Since her starring role in the 1930 film Madreselva, Libertad Lamarque had been the first lady of tango on stage and screen, her roles casting her image as the anti-elitist heroine, the darling of the people. When Juan Perón came to power in 1946, newly married to Eva Duarte, with whom Lamarque had some widely reported friction on a movie set, the great actress left Argentina in somewhat voluntary exile, using her performing career as a passport throughout the Americas. Legendary director Luis Buñuel soon offered Lamarque her first big role in Mexico, and she signed on to play the lead in his film Gran casino (1947), with more than 60 movies to follow it during the next five decades.
In something of a defiant gesture, ceding the country to her rival while claiming its culture, Lamarque decided to sing the classic tango “El choclo” in the picture, and for the occasion she commissioned new lyrics from Enrique Santos Discépolo, the tango’s most acerbic poet of social criticism. The tune, originally composed in 1903, had already received new lyrics in 1930 from singer Juan Carlos Marambio Catán, so Discépolo had to obtain his permission for copyright purposes; and once the legalities were provided for, he set to work on a new text. Reflecting his own view that “El choclo” was a kind of tango national anthem, Discépolo’s refashioned lyrics offered a sweeping retrospective on the tango’s entire history. He mythologizes the song itself not just as the origin of the genre, but as the wellspring of all its characters and iconography, making “the corncob” stand for the whole creole stew, the melting pot of the new world, the new century, and the new hopes of the underprivileged. This new version of the classic became definitive on the spot, and stamped its seal on the story of the tango forever after. Soon after its appearance in Gran casino, the song was again a set-piece in Manuel Romero’s 1949 picture La historia del tango, performed by the gutsy Tita Merello.
Notes. Caráncanfúnfa was the nickname of an Argentine dancer who popularized the tango in Paris in the 1910s; originally the term was an onomatopoeia for how dancers would hum the tune when no music was playing. The original Pernod fils was the world’s leading maker of absinthe, until the drink was banned in 1914.
The Corncob (1947)
(Tr. Jake Spatz)
YouTube: Libertad Lamarque (Gran casino, 1947)
Tita Merello (La historia del tango, 1949)
With this old tango’s little mocking, roguish fellow,
My city limits fit two wings on its ambition;
With this old tango launched the tango, and with a bellow
It left the sordid muddy slums in search of heaven;
An eerie spell of love turned into swinging phrases,
That forged ahead without a single law but hoping,
Outrage and sorrow, faith and absence, mixing gently,
All weeping innocently to a feisty rhythm’s tone.
By your miraculous staccato incantation
The girlies and the mollies sprang up into creation,
The moon in puddles, the slinky hips’ gyration,
And a fiendish yearning in the burning ways of love…
To think about you…
Beloved tango…
I feel the floorboards in the dancing venue rumble
And hear the grumble of my past life…
Now that I’m living…
Without my mother…
I feel her coming close on tippy-toes to kiss me
When your song rises from a groaning bandoneón.
Carancanfunfa took your flag across the ocean,
And cut the green Pernod of Paris with Puente Alsina.
Unhappy sidekick of the cruiser and the sweetheart,
And like a sister to the gangster and the schoolgirl.
Through you the fop, the cop, the slacker, and the beggar
Were given voices in your destiny’s beginning…
High mass of kerosene and skirts, the slash and dagger,
That ignited in the tenements, and ignited in my heart.
El choclo (1947)
Music: Ángel Villoldo
Lyrics: Enrique Santos Discépolo
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Con este tango que es burlón y compadrito
se ató dos alas la ambición de mi suburbio;
con este tango nació el tango, y como un grito
salió del sórdido barrial buscando el cielo;
conjuro extraño de un amor hecho cadencia
que abrió caminos sin más ley que la esperanza,
mezcla de rabia, de dolor, de fe, de ausencia
llorando en la inocencia de un ritmo juguetón.
Por tu milagro de notas agoreras
nacieron, sin pensarlo, las paicas y las grelas,
luna de charcos, canyengue en las caderas
y un ansia fiera en la manera de querer…
Al evocarte,
tango querido,
siento que tiemblan las baldosas de un bailongo
y oigo el rezongo de mi pasado…
Hoy, que no tengo
más a mi madre,
siento que llega en punta ’e pie para besarme
cuando tu canto nace al son de un bandoneón.
Carancanfunfa se hizo al mar con tu bandera
y en un pernó mezcló a París con Puente Alsina.
Triste compadre del gavión y de la mina
y hasta comadre del bacán y la pebeta.
Por vos shusheta, cana, reo y mishiadura
se hicieron voces al nacer con tu destino…
¡Misa de faldas, querosén, tajo y cuchillo,
que ardió en los conventillos y ardió en mi corazón.