Videoclips about Mariachi
from Arizona Illustrated

Folklorist Big Jim Griffiths tells us about the history of Mariachi music. from Arizona Illustrated, March 28, 2002 RealPlayer time 02:48

Transcript:

People will tell you Tucson is a Mariachi town. They are right. It is big here, there are a lot of fine Mariachi groups. There have been for a long time some tremendous bands that created a continuity of the music here. We have the Mariachi festival every year. Mariachi music isn't native to this part of the world. It was brought here, it's a post World War II import into Tucson. It comes from the homeland of the State of Jalisco in Mexico, the area near the city of Guadalajara. It is folk dance music of that part of Mexico. Nowadays it is played with lead instruments of violins and trumpets and the rhythm instruments of guitar, a little guitar with five strings and a huge six-string guitar. The trumpets were probably added in the 30s. The older Mariachi style was just violin and three guitars and sometime a harp in there, too. You can accompany almost any kind of play almost any kind of tune on Mariachi. But the core repertoire of the Mariachi group is a dance tune. For the men and women separate facing each other, folk dance of that area. I'm going to play you, to end this segment on Mariachi music, a tuney bit of the oldest Mariachi recording that anyone knows about. It's a group from the town which it is named for. They recorded around 1910. I happen to have this nice record playing a song which is still played. Let's listen to the oldest sound of Mariachi we really have available to us.