Learning From Each Other’s Oppression: Latin American Revolutionary Nationalist Music in the Liner Notes of Paredon Records
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Learning From Each Other’s Oppression: Latin American Revolutionary Nationalist Music in the Liner Notes of Paredon Records
Articles

Learning From Each Other’s Oppression: Latin American Revolutionary Nationalist Music in the Liner Notes of Paredon Records

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Jackson Albert Mann examines the debate that took place over nationalism, internationalism, and musical aesthetics in the liner notes to albums of Latin American revolutionary nationalist music released by US-based, left-wing record label, Paredon Records, between 1969 and 1985. 

Fidel Castro, Barbara Dane, and Daniel Viglietti during the 1967 Encuentro de la Canción Protesta, Havana, Cuba.

Introduction

Paredon Records was a musical pillar of the later period of the United States’ New Left. Founded in 1969 by US musician and communist activist Barbara Dane,1 the label operated for a decade and a half. Over this period, Paredon produced over three dozen full-length albums of socialist, communist, and revolutionary nationalist political music from movements around the world, as well as recordings by numerous left-wing musical groups from the US. A plurality of the label’s releases came from revolutionary nationalist movements in Latin America. 

The special attention Paredon paid to the music of Latin American revolutionary nationalism was primarily a consequence of Dane’s political and personal connections to the post-Revolutionary Cuban government. When well-known communist folk singer Pete Seeger declined an invitation to tour Cuba in 1966, Dane was tapped as his replacement.2 Dane’s reception was positive and she was invited to return to Cuba for the 1967 Encuentro de la Canción Protesta, an international gathering of left-wing folk musicians hosted by the Cuban state.3 Held concurrently with the first meeting of the Cuban-led Organization of Latin American Solidarity (OLAS), the Encuentro was designed as the cultural auxiliary to the Cuban state’s efforts at articulating foreign policy and building diplomatic ties with revolutionary movements and sympathetic governments.4 While attending the conference, Dane met and befriended many Cuban cultural policy-makers, as well as some of Latin America’s most dynamic revolutionary musicians. These relationships would become primary contacts through which Dane acquired recordings for Paredon.

Paredon releases included extended liner notes. The bulk of these were composed by Dane and her husband Irwin Silber, former editor of the left-wing folk music journal Sing Out! These essays interpreted and historically contextualized the musical selections for a sympathetic US-based audience. For many US leftists during this period, Paredon Records’ releases were a key medium through which they developed an emotional connection with Latin American revolutionary nationalism. The liner note essays of Dane and her associates, then, are key to understanding how organizers, activists, and sympathizers of the US New Left understood the politics of musical activity in Latin American revolutionary nationalist movements, as well as the underlying political character of Latin American revolutionary nationalism itself. 

Paredon’s Influence

There is widespread evidence for Paredon’s reach in the US New Left. Dane and Silber, born in 1927 and 1925 respectively, were both former members of the American Communist Party (CPUSA) and well-connected in the broader world of the US labor and socialist movements. The label’s releases were advertised widely in the US left-wing and alternative press.5 Of key importance were the positive reviews that Paredon’s releases garnered from left-wing publications.6 For instance, reviewing Paredon’s first three records for The Militant in 1971, David Thorstad glowingly described them as “stunning,” “brimming with dynamism,” and “brilliant,” respectively.7 By 1972, Paredon’s releases were popular enough that the label was regularly referred to as “the people’s record company.”8 The positive critical reception of Paredon’s releases within the movement would continue through the 1970s, only dissipating as the remaining organizations of the New Left, including Paredon itself, began to crumble under the pressure of the Reagan Revolution.

However, the most convincing evidence of Paredon’s influence during the later years of the New Left, comes from the label’s sales records. By 1979, Paredon’s top five albums had each sold an average of five thousand copies. Three of these were compilations of revolutionary nationalist music from Latin America. The label’s top ten had combined sales of over forty thousand copies, fifty percent of which represented albums by Latin American artists.9 Although these sales numbers may seem small by comparison with major recording firms, they are impressive considering Paredon ran on a shoe-string budget, had a no-profit model, and produced often explicitly socialist- and communist-themed music marketed exclusively to already committed organizers, activists, and sympathizers.

