Love is a Roasted Parrot: Puerto Plata and "La Cotorrita de Rosa"

Happy New Year's! Let's start the new year off right with a random tune from Puerto Plata. The stage name of Dominican musician José Cobles, Puerto Plata's music and singing is reminiscent of guitar music heard in the Dominican Republic in the 1930s and 40s, before it was stigmatized by dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, who preferred accordion-heavy merengue tipico. By the 1960s, after Trujillo's assassination, Dominican guitar music began to develop into bachata. Plata does not play bachata, however, but a music closer in style to contemporary Cuba, even though it is inspired in the Dominican past. In addition, Plata's band features some of the Dominican Republic's finest musicians, such as guitar legends Edilio Paredes and Frank Mendez. This song, La Cotorrita de Rosa, can be found on Plata's first internationally distributed solo CD, Mujer de Cabaret, released in 2007. The song's title translates to "Rosa's Little Parrot," and the lyrics, in which Rosa cries for her parrot which has been roasted and eaten by three men, is also a metaphor for the burning love of the narrator for a paramour.

Listen to songs like this and more on the KUNM Global Music Show every Monday night from 10 pm - 1 am Mountain Standard Time. Live streaming, program information and the two-week digital archive can be found at http://www.kunm.org.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Plata_(musician)