Bucaramanga

A song for Señora Bucaramanga

In “Señora Bucaramanga”, José A. Morales addresses the city as a woman. He calls her the lady of the cicadas, compares her women to palm trees and names Parque Romero. The song is a pasillo, one of the forms in the Colombian Andean repertoire Morales helped bring to listeners.

Morales was born in Socorro, Santander, and lived in Bucaramanga during his life. Another of his songs, “Pueblito viejo”, remembers Socorro rather than Bucaramanga. According to a remembrance published in Vanguardia, the duet Durán y Solano tried it on live radio in Bucaramanga before Garzón y Collazos recorded it.

The Dueto Hermanos López later recorded “Señora Bucaramanga”. Their interpretation returns to Morales’s images of the city: the palms, the cicadas and a park named in a song addressed to a señora.