The Question of Nationalism and Internationalism

The content of Paredon Records’ first release is important to the question of how revolutionary nationalist music from Latin America was interpreted by Dane and Silber, and, therefore, how it was received by its US audience. Cancion Protesta: Protest Song of Latin America was a compilation culled from field recordings Dane made of her colleagues at the 1967 Encuentro.10 The album featured performances by several politically committed Latin American musicians representing Peru, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, and, of course, Cuba. 

Dane’s liner notes opened with an invocation of Che Guevara and Simon Bolívar, where she linked the politics of the latter to the former. Che, she asserted, fought not just as a nationalist but “together with a band of patriots from several Latin American countries.”11 This frames the following paragraphs, in which Dane argues that although these “songs of the people” are “based in tradition” drawn from the respective nations of each individual artist, they are also capable of connecting the many peoples of the Latin American nations.12 Dane highlighted the young Uruguayan singer-songwriter Daniel Viglietti because his then-recently composed song “Canción De Mi América” had quickly entered the international revolutionary song canon and was gaining traction in the revolutionary nationalist movements of “several Latin American countries.”13 For Dane, Canción Protesta, and particularly Viglietti’s “Canción De Mi América,” was facilitating an internationalist revolutionary nationalism through its ability to allow the many peoples of Latin America to learn from both “their own and each other’s oppression.”14 

The invocation of internationalist revolutionary nationalism remained a regular feature of Paredon’s liner notes. This was actually a direct replication of the Cuban government’s foreign policy discourse as filtered by the cultural diplomacy objective of the 1967 Encuentro. Contained within this formulation of the revolutionary struggle, however, was a tension between the national and international. Delegates to the OLAS conference had themselves struggled to reconcile this friction in the conference’s “General Declaration.” Though likely unintentional, the “Declaration” revealed this tension in its juxtaposition of then-contemporary Latin American revolutionary nationalisms with Latin American anti-colonial struggles of the nineteenth century. According to OLAS delegates, the success of nineteenth-century Latin American anti-colonialism was a result of its leaders’ explicit understanding of the region as “a single homeland,” their “clear perspective of the continental character of the struggle,” and their resulting willingness to take “action[s] that extended beyond the frontiers of the colonies.”15 In other words, the defining characteristic of the nineteenth-century struggle was that it was primarily cosmopolitan and continentalist in outlook. 

Compare this with the document’s description of the then-contemporary Latin American revolutionary movement, which was defined as an alliance of discrete elements; one formed between “the Cuban people [and] the other peoples of America” to “fight a common enemy” [emphasis mine].16 Although the document goes to great lengths to highlight the “indestructible unity” of this alliance, the delegates clearly articulate the movement as a coalition of discrete nationalisms with an international character emerging from common circumstances rather than a primarily internationalist movement seeking to form a unified, continental people.17 In other words, both nineteenth century Latin American anti-colonialism and twentieth century Latin America revolutionary nationalism were internationalist, but with key differences. Nineteenth century Latin American anti-colonialism was primarily internationalist, being concerned with forging a cosmopolitan society that transcended the national boundaries inherited from Spanish colonialism. By contrast, twentieth century Latin America revolutionary nationalism was internationalist as a contingency of the common imperialist enemy of discrete nationalist movements. 

Although left unaddressed by OLAS, the tension between defining internationalism as an alliance of revolutionary nationalisms and as a cosmopolitan transcendence of nationalist distinctions was especially pertinent for the musician-delegates of the Encuentro, who were often working with aesthetic materials that had deep, connotative ties to national identity. In other words, cultural nationalist attachments to particular kinds of music created serious impediments for revolutionary musicians working in the context of a movement made up of discrete nationalisms. Unlike the “General Declaration,” the Encuentro’s “Resolución Final” avoided invocations of nationalism entirely, and encouraged musicians on the revolutionary left to transgress aesthetic boundaries by making use of “any procedure or technical idea” that promised to successfully “combine… artistic quality and ideological efficacy.”18

Charting a Path to a Cosmopolitan Latin American Style

Dane and Silber were quick to grapple with the problem posed by the tension between cultural nationalism and cosmopolitanism found within these competing definitions of internationalism for musicians on the revolutionary left. The subtitle of Canción Protesta was itself an early attempt to address it, emphasizing Latin America’s geo-cultural integrity rather than the discrete national backgrounds of the participating musicians. Although the nomenclature of international revolutionary nationalism remained a feature of Paredon’s rhetoric, the label’s accompanying liner note essays quickly began to implicitly critique OLAS’ articulation of the Latin American revolutionary movement as a coalition of discrete nationalisms. These essays regularly revealed the limitations of this discourse through analysis of the ways in which certain forms of Latin American revolutionary music were able to aesthetically transcend the cultural nationalist tensions inherent in OLAS’ definition of internationalism, as well as identifying the pitfalls for music that failed to do so. 

