Violeta Parra

Biography

One of Violeta Parra’s first listeners was a rag doll: as the story goes, she wrote her first song for it when she was nine. She began playing the guitar at about the same time.

She was born on 4 October 1917, and her papers give San Carlos, in Ñuble Province, as the place. The museum that bears her name says otherwise, San Fabián de Alico, forty kilometres from San Carlos; there are no documents to support this. Her father, Nicanor Parra Alarcón, taught music; her mother, Clarisa Sandoval Navarrete, sewed, sang and played the guitar. There were nine children, among them the poet Nicanor Parra and the folklorist Roberto Parra. The family lived in Santiago, then in Lautaro, and from 1927 in Chillán. Her father died in the early 1930s, money became short, and the children sang in restaurants, at inns and in circuses. In 1932, at the insistence of her elder brother Nicanor, Violeta went to Santiago to study at the Normal School, a teacher-training college, but she cared less for school than for singing.

From 1937 she performed with her sister Hilda and her brothers in the Santiago restaurants El Popular and El Tordo Azul: boleros, rancheras, Mexican corridos. In 1938 she married a railway worker, Luis Cereceda, and had a daughter, Isabel (1939), and a son, Ángel (1943), both of whom became well-known musicians. Around 1947 she formed the duo “The Parra Sisters” with Hilda, and together they recorded their first records for RCA Victor.

The turning point was 1952. On Nicanor’s advice she began collecting authentic songs of the Chilean countryside, gave up her earlier repertoire and started writing her own on the basis of folk forms. On her travels she met poets, Pablo Neruda among them. A tenant farmer taught her to play the guitarrón, a traditional Chilean instrument with twenty-five strings. What she gathered went into the book “Cantos folklóricos chilenos”; by some accounts it holds more than three thousand songs. In 1954 she hosted a radio programme, “Canta Violeta Parra”, won a national prize for her performance of folk songs and travelled to the World Festival of Youth and Students in Warsaw. From there she went on to Paris, where she sang at L’Escale, recorded at the Musée de l’Homme and for the label Le Chant du Monde, and travelled to London. In 1955, while she was in Europe, her youngest daughter, Rosita Clara, died.

After returning to Chile in 1957 she recorded the series “The Folklore of Chile” for EMI Odeon, and in 1960 she founded the National Museum of Folk Art at the University of Concepción. Around this time she wrote many décimas, a verse form in which she was especially strong. At the same time she worked in ceramics, oil painting and arpilleras, that is, embroideries on burlap. Her work was shown at the first and second outdoor exhibitions of fine arts in the Parque Forestal in Santiago (1959 and 1960). The paintings “Las tres pascualas”, “Casamiento de negros” and “Machitún” are oil on wood and grow out of tales she had heard; she deliberately avoided realism.

On her birthday in 1960 she met the Swiss clarinettist Gilbert Favre. In 1961 she exhibited her paintings and recorded an album in Buenos Aires, and the album was banned. In 1962 she travelled with her children and granddaughter to the youth festival in Helsinki, then through the Soviet Union, Germany, Italy and France, and settled in Paris. There she sang in the Latin Quarter and at the Théâtre des Nations at UNESCO, and made arpilleras and wire sculptures. On 18 April 1964 her solo exhibition opened at the Museum of Decorative Arts at the Louvre, the first there by a Latin American artist. In 1965 her book “Poésie populaire des Andes” was published in Paris, and Swiss television made a film, “Violeta Parra, Chilean Embroiderer”. Her sharpest songs date from here, among them “Arauco tiene una pena” and “El gavilán”, written for Favre. They are regarded as the foundation of the Nueva Canción, the “New Song” movement.

In June 1965 she returned to Chile, and on 17 December she opened a large tent, La Carpa de La Reina, in La Reina, a suburb of Santiago. She imagined it as a centre of folk culture and a “university of folklore”, with courses by day and music in the evening. The public responded weakly. Favre had by then left for Bolivia, where he played in the group Los Jairas. In La Paz, Violeta found him married. In 1966 “La Carpa de La Reina” and “The Last Compositions of Violeta Parra” were released; the second includes “Gracias a la vida”, written in La Paz, and “Volver a los 17”.

She shot herself in her tent in La Reina on 5 February 1967. In her farewell letter to her brother Nicanor she wrote: “I am not killing myself for love. I do it out of a pride that rises against mediocrity.” She was buried in the Cementerio General in Santiago.

The Violeta Parra Foundation was set up by her children in 1992. In 1998 she was posthumously awarded the Gabriela Mistral Medal. In 2011 Andrés Wood made the film “Violeta Went to Heaven” about her, and on 4 October 2015 the Violeta Parra Museum opened in Santiago.