Is there a start to music? For many people, for Cuban music, the beginning was El Manisero, the song reputed to have derived from a peanut vendor’s cry in the streets of Havana in mid 1800s but attributed to the band leader Moises Simon and first recorded in 1927. But what actually did it kick off?
The song had an electrifying effect on the perception of Cuban music in America where it kicked off a decade of rumba mania. By 1930 it was one of the biggest songs in the Western world covered by Louis Armstrong among 100s of others, selling a million copies, with cinematic versions by Groucho Marx, Cary Grant and Judy Garland, and for the next 29 years Havana was the Ibiza of the day.
In Europe it became the first Cuban song to impact on the European consciousness, yet it loosened colonial ties. It arrived in a Parisian bohemia where future post-independence president Leopold Senghor of Senegal was studying, and in Philly and Harlem where Kwame Nkrumah, the father of Ghana, was studying Sociology and teaching African unity. It can be speculated that the song, drawing on the rhythms of Africa, translated via the sugar fields of Cuba to the streets of Havana, and back across the Atlantic, fit the bill for the postcolonial identity that negritude demanded.
Perhaps the most direct incorporation of the song into African music was by Cardinal Rex Lawson, the 60s Nigerian High Life singer – listening to its incorporation into his hit ‘Sawale’ is as much confirmation as you could get of the AfroCuban continuum. And its influence carried on, flavouring Flavour N’abania’s ‘Nwa Baby’ in this century.
The lyrics are often dismissed as being banal, but I love them. Call me a mucky pup but in every sparse couplet I see chimes of the kind of filth you could only get away with if you were a US blues singer in the 30s or a British bluesrocker in the 60s. “If you wanna have fun by the mouth/eat up your peanut cornet” says Moises Simon. Bo Carter replies “Now i ain’t no auger-man, no auger-man’s son,i can blow your hole ’til the auger-man comes”. Moises primes the pot with “How toasty and rich it is, You can’t ask for anything more” and Lil Johnson ups the ante with “Come on, baby, lets have some fun, Just put your hot dog in my bun” – going on to clarify “he’s got good hot dog! I don’t mean a Wienee”. Next thing you know the English boys have lemon running down their leg and are asking how come Brown Sugar tastes so good (my alternate thesis on the influence of Pancake Day on R&R is yet to be published).
As seen in the first video – the most high profile version of the song – Don Azpiazú of Cienfuegos leads and Antonio Machin sings. I don’t know how footage of a mixed race Cuban throwing peanuts at his New York audience played out – it all looks so demure but it was 40 years before Iggy Pop dared try something similar in a Cincinnati field.
It started in Africa and went through Cuba.
El Grito 