In the liner notes to a compilation of Viglietti’s recordings released by Paredon in 1973, Dane claimed that “to be a purely nationalist artist… is not sufficient to the times, for that might only serve to bolster the oligarchies, the local exploiters, [and] the comprador classes.”19 She again singled out the Uruguayan singer for his ability to transcend the reactionary pitfalls of nationalism through sheer international popularity. It was through this process of international popularization that Viglietti became “a patriot… not just for Uruguay, but for all Latin America.”20

The most extended articulation of this view in Paredon’s catalog was in Silber’s notes to the label’s tenth release, a compilation of songs recorded by the Cuban Nueva Trova supergroup, El Grupo De Experimentación Sonora. In this essay, Silber claimed that the “sophisticated world of neo-colonialism,” where imperial metropoles maintain only indirect political control of “the Third World,” opens a historical conjuncture where “the struggle for a national culture, which once seemed to be revolutionary almost by definition,” becomes increasingly available for use in “pacify[ing] unrest, reinforc[ing] outmoded values, and legitimiz[ing] oppressive authority.”21 In other words, under the particular circumstances of neo-colonialism, cultural nationalism could easily be appropriated by the nationalist right and used toward counter-revolutionary ends. 

According to Silber, El Grupo successfully overcame this tension by aesthetically transcending the limits of cultural nationalism. They accomplished this by eclipsing the restrictive criteria associated with “exalt[ing] the folklore of the people,” opposing aesthetic purism through their dialogue with broader “world culture.”22 By actively pursuing a fusion of national folklore with international popular music, El Grupo formed a cosmopolitan musical style. The group’s cosmopolitan aesthetic transcended the contradictory limits of internationalist revolutionary nationalism insofar that cosmopolitanism itself represented a turn away by the Latin American musical left from a politics based on alliances between discrete nationalist movements in favor of one based in “class terms.”23 Indeed, for both Silber and Dane, who had their backgrounds in the US communist movement, class represented the political subject around which a successful cosmopolitan musical aesthetic could be constructed.  

Cuban Nueva Trova, the musical movement from which El Grupo emerged, remained a fixation of Paredon for its perceived ability to overcome cultural nationalist aesthetic restrictions. In Rina Benmayor’s essay accompanying Cuban Nueva Trova singer-songwriter Silvio Rodriguez’s 1981 album for Paredon, Rabo de Nube/Tail of a Tornado: Songs of the New Cuba, she historically embedded Nueva Trova musicians in a cosmopolitan trajectory of pan-Latin American revolutionary music stretching back through Uruguay’s Viglietti, Chile’s Victor Jara, to the Argentine left-wing folk-revivalist Atahualpa Yapanqui. Benmayor lauded Rodriguez and other Nueva Trova musicians’ success in “experiment[ing] with their own traditional forms” by “fusing them with jazz, blues, rock” and the music of “Bob Dylan and the Beatles.”24

Nueva Trova, however, was not the only politically committed Latin American musical movement highlighted by Paredon for its international popularity and cosmopolitan aesthetic. Dane and Silber were especially infatuated with the cosmopolitanization of Andean instruments like the charango, sikú, and quena. For instance, in 1973, Suni Paz, an Argentine songwriter who had spent time in Chile before coming to the US to work in the Chicano and Puerto Rican revolutionary nationalist movements, recorded an Andean folk-revival-influenced album titled Brotando Del Silencio: Breaking Out Of The Silence for Paredon. In her accompanying notes, Dane points out the prominence of the charango in Paz’s arrangements, making sure to identify both its origins in Andean music and its cosmopolitan trajectory as an instrument subsequently used in the revolutionary music of “Peru, Chile, Argentina,” and even “Mexico.”25 

Three years later, Paredon released an album by the Ecuadorian Andean folk-revival group Jatari titled Ecuador: The Cry Of Freedom! El Grito De Libertad! Describing the group’s instrumentation as made up of “the traditional instruments of the Andes,” the accompanying essay argued that the sounds of the charango, sikú, and quena had come to represent “the cultural unity of all Latin America.”26

How Real Was The Cultural Nationalist Threat?

