Fandangos, fandanguillos and fandangazos: Fernando el de Triana on popular and flamenco music

Arte y artistas flamencos (1935) is an indispensable text with reference to the GoldenAge of flamenco and its protagonists, according to the vision of flamenco guitarist and singer Fernando el de Triana (18671940). The book bears witness to a moment in which flamenco experienced a genuine morphological revolution, developing positions and applying patrimonial logic, and thus complicating the dichotomies with which flamenco was commonly viewed, as it sought to define itself in light of territorial, artistic, and personal dimensions of meaning. Fernando el de Triana intuited the differences between popular fandango, flamenco fandango, and the then-fashionable fandanguillo; his exposition of these forms distils the influences of early-twentieth-century andalucismo (an Andalusian parochialism and populism). I argue there that conditions under which this book was published explain the oscillations between these popularist positions, and the degree of political accommodation between flamenco and Spanish nationalism, seen as a metonymic extension of lo andaluzand foreshadowing the coming propaganda of the Franco regime.