the Teatro Colón, sings a popular vidalita for Columbia in 1909.

The cassette

Los Payadores came out in two volumes, 22 and 19 tracks, recorded between 1904 and 1938 and sold at 25 pesos each. Lucci says the technical data were taken from the original recordings in his private collection, and that he had long planned to let listeners hear voices otherwise locked in cylinders and discs. The booklet credits Sony, EMI and BMG for the Columbia, Odeon and Victor tracks. According to Néstor Pinsón and Ricardo García Blaya on Todotango, Lucci also released the last album of the singer Osvaldo Ribó, recorded in 1999.

Siempre el tango… en el disco

The same pages offered a CD of a different kind: the first programme of the radio show Siempre el tango, put on disc complete with its spoken commentaries. Seventeen recordings alternate with seventeen short talks. The idea, the presenters explain, was to rescue recordings that had become documents and to include every Argentine genre related to tango, since its first popularisers were the actors of the sainete in circuses and creole theatres, followed by payadores and folk singers.

The programme runs from a music box of 1880 playing a habanera to Hugo del Carril singing a payador’s song to Juan Perón, words by Homero Manzi, in 1949. On the way it presents Alfredo Gobbi’s La crisis, recorded in France in 1907 according to the notes; La morocha by Saborido and Villoldo, sung by Lola Membrives with Antonio Reynoso at the piano (1909); José Razzano singing Desde el alero (1923); Francisco Canaro’s group with the singer Nerina Valyer (1923); Julio De Caro’s orchestra in Nobleza (1925); Ignacio Corsini’s tango Hipólito Irigoyen, recorded on 14 February 1927; Osvaldo Fresedo, Elvino Vardaro’s sextet, Atahualpa Yupanqui and the Servidio brothers’ bandoneon trio; and Héctor Palacios singing the waltz Llevame viento by Aristóbulo Bottero and Roberto Gil, recorded on 11 May 1937. La morocha had been recorded before: the Discography of American Historical Recordings lists a Victor session by Flora Rodríguez de Gobbi with piano on 3 August 1906. According to the notes, all tracks were transferred with the original machines, discs and cylinders.

Sources