Rafael Escalona's songs told the stories of people from Colombia's Caribbean coast, their everyday life and heartaches, feuds and festivities, often commenting slyly on politics. He became a creative inspiration to millions, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez (in photo above), who took him to Stockholm with him in 1982 when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature and told the world that this songwriter and composer was his inspiration.
Born in the coastal town of Patillal, the young Rafael was educated to become a lawyer or landowner, but what most interested him were the stories his father told about exploits in Colombia’s civil war or other tales from what in those days was a wild frontier region.
At the age of 10, Escalona and his family moved inland to the larger town of Valledupar. At school he was already writing poems, but it was in 1943 when he left school that he composed his first song for a local vallenato group led by an accordion, guitar, a guacharaca or scraper, and the caja or small drum. He went on, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, to compose many of his most famous songs, gradually making a name for himself along the northern coast of Colombia.
Escalona was unusual in that he never learned to read music or play an instrument, and he never even performed in any official capacity -- he was instead a parrandero, or partygoer, and spent countless hours drinking whiskey, chasing women, and singing ballads amonsgt friends. This he turned into an artform, allbeit difficult to document and record.
Escalona's experiences as a parrandero fuelled his passion for the vallenato and informed his efforts as a songwriter -- his lyrics drew on his own romantic foibles as well as the everyday lives of his friends, bolstered by the kind of news, gossip, and legends once carried from town to town by traveling minstrels. "I compose vallenatos in a different style," Escalona once said. "Sort of like musical chronicles -- like the gentleman that crashed his cart, or the farmer that fell off his horse and broke his leg."
His wife, Marina Arzuaga ("La Maye" in his songs), for many years put up with his womanising which produced between 28 and 36 offspring. Despite his success, he never made a living from music, and spent the majority of his life farming cotton. Over time, Escalona's circle of parrandas mates included Hernando Molina, husband of journalist Consuelo Araujo.
In the 1960s Escalona's songs about life in his remote province conquered the imagination of students in Bogotá, including Alfonso López Michelsen, the son of a former president. He helped Escalona found the Festival de la Leyenda Vallenata in 1967, a week of celebrations held annually in Valledupar to elect the "kings" of vallenato music for the year.
In the 1990s Escalona found himself once more enjoying huge popularity in Colombia. A TV soap opera based on his life was a huge success, and launched a new star of vallenato, Carlos Vives. This was the first time Escalona made any money from his music, which he spent as usual on drink, women, and friends.
Escalona's impact on contemporary Latin pop was also celebrated in 2006 when the Latin Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences presented him with one of its excellence awards. In the end Rafael’s hard living took its toll and Escalona was in hospital for several weeks before dying of heart failure on 13 May 2009.
