To the sound of cowbells worn by beasts subjugated to men's will, thus is born the farm laborer's song. Giddap!, says the muledriver as he drones out a primitive melody coaxing the animal to greater spirit in the threshing. And then, when the cattle fair comes around, the same master who before hummed away the time in the fields singing the tunes of tedium, gets carried away by the wine and the trading, transforming the hitching mount and knuckled milling on wood into compás. Oh the fair! The buying and selling of cattle was perhaps the perfect excuse to get out of the fenced-in fields, where weariness and hunger were bedfellows, and the intoxicating grape was little more than a cursed dream, the humble mirage of men who were fed up with hard work and scarcity. But April, when the blood runs hot - not April showers - the routines of Seville, it was the silver lining for those young men whose bosses rewarded them with working the cattle at the Ybarra and Bonaplata markets. For after the intense work of transporting and unloading the animals, the tavern beckoned impatiently. And there, songs which were born of folklore and necessity, acquired a legitimacy, between little glasses of new wine from Condado and manzanilla from Sanlúcar.

Although later on, with the passage of time, the Seville fair took sevillanas as its main theme song, at inception it was something else. In the first "casetas" you could hear seguiriyas and soleares, tonás and trilleras, and, now and again, some sevillanas, which, lest we forget, is one of the flamenco forms. The origin of the cante is to be found among certain cattle-traders and slaughterhouse workers, people who preceded the professionals of long ago who would take advantage of this type of event to sing in the taverns or casetas in exchange for pocket money. One example can be seen in the words of Juan Martínez Vilchez, Pericón, as recounted by José Luis Ortiz Nuevo in his book "Mil y una historias de Pericón de Cádiz":

"I saw Tomás Pavon's face and it inspired fear, and the thing was, in the caseta next-door there was a piano that didn't stop playing sevillanas... and poor Tomás felt sick just thinking of how he would have to sing with that piano sounding, until finally the president of the caseta where we were working, after sending two or three messages, managed to get the caseta next-door to stop the piano for a while. Then Tomás took advantage of the respite to sing siguiriyas. He sang once and didn't sing again all night because it wasn't possible in that place".

This scene, for which we have no date, could easily have occurred around the twenties, because the youngest of the Pavón siblings was born in 1893 and Pericón, in 1901. By that time flamenco, a kind of music which had always been little understood by the masses, was beginning to abdicate its initial dominance in favor of the aforementioned sevillanas with piano. The fair, which already had seventy years under its belt, had exchanged cattle-trading for boisterous fiestas. And the cante was the first element to suffer this change: from the profundity of previous years to the present gaiety.

Nevertheless, there is not one single cantaor worthy of note who has not passed through one of the casetas of the Seville fair. Amidst the tumult of dancing and palmas there continues to be a place for worthwhile voices, those who build, from bulerías, an empire with which to defend present-day flamenco. Singers like Juan Peña El Lebrijano, Paco Taranto, José de la Tomasa, or Pepe Collantes, and dancers such as Antonio Canales or Manolo Marín keep the torch of the April fair brightly burning. And they demonstrate that Seville, paradoxically, wonderfully, knows how to make a smooth transition, soul intact, in just a few days and with the same voices, from the anguished saeta to the euphoria of the the bulería. Just as in old times when the farm laborers traded in their work-induced suffocation for the joys of the grape. In other words, like Seville itself.

Alberto García Reyes
Translation: Estela Zatania

Further information Sevillanas: between two worlds