The Women That Shaped Music: Celia Cruz

The Queen of Salsa: Celia Cruz

As March comes to a close, we are honoring our last influential woman in music for our series: Celia Cruz. If you have never heard her name, you have certainly heard her music or the music of someone influenced by her. Her music is for those who dance, laugh, and love vibrantly. She famously said, "All my life, I’ve sung happy music; I don’t like to sing anything sad. Of course I have unhappy moments, but they are just for me, for my inner life. I don’t want to bring that to the public." Her upbeat rhythms and inspiring lyrics are a testament to that.

Born in Havana, Cuba, Celia grew up in a large, tight-knit family in the Santos Suárez neighborhood. She spent many nights at her Tia (aunt) Ana's house, and she found herself singing lullabies to her younger cousins, some traditional, and some she would create spontaneously.

She built her singing career from the ground up, and coming from a humble background, she could not always afford to take public transportation to the talent contests hosted at local radio stations. This did not stop her from winning multiple competitions and dreaming of becoming a professional singer, despite backlash from her father. She continued to perform with local bands in the neighborhood and on the radio, and by 1950 she became the lead singer for an incredibly popular band at the time, La Orquesta Sonora Matancera. Cuba had a huge radio presence and as its music became well-known world wide, so did Celia. She began touring Latin America, and then as her fame climbed, the United States. In the 1960s, she became a political exile, never returning to her home country of Cuba.

She settled in America, but clung to her identity through her music and it's Afro-Caribbean rhythms, as well as her famous ad-lib "azucar!", which translates to sugar. It is said that she coined the phrase after being asked if she wanted sugar in her coffee, to which she exclaimed "sugar!". She called the phrase a "battle-cry" which was characteristic of the rumba style of her music, known for its dance rhythms grounded by African percussion. While in America, her music evolved as she joined forces with Jonny Pacheco, a Dominican musician whose record label she joined. With him and other notable musicians, such as Tito Puente, they began to fuse electric instruments such as the bass and keyboard, with Afro-Cuban rhythms and put a name to the sound, "salsa". Pacheco famously said, “When I was rehearsing (with) the band, I saw that we had Dominicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and two Jewish fellows. When you make a sauce, you have different ingredients. And when I saw the band and the singer I thought, this is what we got. We got salsa.”  

Celia solidified herself as one of the first female Salsa artists, and took on songs traditionally sang by male vocalists. She also had a flamboyant and vivacious fashion sense, filled with bright colors, traditional cuban dress, and her hair in a variety of styles honoring her African heritage.

She remained a relevant figure through her many collaborations as well as her willingness to try different genres of music. She once said, "I have always been a singer of the people. If my fans ask me for something, I try my best to please them, and I don’t impose on them what I think they should like.” She always sought to entertain and uplift. This openness led her all around the world and although she herself proclaimed that her English is "not very good looking", she reached audiences despite their native language, age, or culture.

As I reflect on Celia, I see a driven innovator who boldly walked into the unknown, always grounded because she knew who she was and where she came from, and never failed to honor that. I leave you with these lyrics from her song "La Vida Es Un Carnaval" (Life is A Carnival):

Ay, there's no need to cry, because life is a carnival,

It's more beautiful to live singing.

Oh, Ay, there's no need to cry,

For life is a carnival

And your pains go away by singing.

Thank you Celia for your voice, let us keep on singing.

Miss K