The music that today is called bachata emerged from and belongs
to a long-standin Pan-Latin American tradition of guitar music,
música de guitarra, which was typically played by trios
or quartets comprised of one or two guitars (or other related
stringed instrument such as the smaller
requito), with percussion provided by maracas and/or other instruments
such as claves (hardwood sticks used for percussion), bongo
drums, or a gourd güiro scraper. Sometimes a large thumb
bass called marimba or marimbula was included as well.
When bachata emerged in the early 1960s, it was part of an
important subcategory of guitar music, romantic guitar music
-as distinguished from guitar music intended primarily for dancing
such as the Cuban son or guaracha- although in later decades,
as musicians began speeding up the rhythm and dancers developed
a new dance step, bachata began to be considered dance music
as well. The most popular and widespread genre of romantic guitar
music in this century, and the most influential for the development
of bachata, was the Cuban bolero (not to be confused with the
unrelated Spanish bolero). Bachata musicians, however, also
drew upon other genres of música de guitarra that accomplished
guitarists would be familiar with, including Mexican rancheros
and corridos, Cuban son, guaracha and guajira, Puerto Rican
plena and jibaro music, and the Colombian-Ecuadorian vals campesino
and pasillo- as well as the Dominican merengue, which was originally
guitar-based.
Before the development of a Dominican redording industry and
the spread of the mass media, guitar-based trios and quartets
were almost indispensable for a variety of informal recreational
events such as Sunday afternoon parties known as pasadías
and spontaneous gatherings that took place in back yards, living
rooms, or in the street that were known as bachatas. Dictionaries
of Latin American Spanish define the term bachata as juerga,
jolgorio, or parranda, all of which denote fun, merriment, a
good time, or a spree, but in the Dominican Republic, in addition
to the emotional quality of fun and enjoyment suggested by the
dictionary definition, it referred specifically to get-togethers
that included music, drink, and food. The musicians who played
at bachatas were usually local, friends an neighbors of the
host, although sometimes reputed musicians from farther away
might be brought in for a special occacion. Musicians were normally
recompensed only with food and drink, but a little money might
be given as well. Parties were usually held on Saturday night
and would go on until dawn, at which time a traditional soup,
the sancocho, was served to the remaining guests. Because the
music played at these gatherings was so often played on guitars
(although accordion-based ensembles were also common), the guitar-based
music recorded in the 1960s and 1970s by musicians of rural
origins came to be known as bachata.
The word bachata also had certain associations, upper-class
parties would never be called bachatas. In his book Al amour
del boohoo (1927), Ramón Emilio Jiménez, a distinguished
Dominican "man of letters" and "writer of manners,"
described a bachata in terms that reflect how such gatherings
were associated by the elite with low-class debauchery and dissipation:
The "bachata" is a center of attraction for all the
men, where the social classes ao those who attend them are leveled
and where the coarsest and libertarian forms of democracy predominate.
The most elegant figures of the barrio are there, daring and
audacious. The setting of these dissolute pleasures is a small
living room impregnated by odors that seem conjured to challenge
decency... In an adjoining room a guitarist plucks and unleashes
into the contaminated air of the house (a) blazing street-level
couplet, to which a singer with a well-established reputation
as a "second" makes a duo,
provisioned with a pair of spoons which he strikes to accompany
the melody.
Among Dominicans there is considerable disagreement as to exactly
when the term bachata come to refer to a particular kind of
music. In the absence of any systematic research into the subject,
there is a tendency for people to rely on their own memories,
which vary according to their age, class, and where they grew
up. According to bachata musicians themselves, it was in the
1970s that the guitar-based music they recorded came to be identified
by the term bachata, which by then had lost its more neutral
connotation of an informal (if rowdy) backyard party and acquired
an unmistakably negative cultural value implying rural backwardness
and vulgarity. For example on hearing one of these recordings,
a middle- or upper-class person might say something like "¡Quítate
esa bachat!" (Take that bachata off!). By using the term
in this way, a style of guitar music made by poor rural musicians
come to be synonymous with low quality. The condemnation fell
not only upon the music and its performers, but upon its listeners
as well; the term bachatero, used for anyone who liked the music
as weel as for musicians, was equally derogatory.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, the worsening social and economic
conditions of bachata's urban and rural poor constituency were
clearly reflected in bachata. The intrumentation remained the
same, but the tempo had become noticeably faster, and the formerly
ultra-romantic lyrics inspired by the bolero became more and
more concerned with drinking, womanizing, and male braggadocio,
and increasingly, it began to express desprecio (disparagement)
toward women. As bachata's popularity with the country's poorest
citizens grew, the term bachata, which earlier had suggested
rural backwardness and low social status, became loaded with
a more complicated set of socially unacceptable features that
included illicit sex, violence, heavy alcohol use, and disreputable
social contexts such as seedy bars and brothels.
Until recently, bachata was a musical pariah in its country
of origin, the Dominican Republic. Since its emergence in the
early 1960s, bachata, closely associated with poor rural migrants
residing in urban shantytowns, was considered too crude, too
vulgar, and too musically rustic to be allowed entrance into
the mainstream musical landscape. As recently as 1988, no matter
how many copies a bachata record may have sold -and some bachata
hits sold far more than most records by socially acceptable
merengue orquestas- no bachata record ever appeared on a published
hit parade list, received airplay on FM radio stations in the
country's capital Santo Domingo, or were sold in the principal
record stores. Bachata musicians appeared only rarely on television,
and they performed only in working-class clubs in the capital.
In contrast, even second rate merengue orquestas were given
lavish publicity and promotion, and they entertained at posh
private clubs and nightclubs.
Bachata