album rating: ★★★★★
Genre: Tonada llanera / canción llanera / música tradicional venezolana. Tonadas is the album with which Simón Díaz Márquez — known affectionately throughout Venezuela as 'tío Simón' — definitively established himself as the guardian and master of the tonada llanera, the ancient song of the Venezuelan plains. Díaz (Barbacoas, Guárico, 1928 – Caracas, 2014) was a singer, composer, actor and television host who spent decades rescuing, documenting and composing in a genre that, by mid-century, was in danger of extinction due to rural-urban migration. The tonada is a form of sung work-song traditionally performed by the cabestrero (the cattle herder) to soothe animals during milking and herding — music inseparable from the rhythms of the llano. Tonadas presents ten pieces with extraordinary simplicity and intimacy: cuatro, arpa llanera, maracas and voice, evoking a nocturnal llanero landscape with solemn melodic lines, long melancholic notes and a sense of vast, empty horizons. The album's central song, 'Tonada de luna llena', has since become one of the most covered songs in Latin American history, recorded by Caetano Veloso, Mercedes Sosa, Joan Manuel Serrat and Natalia Lafourcade, among many others.
Label: El Palacio de la Música, S.A. (Venezuela), 1974.
Producer: Hugo Blanco.
Recording studio: Not individually specified in publicly available sources; recorded in Venezuela.
Critical reception: Tonadas is regarded as one of the essential albums of Latin American music and one of the most important documents in the history of Venezuelan popular culture. Los 600 Discos de Latinoamérica includes it among the continent's most significant recordings, noting how Díaz's 'incomparable sensitivity and poetry, his solemn voice with its long melancholic notes that fade into the distance', create an overwhelming sense of the llanero landscape without ever leaving the studio. Rate Your Music rates it number 89 in the best albums of 1974 worldwide. It is consistently cited as the album that canonised the tonada llanera as a distinct and major genre of Venezuelan music.
Commercial success: The album was a solid commercial success in Venezuela and generated significant cultural influence across Latin America. Its reach was amplified by the extraordinary international success of 'Tonada de luna llena', which was featured by Pedro Almodóvar in his 1995 film La Flor de mi Secreto in Caetano Veloso's rendition, introducing it to global audiences. Díaz received the National Prize of Culture of Venezuela in 2012 for his lifetime contribution to llanero music.
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