REMASTERED version here: https://soundcloud.com/kat330repost/el-preso-numero-nueve-remaster
Used on PBS program here: http://www.pbs.org/food/original-fare/season-3-episode-2-childhood-search-puerto-ricos-lost-pepper (Muppets left, Kat arrived ;)
Oct. 31, 2014: Never fear that downloads of this track have maxed out here! Unlimited DL's (w/ more tracks to come) at: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Kathleen_Martin/
My "apologia" to Spanish speakers everywhere! I was in my mid-teens when I first heard H. Cantorell's "El Preso Numero Nueve" ("Prisoner Number Nine") as performed by Joan Baez on her 1960 eponymous album. I was given my first guitar several months before I ever discovered Baez' early association with my newly-beloved icon crush, Bob Dylan (though that order of discovery was likely reversed for folk fans several years older than I), and curiosity had me seek out her early albums.
The version I'm performing is pretty much the same as what I taught myself all those years ago at sweet sixteen, so it's like an old aural snapshot, a performance on the fly caught in amber. Along with a very basic Spanish guitar strum, I learned the foreign lyrics by repeated listens to her singing them with the tedious action of lifting the needle and setting it back down to repeat a phrase. The album vanished from my collection while in trusted storage somewhere or other, but I believe the Mexican lyrics were also printed on the LP's back cover or sleeve. This might have helped my pronunciation and memorization much more if only I'd been a student of Spanish rather than of French and German in school!
In any event I never revisited the Baez lyrics nor any other version after I had it set in memory for frequent performance back then. Which means, whatever I got wrong by phonetic rote to start with -- plus whatever syllables and phrases have mutated even farther afield over these many interim years -- will be painfully evident in this track. I do know the general gist of the lyrics and the tragic tale being told, but probably it will be a challenge to any Spanish-speaking listener to fully comprehend this version. Again, my apologies in advance.
Side notes: Recording this song all these decades later showed me a personal development and growth in myself; my youthful perfectionism-to-the-point-of-paralysis has relaxed to where now I can allow for and be OK with some mistakes (as can be heard in the track). Also, the opening melodica phrase is a haunting homage to Marty Robbins' "El Paso" only in a minor key. I'd considered carrying it through with that song's other triads in minor, but decided to KISS and leave it as is.
A final note: Another special connection to "El Preso..." is that it won me various talent contests at the time, and I even performed the song as my talent portion in the Indiana Junior Miss state pageant. A bold move on my part to play Spanish guitar and sing in a foreign language at such apple-pie-American-patriot-flag-waving-Hoosier fests and, apparently, good fortune there were never Spanish-speaking judges of these events in the late '60s. :)
