Mercedes Valdés Granit

She was born on the Day of Our Lady of Mercedes in the Havana neighborhood of Cayo Hueso on Neptuno and Hospital streets, where she assimilated, from childhood, Yoruba chants and prayers, rumba and works by representative Creole composers, among others, Ernesto Lecuona, Rodrigo Prats, Arsenio Rodríguez and Eliseo and Emilio Grenet.

Her beginning as a professional artist took place in the radio program La Corte Suprema del Arte, from the old CMQ station, in which the applause of the public determined the triumph of whoever aspired to the prize in that broadcast.

Her small but well-timbered voice guaranteed her success then with compositions of Afro-Cuban music, a genre that Valdés would dedicate herself to interpreting fundamentally. Miguel Barnet has said in this regard: While it is true that the Cuban is above all a dancer, his singing abilities are not far behind.

Merceditas always brought together both gifts, harmoniously combined them in a personal style, within the great group of Afro singers, and turned it into an identifying mark of grace and Cubanness.

Her voice stood out among others, more nasal, more acute or simply more strident.

That sweetness and sobriety inherent to prayer and invocation sought a voice like Merceditas'. Because of these peculiarities, the wise Fernando Ortiz selected Merceditas Valdés starting in 1941 to illustrate in the University of Havana and in other capital institutions his lectures and seminars around the musics of African origin in the Caribbean island.

When she was presented that year by the drummers Trinidad Torregrosa and Jesús Pérez, the eminent ethnologist called her a rough diamond and later, when in their joint work she became indispensable in the interpretation of Lucumí and Congo chants and prayers, he granted her the qualification of my little aché.

During the very forties of the twentieth century, Valdés, under the musical direction of Obdulio Morales, maintained a Sunday program for a long time on Radio Cadena Suaritos, which made an epoch.

And in 1951, under the direction of maestro Enrique González Mantici, she participated as the leading figure in the space Rapsodia Negra, from the CMQ radio station. At the beginning of the last decade mentioned, television was inaugurated in Cuba.

Merceditas Valdés' Afro-Cuban interpretations would receive the acceptance of an entire people through the new means of communication.

In different television channels, film studios, radio stations, theaters or nightclubs she alternated with personalities of the caliber of Sarah Vaugham, Nat King Cole, Ernesto Lecuona, Rita Montaner, Benny Moré, Celia Cruz, Emilio (El Indio) Fernández, Mongo Santamaría, Pedro Armendáriz, Johnny Mathis, Bola de Nieve, Chano Pozo, Rosita Fornes, Omara Portuondo, Tito Puentes, Adolfo Guzmán, Gilberto Valdés, Pablo Milanes, Chucho Valdés and the group Irakere.

The internationally known Tropicana cabaret announced her in its stellar cast. In that context she traveled to the United States of North America.

Her name will appear inscribed in the book for the fifty years of existence of the famous Apollo theater, in New York, where she also performed in the select Carnegie Hall concert hall, accompanied by an orchestra of eighty musicians and Gilberto Valdés as director.

At the Hotel Flamingo, in Nevada, she was accompanied by the orchestra of the famous Creole singer Miguelito Valdés.

Other parts of North American territory she toured with a spectacle called From Havana to Harlem, whose music was by Jenx Simons.

After the political, economic and social changes initiated in Cuba in 1959, Merceditas Valdés' art broadened its projections.

The number of her phonographic recordings increased considerably, initiated in 1946 with the long-playing record Toques de Santos, which reached a consecrating moment with the appearance of the Aché series, in the nineties.

Likewise she took her original style throughout and across her homeland, without neglecting her international tours through nations of America and Europe; she worked alongside the Oru Group, directed by composer Sergio Vitier, and worked with the musical collectives Los Ibellis and Los Amigos.

With an extraordinary capacity to remain relevant beyond eras and musical styles, until her death, on June 13, 1996, Merceditas Valdés offered the best of her talent to the people who consecrated her among their artistic devotions.

She will always be an ethnographic document in which African chants and prayers persist, inserted in national culture.

The presence of Merceditas Valdés on any stage inspired all the magnitude that her own physical stature contradicted; the small Aché, as the famous Cuban ethnologist Fernando Ortiz called her, was the most important interpreter of Cuban folkloric music of African descent, which she disseminated excellently, through every place she went, and without a doubt left her mark. As if that were not enough, in her repertoire are included other genres such as bolero, rumba, Cuban jam session; which she interpreted with equal mastery.

In a concert offered in the White Hall, in Matanzas, and recorded in a phonographic recording, on September 3, 1983, it was a sample of her interpretive capacity and this diversity in her singing preferences. But it holds the special value of counting with guests who equally maintained a rigorous line of work with the genres they proclaimed, as is the case of Isupo Irawo by Jesús Pérez and Los amigos, directed by her life companion Guillermo Barreto; groups to which she was linked throughout her musical career.

From a Yoruba cycle with prayers to Elegguá, Oggún, Ochosi, Yemayá, to the well-known Pa' gozar, by the late Tata Güines, passing through a Drume negrita, or her bolero guaguancó version of the well-known Amor por ti, interpretations all touched by excellence, make of this concert, one of the jewels — which recorded in situ by engineer Jercy Belc with the EGREM mobile studio —, treasured in the music archives of San Miguel and Campanario, and which today remain for lovers of good music.