The 1926 tango “Tiempos viejos” is a classic song, and for a few different reasons, whose intertwining tells us something important about the tango’s own history. This tango was originally, in 1926, the lead song in Manuel Romero’s one-act farce titled Los muchachos de antes no usaban gomina (The Guys from Back Then Didn’t Gum Up Their Hair, the song’s fourth line). Romero later remade this play into a movie in 1937, with the same title, which by then had become a well known phrase, and the film became one of the classics of the period. (Still further along, a second movie version was made 1969, again with the same title, directed by Enrique Carreras.)
This tango is also the origin of the character la rubia Mireya (Mireya the blonde), a figure like Milonguita, who has become a stock image of the tango world—to the extent that she is sometimes portrayed by street performers. For the film versions, her role as a dramatic figure was enlarged (the protagonist still yearns for her after leaving her for a society marriage), but in these lyrics she is a picture of fate and of time’s passing, a theme that would be revisited by later songwriters in the years to come.
Finally, “Tiempos viejos” is the most straightforward example in the tango songbook of the so-called ubi sunt (“Where are they now”), the original nostalgia theme of the Latin middle ages. Romero’s lines in the chorus echo the basic formula, seen in Villon’s famous verses, known in English in D. G. Rossetti’s version, “Where are the snows of yesteryear?” All these threads thus weave together in this song—the industry of show business, the alluring personas of fiction, the legacy of poetry—showing how deeply the tango, for all its self-portrayal as a cultural outsider, had its roots in the world of the arts.
The Good Old Days
(Tr. Jake Spatz)
YouTube: Alberto Arenas (orq. Francisco Canaro)
You remember them, brother? Those were the days!
Those men were something, more men, our own.
Of morphine and coke they were never aware,
The guys from back then didn’t gum up their hair.
You remember them, brother? Those were the days!
Twenty-five Aprils that are gone with the years!
Twenty-five Aprils, to relive them again…
I remember them now with my eyes full of tears.
Where are they now, those guys from the old times?
Yesterday’s gang from before, where’d they go?
No one is left now but you and me, brother,
No one remembers, but us two alone…
Where are they now, those gals of the old days,
Those girls of great heart you were always sure of,
Who back in those dances at Laura’s threw down,
Each one in defense of her heart’s true love?
You remember her, brother, Mireya the blonde,
Whom I snatched at Hansen’s from crazy Cepeda?
I was nearly a suicide over her once,
And now she’s a poor old washed-up beggar.
You remember her, brother, what a beauty she’d been?
They would line up to see her dance by with a cheer!
When I see her now in the street old and thin,
I avert my face with my eyes full of tears.
Tiempos viejos (1926)
Music: Francisco Canaro
Lyrics: Manuel Romero
¿Te acordás, hermano? ¡Qué tiempos aquéllos!
Eran otros hombres más hombres los nuestros.
No se conocían cocó ni morfina,
los muchachos de antes no usaban gomina.
¿Te acordás, hermano? ¡Qué tiempos aquéllos!
¡Veinticinco abriles que no volverán!
Veinticinco abriles, volver a tenerlos,
si cuando me acuerdo me pongo a llorar.
¿Dónde están los muchachos de entonces?
Barra antigua de ayer ¿dónde está?
Yo y vos solos quedamos, hermano,
yo y vos solos para recordar…
¿Dónde están las mujeres aquéllas,
minas fieles, de gran corazón,
que en los bailes de Laura peleaban
cada cual defendiendo su amor?
¿Te acordás, hermano, la rubia Mireya,
que quité en lo de Hansen al loco Cepeda?
Casi me suicido una noche por ella
y hoy es una pobre mendiga harapienta.
¿Te acordás, hermano, lo linda que era?
Se formaba rueda pa' verla bailar…
Cuando por la calle la veo tan vieja
doy vuelta la cara y me pongo a llorar.