Dane, Silber, and other Paredon staff were not wrong to fear the possibility of right-wing forces appropriating Latin American revolutionary music that failed to overcome its nationalist pretenses. Their support of the cosmopolitanization of the Andean folk revival, for instance, was part of a broader context in which reactionary movements in Latin America were attempting to co-opt Andean folk music to legitimize right-wing regimes. 

For example, in 1972, a popular Argentine musical documentary titled Argentinísima caused enormous controversy in Bolivia for its featuring of Argentine Andean folk-revivalist Jaime Torres. Reactionary cultural nationalism had been intentionally cultivated in Bolivia by the right-wing military dictatorship of Hugo Banzer in the early 1970s, and the performance of Andean folk music, supposedly the specific “cultural patrimony” of Bolivia, in the context of a film on Argentina provided the perfect opportunity to use the Andean folk-revival to rhetorically strengthen the Banzer regime.27 

Four days after Argentinísima’s La Paz premiere, the Bolivian state filed an official complaint with UNESCO regarding the “clandestine commercialization” and “destructive” “transculturation” of its cultural heritage by other nations, clearly implicating Argentina, an event which ethnomusicologist Fernando Rios believes likely triggered the creation of UNESCO’s “intangible cultural heritage” program.28 While the controversy-proper was provoked by Bolivian right-wing reaction to Argentinísima, it is important to remember that the inclusion of Andean folk-revival material in a film with a title meant to, in effect, frame its subject material as specifically Argentine, was itself a representation of the tensions inherent in musicians’ use of aesthetic materials with cultural nationalist connotations. 

The truth was that the music that made up the foundation of the Andean folk revival had a long history in many Latin American nation-states with Andean regions, including both Bolivia and Argentina. Andean folk-revivalism itself was a thoroughly international musical practice by the time of Argentinísima’s release.29 This is what made the Andean folk revival a useful basis for producing revolutionary left-wing music capable of transcending cultural nationalism. Dane and Silber were correct, however, that the cosmopolitanism of the Andean folk revival could not be assumed as natural; that cosmopolitan character needed to be defended and extended through aesthetic experimentation and musical fusion, because if left unprotected it could just as easily be mobilized by the forces of reactionary nationalism. 

Conclusion

These liner note essays reveal a particular schema through which Dane, Silber, and others involved in Paredon interpreted the musical activities of these movements. Cultural nationalist folkloric strategies were seen as a positive, but necessarily limited path forward. To avoid the very real possibility of their work being appropriated by right-wing forms of nationalism, Latin American revolutionary musicians had to concurrently engage in the revival of traditional forms while also participating in aesthetic experimentation through musical fusion. The liner notes of one of Paredon’s last releases, a 1983 album by Nicaraguan composer and Sandinista activist Luis Enrique Mejía Godoy, highlight this dynamic explicitly. The essay underscored how Nicaraguan revolutionary nationalist musicians’ interweaving of “traditional forms of culture… with the new and experimental” was producing positive results, and attributed the smooth way in which this process was unfolding in Nicaragua to the post-Revolutionary Sandinista government’s large-scale support for musical activities through the establishment of a state-led recording industry.30 

For the organizers, activists, and sympathizers of the US New Left, much of what was occurring musically in the revolutionary nationalist movements of Latin America would have been filtered through Paredon’s politico-aesthetic criteria. For them, it would have seemed that Latin American revolutionary nationalist music was in danger of being appropriated by the nationalist right. As shown above, this was, in certain circumstances, a real and present threat. However, certain musical movements, namely Cuban Nueva Trova and the Andean folk revival, which simultaneously maintained a connection to the authenticity of national folklore and embraced a cosmopolitan, experimental outlook, would have been seen as a musical vanguard transcending the limits of nationalism as such, allowing these musicians to outmaneuver right-wing cultural nationalist attempts at musical appropriation and sustain musical dynamism in the Latin American revolutionary left.

