Mi Corazón es Contento because we got Marisol, dictator Franco’s sweetheart!
Summer time equals Spain for me and everything Spanish, so let’s enjoy some old Spanish pop to get that holiday feel. This is Marisol, one of the greats from the time Spain was still suffering under dictator Franco. Her real name is Josefa Flores González and she’s from Málaga, Andalusia. She started out as a member of the organisation Coros y Danzas, created by Franco to promote regional folklore. Then she got discovered and played in a large number of movies and scored a huge amount of hits in the sixties and early seventies.
Marisol is one of the Spanish Yé-ýe girls, though I shouldn’t say ‘girls’ but everybody did at the time. Yé-yé is originally the French answer to the Anglo-Saxon Beat music, and it comes down to an imitation of American and British music but with and unmistakable French flavour.
So the French imitated the Americans and the Spanish imitated the French, but gave the Yé-yé a typical Spanish twist, with influences from Flamenco and other Spanish folklore. In The Netherlands and in Japan you see a similar movement in the pop music of that time.
And so you have this colourful, naive, cheerful music that makes even an anarchist like me long for Spain in the time of Franco. People didn’t have to worry about politics then. Other people did that for you. (PB)
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