Payador
Payador
Payador, an itinerant troubadour whose skill at musical improvisation earned him the rank of most esteemed gaucho musician. Music and dance played prominent roles in the folklore of the Río De La Plata. It was the payador, however, who excelled at singing duels (payadas), in which two contestants exchanged witticisms and insults. Singers accompanied themselves on the guitar or charrango, a small guitarlike instrument fashioned from the shell of an armadillo. Many famed payadores were black.
Two singing duels in particular became celebrated in gauchesco literature. In one, Santos Vega loses a singing duel to the devil in a poem by Rafael Obligado. And in the famous epic by José Hernández, Martín Fierro challenges a black payador, then kills him in a knife fight. Leopoldo Lugones titled his influential interpretation of the Hernández poem El payador (1916).
See alsoMusic: Popular Music and Dance .
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Domingo F. Sarmiento, Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants (1971).
Richard W. Slatta, Gauchos and the Vanishing Frontier (1983), pp. 81-82.
Additional Bibliography
Fuente, Alfredo de la. El payador en la cultura nacional. Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 1986.
Lugones, Leopoldo. El payador. Buenos Aires: Stockero, 2004.
Richard W. Slatta