Part 2 of Baby $ qwirl and da homies in San Juan, Puerto Rico ridin around and hittin up da klubs
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“Puerto Rico” de Jose Chiquitin Morales. MONCHO LEÑA Y LOS ASES DEL RITMO. RECORDED IN 1958. Don Mon was born in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico (at the Rio Cañas Arriba “barrio” in the outskirts of the city, close to the place Eugenio María de Hostos was born) in 1899, and lived in the working class Barcelona barrio of the city proper. He was a janitor and handyman at the nearby University of Puerto Rico – Mayagüez for more than 40 years, and was well loved by the campus community. Known as “‘Rate” by his closest friends, Don Mon gained a strong reputation as a composer of plenas, a musical genre considered the “musical newspaper of the barrio”. He assembled impromptu plena jams in the neighborhood, which were so widely known that they were preserved for posterity in the documentary film “Plena ” (1956) by Amilcar Tirado (Don Mon appears at the last segment, improvising lyrics). Two of Don Mon’s most famous plenas, “Askarakatiskis” (sometimes referred to as “Karacatis Ki”) and “El Gallo Espuelérico” (loosely translated as “The Spurless Rooster”) were humorous takes on real life events. On the first one Don Mon told the story of Rafael, a gambler who loses all his money rolling dice and is then assaulted by his wife Luz María with a broomstick, while their daughters laugh the incident off (one of the girls’ laughter is the basis for the song’s name). “El Gallo Espuelérico” tells the story of Américo, a guy who brags boastfully about a gamecock he carried with him to a fight. The …