Mountain Music

In the fashionable grillroom of Bogota's Granada Hotel the orchestra broke off a tango and swung into a soft, strumming, offbeat rhythm. A singer crooned:

Come, come, my sweet, to my little

ranch house Where I'll greet you with all my ardor.

On the crowded dance floor, several couples, unfamiliar with the music, went back to their tables. A few others, responding to what seemed three-quarter time, dipped into a fast waltz. Everybody else, some with handkerchiefs flying, stomped and whirled in the gay beat of a traditional Colombian dance, the bambuco.

All over the capital last week people danced to the mountain music. Staid Nacional Radio slipped a few bambucos in among its classics; smaller stations broadcast them at all hours. White-tied guitarists strummed the beat at the upper-class Embajador restaurant. Street minstrels twanged the bambuco on their four-stringed tiples (Indian guitars). El Espectador, surveying the popular tunes of 1949, noted that three bambucos topped the list. "Why not?" asked a bogotano. ''After all, it's our own music, and it's good."

Others thought it was good, too. The dance had spread to the U.S. In Manhattan, Tony & Sally de Marco introduced a fancy-dress version at the Plaza Hotel and on the stage of Broadway's Capitol Theater. Bandman Emil Coleman was playing it nightly along with foxtrots, rumbas and sambas for the Waldorf-Astoria patrons.

The bambuco has a long history in the Colombian countryside. For 100 years, the backlanders of Boyaca and Tolima have danced and sung it with little heed from bogotanos or anybody else. The boyaquenses, a mournful sort, usually sing of the cruel landlord, the icy mountains, the deceived husband. The tolimenses more often compose their songs about their burros, canoes, crops, or sweethearts. Straw-hatted, sandal-shod, machete-lugging mountaineers flirt as they dance to the music. Their girls, swaying and whirling with lifted skirt, respond coquettishly to each advance.

When members of Bogota's Tolima colony recently brought the bambuco to the capital, instructors had to show the city folk how the bambuco was done. But that was all that was needed. By last week city slickers whistled Pescador, Guabina Chiquinquirena and other mountain favorites as if they had known them all their lives.

Experts wrote essays proving that the bambuco had been the national dance all along. So far as Bogota was concerned, the rumba, samba and the tango had a new and potent rival.

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