A Cuban love-song style travelled from Santiago's guitars all the way to Vietnam
The bolero was born among wandering guitar-playing troubadours in Santiago de Cuba, and its founding composer never wrote his songs down. It became Latin America's great romantic song, got sold abroad as rumba by mistake, and ended up so loved in South Vietnam that the victorious communist government banned it in 1975.
Despite the name, it has no link to the old Spanish dance called bolero. In the last quarter of the 19th century, itinerant trovadores in eastern Cuba earned a living singing to their own guitars, and Pepe Sánchez, untrained but gifted, wrote the first bolero, Tristezas, in 1883. He composed in his head, so most of his songs vanished; about two dozen survive because friends and pupils copied them. What set the bolero apart from the simpler canción was its polished, poetic lyrics about love.
It spread fast. Sindo Garay took it to the Dominican Republic in 1895, and early radio stations popularised it in Mexico around 1915. By the 1930s it was standard fare across Latin America, especially after Trío Matamoros made the bolero-son famous. In Spain, blended with Andalusian music, it became the bolero moruno. Its flexibility let it merge with almost anything, spawning the bolero-mambo, the 1950s bolero-cha and, in the 1960s, the Dominican bachata.
The rumba confusion began in the early 1930s, when promoters wanted one simple label for Cuban music and hung it even on The Peanut Vendor, which was really a son-pregón. The ballroom rumba is in fact a bolero, danced at about 120 beats per minute with three steps to four beats. American Rhythm competitions keep a separate bolero, slower at 96 to 104 beats and borrowing the rise and fall of the waltz.
Vietnam adopted a slower, enka-like version in the 1930s. The Viet Minh despised its sentimental poetry, and after the war this yellow music, as opposed to state-backed red music, was outlawed. Emigrants carried it to America, the ban eased in 1986, and television contests such as Boléro Idol now feature once-forbidden songs.
Source: Bolero
