PUERTO RICOS ON MY CHECKLIST LYRICS SERIES

“When you sing ‘Happy Birthday,’ you sing it to the rhythm of plena. By the time Matos was born, in 1968, it was a dominant musical style on the island. Its stage is the streets.” But plena gradually gained respectability among the upper classes, and, by the nineteen-fifties, an upscale version was even performed in ballrooms. As Rita Indiana, a Dominican musician and novelist who lived in Puerto Rico before moving to Washington Heights last year, explained, “ Plena has a very urban, joyful character. Its origins are not religious, so it was never celebrated in hiding. In the early twentieth century, plenas were mostly a satirical commentary on the news, gossip, and daily life, and were performed by men on street corners. Though there are many classic plenas whose lyrics are widely known, there are at least as many that have been sung once and lost. There is a theme, and the lead singer is responding.” Matos, whom Sánchez met in San Juan when they were both seventeen, played the requinto and sang. “ Plena is based on the African concept of call and response, like gospel. “The rhythm comprised three different layers, the beats of the three panderetas, but they must sound like one,” David Sánchez, a Grammy-winning jazz tenor saxophonist from Puerto Rico, explained. The basic metric is 4/4, and the tempo can vary. The two largest provide the base rhythm the smallest and highest pitched, called a requinto, improvises beats. Plena can be traced back to African roots in the Black and working-class communities in the towns on Puerto Rico’s southern coast, and it is played on handheld drums, called panderos or panderetas, of three sizes. To understand what made Matos such a towering figure, it is necessary first to understand the nature and the importance of plena, a more-than-a-century-old style of folk music, and what Matos made it into. Puerto Rico’s Governor, Pedro Pierluisi the mayor of San Juan, Miguel Romero the former New York City Council speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, and the singer Ricky Martin all publicly mourned Matos’s death. Is there a word for enormous loss that doesn’t feel as sharp because it’s shared?,” the WNYC podcast host Alana Casanova-Burgess tweeted. Thousands of people poured their sorrow into their social-media feeds. On January 18th, another sadness was added to this list, when Héctor (Tito) Matos, a master percussionist and beloved performer of the musical genre known as plena, died at fifty-three, of a heart attack.

PUERTO RICOS ON MY CHECKLIST LYRICS SERIES

In just a few years, Puerto Ricans have gone through a devastating debt crisis, a catastrophic hurricane, a string of earthquakes, a series of angry protests against political corruption and government ineptitude, and mass outmigration.

Puerto ricos on my checklist lyrics