QUEEN OF THE GYPSIES:
The life and legend of Carmen Amaya.

Excerpt from the book "Carmen Amaya, Queen of the Gypsies". Author: Paco Sevilla.

4. Carmen Amaya, the beginning.

When Carmen Amaya was contracted by the Bar de Manquet in 1924, at age ten, she had only to be concerned with dancing for the working class customers who came to escape the daily grind with cheap drinks and good flamenco. Located in the heart of Barrio Chino, the Bar de Manquet was widely known as a place to go for flamenco, and aficionados often gathered there to listen to a large collection of flamenco records. But few tourists dared to enter that haven of dock workers and gypsies. Author Alfonso Puig describes what transpired:

Those were happy times, when, for a peseta, in the Bar del Manquet in Atarazanas [the heart of Barrio Chino], they served us real coffee with three lumps of sugar as we sat among a motley crowd of dockworkers applauding an impressive cuadro flamenco that we felt would someday make its mark on history. It was made up of Carmen Amaya "La Capitana", her aunt, Juana la Faraona, and exemplary model of gypsy beauty and unmatched in her zambras and farrucas, La Romerito, unique in her more stylized alegrías and sevillanas, and El Gato, with his serious masculine demeanor, accompanied on guitar by El Chino (father of La Amaya) and Manolo Bulerías. A group that, for a few glasses of manzanilla wine, would treat us to some extra performances outside of the regular program and thank us for our faithful attendance.

La Capitana, a stage name that the little Carmencita likes to use to present herself, is an exceptional case of "pure blood". When she dances, she vibrates from head to foot, contorts, and rises up with histrionic haughtiness, and her feet of steel pound with deafening fury, obsessed by the crescendo of the guitar, in an uncontrolled frenzy that is always closed by the final high of an explosive desplante [rhythmic variation].

Carmen always insisted that she had no formal training, no teachers. But there can be no doubt that, once she began to dance in the cuadros of the cabarets and was exposed to a broad range of dance styles, she absorbed everything she saw and heard. In the Bar de Manquet, he observed the classical style of Andrea Romero "La Romerito" in alegrías, and she must have taken a great deal from the masculine dance of El Gato. Escudero el Gato, along with his brother, a guitarist from Madrid named El Pelao Viejo, belonged to a family that would create a dance dynasty in the next generation (Juan el Pelao, El Fati, Faíco, Toni el Pelao, Pelao Chico, etc.). El Gato achieved renown with his dance por farruca, which he often ended with the media verónica, a cape pass taken from the bullfight. Carmen Amaya would always remember him as the best in this dance.

The farruca and another popular dance, the garrotín, had a parallel histories. Both originated as songs in northern provinces, outside the cradle of flamenco in Andalucía. When sailors from Asturias and Galicia settled in the port of Cádiz, Andalusians called them "farrucos". With that name, the songs of these immigrants entered the flamenco repertoire and were popularized in the early 1900 by singers like the great Manuel Torre. One source reported seeing the farruca danced for the first time in 1904, another in 1912. It is said to have been created by a dancer from Sevilla (with family roots in Cádiz)named Francisco Mendoza, better known as Faíco. This handsome, elegant dancer looked more like a banker from New York than a flamenco performer. He learned from José Otero, the famous teacher of flamenco and classical school dances in Sevilla, so it is likely that he had a refined, academic technique. Faíco teamed up with the great guitarist Ramón Montoya to create the dance and music por farruca, employing the fourcount rhythm of tangos, but giving it a unique, markedly pronounced cadence that brings out the best in the male dance. The dancer Vicente Escudero felt that the farruca had Slavic qualities more typical of Eastern European gypsies than flamenco. Ramón used to play it in E-minor rather than A-minor common today. The farruca reached the peak of its popularity in the period from 1910-30, but survived to modern times, generally without song accompaniment, having been given a big boots in the 1950s by José Greco.

The garrotín may also have roots in Asturias, but it is thought to have been developed by the gypsies of Lérida (about ninety miles west of Barcelona) and, later, Barcelona. If true, it would be the only flamenco song or dance form (other than the rumba) that developed outside of Andalucía. The garrotín really caught on when it was sung and recorded by La Niña de los Peines. It was Faíco, again, who recreated the garrotín and gave it the structure needed for dancing on stage. With its lively tango rhythm and major key, the garrotín enjoyed great popularity until it all but disappeared in the 1930s. Appropriately, it would be a catalán gypsy, Carmen Amaya, who would keep it alive and make possible its revival in the 1970s.

During the period of the Bar de Manquet, "... a fountain was inaugurated, a small fountain with a column of bricks supporting a lead spout. There were festivities and José joined in with his guitar and his daughter; the father, with his left foot resting on the bowl of the fountain, played, Carmen danced, and the people hurt their hands applauding." Years later, Carmen recalled the installation of the small fountain in the embankment between the Somorrostro slum and the barrio known as the Barceloneta:

"I was seven years old when they first brought water to the Somorrostro."

Where did you live, exactly?

"In a shack, about twenty meters from the fountain. I would come home each day from work, about six o’clock in the morning, and go to bed."

Where did you work?

"In various places, in Casa de Manquet... I went from one place to the other. And, as I was saying, I got into bed and was asleep when Miguel Payo, the mayor of the barrio, who was crippled, came to wake me up. He said to me, ‘Get up, you are our artist and you have to baptize the fountain!’ My father got up too, took out his guitar, and we went. On the way, we bought a bottle of rotgut anise brandy from Señor Joaquín’s bar, and then continued on to the fountain where there were children everywhere."

And what was the baptism like?

"I shattered the bottle against the fountain, my father played the guitar, and I danced por bulerías."

You didn’t drink the anise?

"The fountain drank it. We drank water."