La Grey Zuliana

Ricardo Aguirre was a primary school teacher before he was a star. Born in Maracaibo in 1939, he qualified at 19, taught in Bachaquero and Maracaibo and worked as a radio announcer, while singing gaita, the music of Zulia state that traditionally fills the season from the eve of the Virgin of Chiquinquirá's feast in November to Candlemas in February. Gaita had long since become a music of celebration and also of criticism and protest, and Aguirre sang about Maracaibo, its people and their hardships in a voice so distinctive that a fellow composer christened him El Monumental. In 1967, after disagreements within his group Cardenales del Éxito, he moved to the conjunto Saladillo, and with them in 1968 he recorded La Grey Zuliana. According to the researcher Arnoldo Hernández Oquendo, the music and the introduction were Aguirre's while the refrain belonged to Marcial Valbuena, and the recording was the first time an electric bass was used in a professional gaita group. The song spread so far that it came to be called the hymn of the Zulian gaita. Aguirre did not live to see what it became. In the early hours of 8 November 1969, driving home in his Jeep through a downpour after a rehearsal, he was killed in a crash at the age of 30, just days before the gaita season was due to begin. In 1983 the governor of Zulia declared 8 November the Day of the Gaitero in his memory. Half a century on, the gaita he recorded the year before his death is still the one Zulia calls its anthem.