La Voz de la Zafra

Because Mercedes Sosa (1935-2009) achieved international recognition in her later years, she is popularly imagined as an ageless earth-mother with a big, booming contralto. This re-release of her 1959 debut album reminds us that her voice once possessed a youthful timbre and also that Sosa was there at the beginning of the socially engaged nueva canción (new song) movement. Performing eight songs composed by her husband Oscar Matus with Armando Tejada Gómez and four further songs by gifted Argentinian composers, Sosa hymns the people and landscapes of her native Tucumán – and in turn those of marginalised Latin America as a whole. Like Victor Jara, Violeta Parra and Atahualpa Yupanqui she acts out her rebellion through homages, prayers and lullabies, singing soulfully to the country-dance rhythms of the zamba and chacarera. The zafra of the title refers to the harvest – the time of bounty – but not all here is fruitful. ‘El Indio Muerto’ and ‘Zamba de la Distancia’ evoke a lonely desert-world. ‘Nocturna’ captures the sadness of true love. Mercedes Sosa is now universally acclaimed as the voice of the silent majority; this simple but moving album is where it all began.