The Roots: The Three Worlds That Made a Music (centuries XV–XIX)

Argentine folk music finds its roots in the original indigenous cultures. Three major historical-cultural events shaped it: Spanish colonization (16th-18th centuries), European immigration (1850-1930), and internal migration (1930-1980).

From this triple encounter — the indigenous world, the African world brought by slavery, the European world of the conquerors — was born the sound that Argentina recognizes as its own: a music that does not belong completely to any of its three origins but carries them all within.

The Indigenous Root: Before the Guitar

Before the Spaniards arrived at the Río de la Plata in the 16th century, the territory that is now Argentina was inhabited by dozens of peoples with completely different musical traditions.

In the Andean northwest — Jujuy, Salta, Tucumán — the Quechua and Aymara peoples had music intimately connected with the Andean worldview: the quena, a cane flute that produces the most characteristic sound of the highlands, and the sikus or panpipe, the pan flute instrument that the Incas had carried across the continent. This music was not entertainment: it was the language in which men spoke with Pachamama, with the apus of the mountains, with the cycle of water and the harvest.

In the littoral region — Corrientes, Misiones, Entre Ríos — the Guaraní peoples had their own vocal and percussive traditions, with responsorial chants and rhythms that the Jesuits who arrived in the 17th century attempted to incorporate into the Catholic liturgy with musically extraordinary results: the Jesuit reductions produced in the 17th and 18th centuries a unique fusion between European Baroque music and Guaraní rhythms that musicologists from all over the world still study.

In Patagonia, the Mapuche, Tehuelche, and Selk'nam peoples had their own musical traditions that European chroniclers described with fascination and which partially survived until the 20th century, when the expansion of the Argentine State to the south completed the process of destruction that colonization had begun.

The African Root: The Candombe of the Río de la Plata

The musical history of Argentina is also, to a degree that the official narrative long preferred to minimize, an African history. At the end of the eighteenth century, candombe appeared — a musical style and dance created by enslaved people of African origin, based on drum rhythms.

Buenos Aires was an active slave port during the colonial period. Afro-Argentine communities — concentrated in the Mondongo neighborhood, in what is today the southern part of the city — developed their own cultural institutions: the African nations, associations organized by ethnic origin that functioned as spaces for cultural preservation, mutual aid, and resistance.

In those nations, candombe could be heard: the drums, the songs, the dances that came from Africa and found, in the Río de la Plata, specific soil in which to grow. The African presence in Rioplatense music was for decades so visible that nineteenth-century chroniclers described the celebrations in Afro-Argentine neighborhoods as one of the most extraordinary spectacles in the city.

That presence nearly disappeared over the course of the nineteenth century: the wars of independence and later the Paraguayan War decimated the Afro-Argentine population, which participated disproportionately in every conflict. But their musical legacy did not disappear: it remained in the rhythm of tango, in the syncopation of the milonga, in the specific way that music from the Río de la Plata treats musical time in a manner that European music does not.

The Spanish Root and the Gaucho

Spanish colonization brought aesthetic criteria, techniques and instruments characteristic of European music. Cultural mixing led to the development of dances, instruments and musical techniques of their own that had a decisive influence on Argentine folklore.

The most important instrument of that heritage was the guitar: from the moment it arrived at the Río de la Plata, it was quickly adopted by the criollos and managed to intertwine with native instruments in such a way that today it is the main protagonist of folk music. It was a companion to the gaucho's solitude, to the wit of the payadores.

The gaucho — the inhabitant of the pampas plains, mixed-race, free, who lived off cattle and moved through the territory with an independence that the fledgling State found threatening — was the central figure of nineteenth-century Argentine criollo music. His songs were not love songs in the European sense: they were life narratives, chronicles of the landscape, reflections on freedom and the solitude of the infinite plains.

The payada — the duel of poetic improvisation between two guitarists who challenge each other with verses that must rhyme, respond to the rival's argument and demonstrate poetic skill in real time — was the most important artistic institution of gaucho culture. The gauchos, emblematic figures of rural Argentine culture, told through their guitars and payadas stories of struggle, love and solitude. Payadas are improvised songs accompanied by guitar, in which two singers face each other in a verbal and poetic duel.

The great literary text of that culture — the Martín Fierro by José Hernández, published in 1872 — is also the great musical text: an epic poem written in the meter of the payadas, which describes the life of the gaucho persecuted by the State, and which was learned by heart by generations of Argentines who sang it before the educational system taught them to read it.

