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You know He arrived in Veracruz with his father. The foreigners' registry indicates that he is a "theater artist" by profession and gives June 13, 1906 as his date of birth. In later records of the Migration Service 1907 also appears, although today March 16, 1912 is given as the exact day on which the brilliant guitarist was born in Pamplona.
There is also a dance of dates –pardon the pun– for the birth of Carmen amaya in the files of the Immigration Service. The one we show here is from the same day that Sabicas and her father entered through Veracruz. The profession is stated as "dancer" and the date of birth is stated as 1919 (other files give 1915).
After arduous investigations, the date that has been established Montse Madridejos It is 1918, as stated in various works available online. It also appears in the extraordinary book Carmen amaya (Bellaterra, Barcelona, 2013), which he wrote with David Perez Merinero.
On December 28, 1939, they also arrived in Veracruz from Havana, Antonia y Francisco, Carmen's brothers, and their father, Jose Amaya the ChineseThere is no record of the other members of the Amaya family going to Havana.
But let's continue with the Sabicas family. From his brother Diego, also a guitarist, I have not found any records that indicate that he traveled to Havana, nor of his mother, who years later we found settled in Mexico City and in Medellín, already a widow, sometimes stating that her profession is "her home" and other times "artist" and "actress."
We have, therefore, that The four members of the Castellón Campos family were artistsSince no travel records have been found of her or her son Diego's travel to Veracruz in 1939, it can be assumed that they did not travel to Havana, but remained in Mexico.
It's curious, but little is known about Diego despite being Sabicas' right-hand man throughout his life and serving as second guitar to his brother in concerts and recordings. Not even in the indispensable Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Flamenco, Blas Vega y Ruiz RiversThere is an entry dedicated to him. I have not been able to find out his date of birth with certainty, nor whether he was older or younger than his brother Agustín. There are later immigration records of him and they contain interesting data. For example, we have this one from 1944.
His profession is listed as "artist" and his place of birth as "Salamanca" in 1909. The same is true of other later documents. Did Sabicas' family live in Salamanca or was it a coincidence that he was born there, as they were street vendors? We do not know. Nor can we trust the date listed there, as is the case with other dates already seen.
But let's continue with the Cuban journey of the Amaya and Castellón families. As Montse Madridejos tells us in a great article, arrived in Havana in September 1939, after triumphing in Argentina and Mexico, which is where they left for Havana. They returned to Mexico via Veracruz on December 28 of that year, as already seen. In Havana they recorded the short film The spell of the fandangoWho he led Jean AngeloThe film premiered in Havana on January 26, 1940, when the company was already back in Mexico.
Here we can see the short film:
In the magazine The new dawn No. 24 (January-March 2013), Jose Luis Navarro writes an extensive article about Carmen Amaya to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the dancer's death. About the short film The spell of the fandango He writes, referring to the Captain's dance:
«First, she plays, accompanied by an orchestra, the piece that gives the film its title, a kind of highly stylized fandango written by José María Palomo (…). Then, on a stage shaped like an enormous tambourine and accompanied by five guitars –Diego Castellón, El Chino, Sabicas, Paco Amaya and El Pelao– she performs her very personal alegrías.
In the aforementioned article by Montse Madridejos, which is from 2018, the researcher also writes:
«In the film, her sister Antonia appears dancing first (in the learning phase ;-)). Later, her brother Paco plays a soleá. Next, Jesús Perosanz sings fandangos and is accompanied by Carmen's father, José Amaya, El Chino. Then Carmen appears dressed in the bolero dress immortalized by Ruano Llopis and dances The Spell of Fandango with orchestral accompaniment and castanets. In the copy that I have been able to see modernly, after dancing The Spell of Fandango, the scene of the dance of alegrías on a giant tambourine accompanied by five guitarists (José and Paco Amaya, Sabicas and his brother Diego Castellón and El Pelao) appears. This scene seems to be mounted without a solution of continuity with the rest of the short. Carmen appears dressed in trousers, a shirt with large polka dots and the guitarists are dressed as cañís, with a Calañés hat. The thing with the giant tambourine is spectacular… And the end of the film.
The credits list two Agustín Castellóns. For the first, the name “Niño Sabica” is written in parentheses, and for the second, “Padre”. We see, therefore, that Sabicas’ brother, Diego, is not in the film as had been mistakenly believed. It seems that Diego and his father sometimes alternated in the cast of Carmen Amaya, perhaps so as not to leave Mrs. Rafaela alone.
The five guitarists we see in the final scene are actually, from left to right: Augustin Castellon Gabarri (Sabicas's father), Jose Amaya Amaya the Chinese (Carmen's father), Sabicas, Francisco Amaya Amaya (Carmen's brother) and Sebastian Manzano Heredia the Bald One (father of the dancers Juan el Pelao, Faíco and el Fati), who is the gypsy who appears at the beginning of the film and whose name is not in the opening credits.
We have documentary evidence, therefore, that Sabicas' father was a guitarist. Here we can see him in a couple of low-quality frames:
Montse Madridejos has kindly given me a newspaper advertisement in which it is reported that Carmen Amaya will perform in Guadalajara (Mexico) on June 24, 1939, that is, three months before they went to Havana and recorded the short film. As a star guitarist, she is «El Niño de Sabicas, the wizard of the guitar»The guitarists of the painting are José and Paquito Amaya (that is, Carmen's father and brother), Sebastián el Pelao and Agustín Castellón, who has no choice but to be Sabicas' father, already prominently announced above.
Augustin Castellon Gabarri, apart from being a guitarist flamenco, must have been a good fan of cante. In the aforementioned article Mona Morlasky In which he collects testimonies from Sabicas shortly before his death, he writes:
«On one occasion, Sabicas was touring Spain with the legendary Sevillian singer La Niña de los Peines. La Niña, Sabicas, her father and guitarist Niño Ricardo were driving to Badajoz in a noisy wreck of a car. La Niña began to sing por tientos, a form capable of deeply moving people. Throughout the trip she only sang por tientos. She sang about twenty verses, each dedicated to a singer or town. As she sang, the duende took hold of her. «No one could resist that voice,» Sabicas recalled. «The effect was so powerful, my father went crazy. He tore off his clothes, his tie, his shirt. I tried to calm him down, but it was impossible. That is the power of the duende.»
And continues:
«Like many artists, Sabicas insisted from the start on living “my way.” And like many successful artists, his parents encouraged him in these endeavors. As a child, he had special privileges. He never helped his father, who owned a store. Instead, he stayed up all night playing guitar, and was allowed to sleep late in the morning. “My first guitar was so big I couldn’t hold it,” he fondly remarked. “So I played all the songs on the neck.”»
Yes, Sabicas' father was a great fan of cante and also a guitarist capable enough to accompany the earthy Carmen Amaya, both in films and in prestigious theatres. But the most important thing is that he and his wife Rafaela gave the best opportunities to their son Agustín because they knew that a genius of flamenco music had been born in them. We must be eternally grateful to them.
*****
I end the article with a beautiful photograph in which Sabicas can be seen in the centre, together with his brother Diego and Carmen Amaya. It was taken in front of the Iguazu Falls, in the second half of the 50s. It comes from the Juan Antonio Agüero Collection, widower of Carmen Amaya, and it was given to me by Montse Madridejos, to whom this article is dedicated for her kindness and wisdom.
→ See here the previous entry of this article by Ramón Soler.
