Let me make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.
—Andrew Fletcher, 1703.
In the politically violent land of Cuba there is often some doubt as to who, exactly, is writing the laws. But there is never any doubt as to who is the chief songwriter in that melodious land. He is Ernesto Lecuona. He wrote the famed, romantic air which outsiders could scarcely be blamed for supposing was the Cuban National Anthem—Siboney.* He wrote Canto Karabali (Jungle Drums), Andalucia (The Breeze and I), La Comparsa, Say Si Si, Maria La O, and a host of other numbers which have made Cuban melody world-famed.
Last week, armed with the title of Cultural Attaché of the Cuban Embassy, solid, swarthy Ernesto Lecuona was rushing around Manhattan doing a number of things no diplomat had ever done before. He had just signed one of the biggest song-publishing contracts ever negotiated on Broadway. He had agreed to collaborate with U.S. Songwriter Vincent Youmans (Tea for Two) on 15 numbers for a new musical show. He was combing Hollywood agents out of his vaselined hair. He had gathered together an orchestra of some 60 pieces and turned Carnegie Hall into a cave of Caribbean melody.
Even in the U.S. Lecuona's tunes outsell those of many a top-flight Tin Pan Alleyite (Decca alone has sold over 1,700,000 records of Andalucia). They also stay in the top sales brackets longer than most Tin Pan Alley songs (Malagueña has been averaging 100,000 sheet-music sales a year in the U.S. for 20 years).
Boy Bandsman. But Ernesto Lecuona's biggest popularity lies south, of the Tropic of Cancer. There his eminence is fabulous. Cuba has two other top-rank songwriters: Moises Simons (The Peanut Vendor) and Eliseo Grenet (Mama Ines). But Lecuona's 300-odd songs and piano pieces, to which Latin Americans have been listening for more than two decades, have become as indelible a part of their culture as the Spanish and Portuguese tongues. Several years ago, while Lecuona was safely on his plantation near Havana, a businessman named Ricardo Lecuona was killed in a plane crash in Colombia. While news flashes mistakenly identified the dead man as Ernesto, radio stations in Mexico, Peru, Chile, Brazil and Argentina went off the air for periods of silence in his honor.
Unlike most popular songwriters, 47-year-old Lecuona is also a virtuoso concert pianist and a composer of symphonic music. Son of a Havana newspaperman, he began composing at the age of eleven with a two-step called Cuba Y America. Cuban military bands still play it. A boyhood star at Havana's National Conservatory under Composer Joaquin Nin, Lecuona organized his own band and appeared in Havana's movie houses in long trousers borrowed from an older friend. At 21 he traveled to the U.S. and made player-piano rolls of his early hits.
Lecuona was among the first to introduce rumba music to the U.S. public—in 1922 at Broadway's Capitol Theatre. Later he went to Paris, where he hobnobbed with the late Maurice Ravel and continued studying the piano. Then he toured Europe, Central and South America as a concert pianist. He has since made equally wide but more informal tours with a rumba outfit called Lecuona's Cuban Boys, has also written 30 musical comedies, most of them in collaboration with Cuban Librettist Gustavo Galarraga.