Obituary
Mercedes Sosa, an untiring voice for the dispossessed and the persecuted, a leftist in politics and spirit, and an enchanting contralto, died on Sunday. Sosa was one of Argentina’s best-known pop exports and one of the finest singers of her generation. Through the years, she suffered arrest and exile and managed to outlive the military junta that tore her country apart.
Born poor on July 9, 1935, in San Miguel de Tucumán, in the northwest of Argentina, Haydée Mercedes Sosa grew up with the folk traditions of her heavily Amerindian province. Hailing herself from Quechua ancestry, she would become known to her Argentinian audience as “La Negra,” a reference to her jet black hair. Her talents were immediately obvious, and, at age 15, she won a talent contest sponsored by a local radio station, which launched her career. She cut her first record, La Voz de la Zafra, in 1959, when she was 24.
…Sosa picked and chose her compositions wisely, singing those that would best benefit from her chesty and vibrant contralto, an instrument of strident beauty.
Though her earliest recordings were prodigious, it wasn’t until she and her husband, the musician Manuel Oscar Matus, hooked up with the nueva canción movement that she found her artistic stride. Nueva canción began in the mid-60s in Chile, where songwriters began taking local folk forms, especially cueca, and reshaping them into modern expressions of leftist political sympathies, comparable to what people like Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Pete Seeger were doing in New York City at the time.
Not a songwriter herself, Sosa picked and chose her compositions wisely, singing those that would best benefit from her chesty and vibrant contralto, an instrument of strident beauty. Her best known renditions included “Gracias a la Vida,” a song by Chilean poet Violeta Parra, and Horacio Guarany’s “Si Se Calla El Cantor,” songs that brought her international acclaim from North America to Western Europe and even the Soviet bloc, where her themes of worker solidarity had an ideological resonance.
The 1970s were not good years for leftists in Latin America, and the danger to Sosa posed by Jorge Videla’s military junta, which took power in 1976, cannot be overstated. Fame did not inoculate artists. Over in Chile, Pinochet’s death squads had already murdered major members of the nueva canción movement, including the movement’s spiritual leader, Victor Jarra.
Sosa escaped death but not humiliation. She was arrested along with her entire audience at a 1979 concert, where she also endured the indignity of being searched by military police on stage. Though international pressure freed her from prison, Sosa fled to exile, living in Paris and Madrid, where she became known as the “voice for the voiceless ones,” singing on behalf of the victims of the Dirty War.
Despite her fame and the brutal realities of Videla’s Argentina, Sosa could not stay in Europe for long. She returned to Argentina in 1982, just before the Falklands War, and gave a series of concerts at Buenos Aires’ Teatro Colón, where she received a hero’s welcome from her long suffering countrymen. The junta fell into disarray after the war, and her homecoming concerts were released as a double album, Mercedes Sosa en Argentina, that became one of her bestselling works.
Without the pressure of state censorship, Sosa’s career flourished for the three decades preceding her death. She collaborated widely, including some fantastic sessions with Brazilian mastermind Milton Nascimento, and explored new genres, including rock, bossa nova, and Argentinian tango.
In the end, Sosa outlasted the military regime, outlived Pinochet, and left a recorded legacy of more than 70 albums, many of them essential, that will long remain a testament to the power of beauty and courage in the face of atrocity.
