Fixes Your Wagon: Buena Vista Social Club and "El Carretero"

The random tune for today is from Cuba - appropriate given our newfound relations with that country. El Carretero is by the Buena Vista Social Club. The Buena Vista Social Club was the name of a club in Havana where musicians met and performed together in the 1940s at a time when new Latin styles were being created. Juan de Marcos González and Ry Cooder assembled a number of those musicians that had played there and recorded them for a CD in 1997. After the release of the CD, they were invited to play as a full ensemble in Amsterdam where filmmaker Wim Wenders captured the performance on film and interspersed that footage with interviews of the musicians in a documentary called Buena Vista Social Club. The documentary went on to receive an Academy Award nomination, and made stars of the once forgotten musicians as well as reviving interest in Cuban music and Latin music in general. El Carretero is a guajira, and has Eliades Ochoa on lead vocals. The song is about a wagon man who brings the harvest of the plains to the harbor. It can be found on the 1997 CD Buena Vista Social Club. Interesting postscript - Ry Cooder was fined $25,000 by the US government for breaking the Trading with the Enemy Act in regard to the Cuban embargo. I guess that obstacle will soon be coming to an end.