Canto por Travesura: the folklore and bawdy humor on a Víctor Jara album

Abstract

This article’s main objective is to contribute to a better understanding of Víctor Jara’s role as performer of folklore. This role includes the ways in which he collected, musicalized, and performed folk repertories, matters which have been eclipsed by an interest in his songwriting. To this end, we analyze Canto por travesura (1973), his LP dedi- cated to humorous and bawdy folklore collected from Chile’s south-central region. In the first part, we consider his collecting process and compare the versions on the LP with documentary sources. We explore the recording process,

the album’s organization, and the idiosyncratic way Jara and his musicians perform canto a lo poeta. We conclude that Canto por travesura was conceived as a folkloric performance and that Jara did not seek to authoritatively reproduce a rural sound but to evoke rurality for an urban and cosmopolitan audience. In the second part, we explore the meaning of the LP’s sexual humor from a gender perspective. Most of the album’s songs come from male repertories and express male anxieties. Two songs, however, come from female repertories and feature a woman as the main character. We are particularly interested in the resignification that occurs when women’s bawdy repertoire is performed by men. Our study incorporates original material resulting from an interview we conducted with Pedro Yáñez, the renowned folklorist who collaborated with Jara on the LP.