South American Smash

Latin America had a new song rage last week and a dance to go with it. The song was Santa Marta; the dance, the Porro Colombiano. Both seemed likely to follow the rumba and the conga--and other Latin American song hits--north.

Santa Marta is a catchy invocation of the Colombian banana port of that name (pop. 40,000), where the great Simon Bolivar died in 1830. The song's words call attention to an interesting feature of the town:

Santa Marta has a train, Santa Marta has a train,

But Santa Marta has no streetcar.

And if it wasn't for the waves, caramba! Santa Marta would die, caramba!* The song's rhythm, moving from the easy to the explosive, is an ideal basis for the Porro Colombiano--a dance suggesting that the Santa Martans have learned some very sinuous slips on their banana peels.

Santa Marta is a folk song, and as such might never have traveled far from its native shore, had it not been for a roaming Argentine bandleader named Eugenio Nobile. Nobile had been combing remote districts of South America for years, picking up scraps of primitive music and processing them into tunes for the swank dance halls of Buenos Aires. By last week his adaptation of Santa Marta had broken the sheet-music records of Buenos Aires' Tin Pan Alley.

* Copyright Editorial Julio Korn, Buenos Aires; sole agents, Edward B. Marks Music Corp. Radio City, New York.

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