The Instruments: The Physics of Mestizaje

Some of the fundamental European contributions were the criolla guitar, the modifications made to the native bombo drum until it became the bombo legüero, and the charango, a small guitar made from the shell of an armadillo, of great importance to Andean northern folklore.

The bombo legüero — the cowhide drum that can be heard a league away, according to tradition — is the central percussion instrument of Argentine folklore. Its deep, full sound defines the rhythm of the zamba, the chacarero, the malambo. It is an instrument of African origin modified with American materials to serve a music that is all three things at once.

The bandoneón would arrive later — in the 19th century, from Germany, brought by Central European immigrants — and would become the soul of tango, the instrument that no other country uses in quite the same way and that Argentina adopted as if it had been invented in Buenos Aires. But that is the story of the next chapter.

The Dances: The Body as Archive

The dances of Argentine folklore are also archives of history: each step, each figure, each name holds the memory of the encounter between the three worlds that produced Argentine culture.

The malambo — the masculine footwork of the pampas, born in the early seventeenth century — is a display of individual virtuosity: a solo dancer, without a partner, who challenges the rhythm with the speed and precision of his feet. It is the danced equivalent of the payada: competition, skill, identity.

The zamba — not to be confused with Brazilian samba — is the most romantic dance in Argentine folklore: a courtship between a man and a woman with handkerchiefs, where she evades and he pursues in a choreography that shares the same structure as the Chilean cueca and originates from the Peruvian zamacueca, transformed in the valleys of northwestern Argentina until it became something entirely its own.

The chamamé — the music of the Guaraní-Misionero littoral — has the accordion as its central instrument and a syncopated rhythm that recalls its dual heritage: Guaraní and European, inseparable in northeastern Argentina where the boundary between cultures was never as clear as in the rest of the country.

Editorial note: Argentine folklore is not a single tradition but a mosaic of regional traditions that the twentieth century attempted to unify under the label of "national music". That unification was also a political operation: the Peronist state of the nineteen-forties and fifties promoted folklore as a symbol of national identity with the same intention with which other states promote their traditions — to construct an image of unity where the reality is diversity. What survived that operation was precisely what could not be homogenized: the specificity of each region, the particular accent of the Jujuy quena, the unmistakable rhythm of the Corrientes chamamé, the specific melancholy of the Tucumán zamba. Argentina is a country that imagines itself as one and sounds like many. That tension is also its deepest musical richness.

Editorial selection

Top 10 Argentine Musical Roots

1. 1

   La Payada

   The poetic improvisation duel that defines gaucho identity. The direct predecessor of rap in the Argentine criollo tradition. The most democratic art form that Argentine popular culture produced.

   Pampa / Río de la Plata
2. 2

   La Zamba

   The most beautiful courtship dance in Argentine folklore. The handkerchief between the man and the woman as a language of love that needs no words.

   Northwest
3. 3

   El Malambo

   The masculine footwork that is also a philosophy of life: the gaucho who measures himself, not his rival, with each strike of foot against the earth.

   Pampa
4. 4

   El Chamamé

   The music of the Guaraní-European northeast. The accordion and the bandoneón in service of a rhythm that blends two worlds with the naturalness of someone who no longer remembers they were ever apart.

   Litoral (Corrientes)
5. 5

   La Quena

   The pre-Columbian instrument that survived the conquest. The sound of the altiplano before Argentina existed. The voice of the Andes in contemporary folklore.

   Andean Northwest
6. 6

   El Bombo Legüero

   The drum that can be heard a league away. The pulse of Argentine folklore across all its genres. The African heritage that survived the whitewashing of official history.

   National
7. 7

   El Candombe Rioplatense

   The music of the African nations of the Río de la Plata. The Black root of tango that official history preferred to ignore and that contemporary musicologists are now recovering.

   Buenos Aires
8. 8

   La Chacarera

   The oldest rhythm in Argentine popular music. Santiago del Estero as the musical heart of the deep interior, the place where folklore was never a trend but always a way of life.

   Santiago del Estero
9. 9

   Las Reducciones Jesuíticas

   The most extraordinary fusion of the colonial period: European baroque music and Guaraní rhythms producing something entirely new. A musical experiment that lasted one hundred and fifty years.

   Misiones / Litoral
10. 10

    El Martín Fierro (as a musical text)

    José Hernández's epic poem written in the meter of the payadas. Music before it becomes music: the rhythm that lives in the words before the words are sung.

    Pampa

Next chapter — Argentina Series: Tango — origins in the Río de la Plata, the Guardia Vieja, Carlos Gardel and the golden age of the most universal genre Argentina gave to the world.