Music: La Bamba

In Giro’s, a plushy nightspot in Mexico City, the band beat out a rumba rhythm. Americanos were on their feet almost before the Mexicans. Rotund Leon Henderson and his smartly tailored brunette wife, vacationing in Mexico, listened to a few frenzied beats, then let themselves go.*

The Americans and Mexicans were doing La Bamba, the latest dance to heat up Mexico City’s cool nights. Just a few months ago La Bamba steamed up to the higher altitudes from Veracruz, where horsemen and fishing peasants, known as jarochos, have danced it for 400 years. To a jarocho, La Bamba is a studied love ritual of Spanish-Indian origin, in which the dancers start far apart and slowly move together by delicate footwork, tying a ribboned sash on the ground into a lover’s knot with their feet. As they dance they sing their own improvised, often risqué and not always intelligible love lyrics.

Everett Hoagland, the young American who leads the band at Giro’s, saw he dance at a Veracruz fiesta. He orchestrated the simple folk melody and noted down its dance steps. Back at Giro’s he began to alternate it with his regular fare of rumbas, sambas and congas. Within six weeks Mexico City’s socialites, free-spending European expatriates and Amerlean travelers were calling for nothing but La Bamba. As they do it at Giro’s. La Bamba is actually a Mexican version of the Cuban rumba, but more of a bouncy folk dance. At one point the girl swings away from her partner, does a brief waltz step with a hop and a tap thrown in, while picking up her skirts and swishing them back & forth in flirty fashion. Nobody bothers about a ribbon on the floor, or singing while they dance, as the jarachos do.

Last week La Bamba was heading north. Bandleader Hoagland broadcast the melody nightly to the U.S. Mexico’s playboyish presidential candidate, Miguel Aleman, a native Veracruzano, chose La Bamba for his campaign song, had it played by the faithful as often as the Democrats used to play Happy Days Are Here Again. In Manhattan’s Stork Club, publicity-smart Dancemaster Arthur Murray last week gave U.S. dancers a first look at his version of the Veracruz dance.

* Cinemactress Lana Turner once danced a fast samba with Henderson, remarked: “Mr. Henderson dances sidesaddle.”