 

 

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  1. For a short biography of Dane, see: Jackson Albert Mann, “Socialist Singer Barbara Dane Was a True American Radical,” Jacobin Magazine, October 26 2024, https://jacobin.com/2024/10/barabara-dane-folk-cpusa-civil-rights.
  2. Barbara Dane, This Bell Still Rings: My Life of Defiance and Song (Heyday, 2022), 296-297.
  3. For more information on this conference, see: “‘Resolución final del Encuentro de la Canción Protesta,’ Canción Protesta, editado por el Centro de la Canción Protesta, Casa de las Américas, Año I, Número I, 1968,” Boletín Música 45 (Enero – Abril 2017).
  4. Joseph Hansen, “The OLAS Conference: Tactics and Strategy of a Continental Revolution,” International Socialist Review 28, no. 6 (November-December 1967): 1-10.
  5. Cinéaste 4, no. 2 (Fall 1970): 51; Los Angeles Free Press, January 29, 1971, 27; Great Speckled Bird, February 1, 1971, 23; Berkeley Tribe, February 26, 1971, 16; El Grito del Norte, February 18, 1972, 10.
  6. D.K., “Reviews: Records: Sing In!: FTA: SONGS OF THE GI RESISTANCE,” AMEX: The American Expatriate in Canada 2, no. 8 (March-April, 1971): 37-38; Marcy Fink, “Singin’ the Sexist Blues,” FPS: A Magazine of Young People’s Liberation, September 1, 1976, 57-58; Cathy Lee, “Reviews: Music: Unabashed Melody,” Sojourner 3, no. 1 (September 1977): 10; Fred Wei-han Houn, “An ABC from NYC, ‘Charlie’ Chin: Asian American Singer and Songwriter,” East West: Politics and Culture of Asians in the U.S. 5, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1986): 29-31.
  7. David Thorstad, “In Review: Records: Cancion Protesta: Protest Song of Latin America (Paredon P1001). Angola: Victory is Certain (Paredon P1002). FTA! Songs of the GI Resistance (Paredon P1003). Huey Newton Speaks (Paredon P1004).,” The Militant, February 19, 1971, 20.
  8. The Root, May 8, 1972, 11; Great Speckled Bird, May 29, 1975, 16.
  9. David Shea, “Paredon Records (1969-1980): Revolution in the Life and Work of Barbara Dane,” in I Sing The Difference: Identity and Commitment in Latin American Song (Institute of Popular Music, 2002), 86.
  10. Dane donated the catalog of Paredon Records to Smithsonian-Folkways after the label’s closure in 1985. All releases mentioned will link to their respective Smithsonian-Folkways’ pages, but the full Paredon Records catalog can be found here: https://folkways.si.edu/paredon.
  11. Cancion Protesta: Protest Song of Latin America, Paredon P1001, 1970, LP, liner notes by Barbara Dane.
  12. Ibid.
  13. Ibid.
  14. Ibid.
  15. “OLAS General Declaration,” International Socialist Review 28, no. 6 (November-December 1967), 51.
  16. Ibid, 56.
  17. Ibid.
  18. For the author’s translation, see here. For the original document, see footnote 3.
  19. Daniel Viglietti, Uruguay ¡A Desalambrar! Tear Down the Fences!, Paredon P1011, 1973, liner notes by Barbara Dane.
  20. Ibid.
  21. Grupo De Experimentación Sonora Del ICAIC, Cuba Va! Songs Of The New Generation Of Revolutionary Cuba, Paredon P1010, 1971, liner notes by Irwin Silber.
  22. Ibid.
  23. Ibid.
  24. Silvio Rodriguez, Rabo de Nube/Tail of a Tornado: Songs of the New Cuba, Paredon P1045, 1981, liner notes by Rina Benmayor.
  25. Suni Paz, Brotando Del Silencio: Breaking Out Of The Silence, Paredon P1016, 1973, liner notes by Barbara Dane.
  26. Jatari, Ecuador: The Cry Of Freedom! El Grito De Libertad!, Paredon P1034, 1976.
  27. Fernando Rios, “‘They’re Stealing Our Music’: The Argentinísima Controversy, National Culture Boundaries, and the Rise of a Bolivian Nationalist Discourse,” Latin American Music Review / Revista de Música Latinoamericana 35, no. 2 (Fall-Winter 2014), 208-209.
  28. Ibid.
  29. For a short account of some of this history, see: Fernando Rios, “La Flûte Indienne: The Early History of Andean Folkloric-Popular Music in France and Its Impact on Nueva Canción,” Latin American Music Review / Revista de Música Latinoamericana 29, no. 2 (Fall-Winter, 2008): 145-189.
  30. Luis Enrique Mejía Godoy and Grupo Mancotal, Un Son Para Mi Pueblo: Songs from the New Nicaragua, Paredon P1048, 1983.