La Gota Fría

The song began as a grudge. In the late 1930s Emiliano Zuleta Baquero, the leading accordionist of La Guajira, met his rival from Cesar, Lorenzo Morales, in the village of Guacoche. Zuleta borrowed Morales's accordion, dazzled the crowd, and Morales snatched it back. A musical duel was later arranged at a party in Urumita; Zuleta played first to roaring applause, and Morales slipped away, pleading a sudden illness. In revenge, Zuleta composed "La gota fría" in 1938, mocking "Moralito" across the whole region. It is the classic example of piquería, the vallenato verse duel. The two later became close friends until Morales's death in 2005. The song travelled for decades. Guillermo Buitrago recorded it in the 1940s under another title, and in 1969 foreign minister Alfonso López Michelsen quoted its verses to challenge an opposition senator, which made it famous nationwide. Then came Carlos Vives, a former soap opera star and synth-pop balladeer, who found his roots playing the composer Rafael Escalona in a 1991 biopic. With his band La Provincia, Vives reworked old vallenato classics with rock energy for the 1993 album Clásicos de la Provincia, and "La Gota Fría" opened it, sounding, apart from the words, like a different song from Zuleta's original. It was his first commercial hit, reached number six on Billboard's Hot Latin chart and won a Premio Lo Nuestro. A village feud from the 1930s became the song that carried vallenato to the world.