A painter walked into the bar Central in La Puebla de Cazalla and heard the shoemaker’s son singing. The painter was Francisco Moreno Galván, a communist from the same village, and he urged the boy to take up cante for a living. The letter that opened Antonio Mairena‘s door came from someone else: Manuel Orellana Rivero, who had done his military service with the maestro.
Mairena, the supreme authority on orthodox cante, listened to the boy and introduced him himself at the Cine Carretería in Osuna, in 1959. Out of that improbable pairing — a left-wing painter and the guardian of purity — came José Menese: a cantaor who never moved a millimetre from orthodoxy and who spent more than fifteen years singing to Franco’s face.
The Shoemaker’s Son
José Menese Scott was born in La Puebla de Cazalla (Seville) on 3 December 1942, the fourth of nine children. His father was a shoemaker and there was no flamenco in the family: it was not a singing household and he came from no dynasty. In the flamenco of his day that is not a biographical detail — it is what made him have to earn everything twice.
He had been singing since the age of eight at village parties and local theatres, and as an amateur at the bar Central. That is where Moreno Galván found him.
The Zambra, and an Idea of Seriousness
In 1963 he joined Madrid’s Zambra tablao, where he stayed until 1968 alongside Pericón de Cádiz, Perico el del Lunar, Rafael Romero, Juan Varea and Rosa Durán. It was not just any tablao: it was where the most serious cante in Madrid was to be found, and this is how he told it.
When I was a nineteen-year-old lad I went round every tablao in Madrid. There was one I took a particular liking to: the Zambra. It taught me a standard of seriousness I never abandoned after that.
That same 1963 he recorded his first album, with lyrics by Moreno Galván, and won the National Record Prize from the Jerez Chair of Flamencology. Two years later, in 1965, the Tomás el Nitri Prize of Honour at Córdoba’s National Flamenco Art Competition. He was twenty-two and already a festival name.
The Lyrics Somebody Else Wrote
Here is what makes Menese unlike almost anyone. Most of his lyrics were written by Moreno Galván, and they were not love songs: they were texts with a direct social message, awkward for the authorities of the day, sung por soleá and por seguiriya — that is, in the gravest and oldest forms in the repertoire.
The trick, if there is one, lies in that combination. Menese broke nothing on the outside: he sang orthodox, called himself a mairenista and respected the form down to the detail. What changed was what the form said. An old cante saying new things gets through doors a protest with a megaphone does not.
A Payo Mairenista, Which Was Almost a Contradiction
It is worth pausing here, because this is what makes him awkward and therefore interesting. Menese called himself a mairenista, a follower of the doctrine Antonio Mairena had set out in Mundo y formas del cante flamenco: that there is a core gypsy-Andalusian cante, with fixed forms and a correct way of performing them, preserved from household to household far from any stage.
The problem is that Menese was not a gypsy and came from none of those households. He was the payo —non-gypsy— son of a shoemaker in a village of the Seville countryside. By the letter of the theory he embraced, he was precisely the kind of singer who should not have been able to sing like that. And he sang like that — to the point that the phrase most often repeated about him is that he was «a payo who sang like a gypsy».
That tension explains two things. First, his ferocious orthodoxy: someone who does not inherit a place has to earn it, and earns it by being stricter than anyone. Second, why his political commitment cost him so much inside the profession. In a world where authority rested on lineage, putting political words into a soleá was doubly daring: not only was he touching what is not touched, he was someone many considered to be there on loan.
Singing to Franco’s Face, and por Soleá
Moreno Galván’s lyrics were not allusive or coded. They spoke of day labourers, of prison, of hunger and of freedom, in a country where the censor read records before they were released. The alibi was the wrapping: an old cante, a grave form, a verse that sounded like tradition. Things got through there that a pamphlet would never have got through.
It cost him anyway. Criticism rained down from his own colleagues and from much of the flamenco world for having taken sides, and his answer in 1978 — with Franco already dead, when many had stopped taking risks — was an even more explicit record.
It is worth noting what that meant in practice. A cantaor who sings at festivals lives off being programmed, and being programmed depends on organisers, town councils and juries. Taking a public side in that Spain did not close a door with a bang: it simply meant fewer calls, and no way of proving why.
The Reunión de Cante Jondo
In 1967, Menese and Moreno Galván founded, with a group of enthusiasts, the Reunión de Cante Jondo de La Puebla de Cazalla. It was not one more of the festivals that filled the Andalusian summer: it was born with the explicit idea that cante should be heard in silence and without ornament, with the audience seated and attentive — the opposite of a fairground booth. It is still held every summer, and it is probably the most durable thing he left, because it did not depend on his being there.
That same year he became engaged to Encarnación Gil, with whom he had five children. And around then his voice began to leave Spain: a German short film took it to Germany, and out of that came a tour of the whole country.
Paris, the Teatro Real and New York
In the seventies he went abroad, and he went high. He was the first flamenco cantaor to perform at the Olympia in Paris, in 1973 and 1974. In 1974, Madrid’s Teatro Marquina with Manolo Brenes on guitar and Paco Valdepeñas on compás; and Barcelona’s Palau de la Música.
In 1975 he sang at the Teatro Real with the RTVE Orchestra under Odón Alonso, in an interlude from Falla’s La vida breve. In 1985, in New York, at the United Nations Day Concert with Spain’s National Orchestra and Choir and Enrique de Melchor on guitar. And in 1991, at the Cervantes Institute in Paris, a tribute to Falla alongside Carmen Linares.
«Nobody Silences José Menese»
Since I was getting constant criticism from my colleagues and from the flamenco world for having committed myself to singing for freedom, I wanted to show that nobody silences José Menese, not for money and not for anything.
Rafael Alberti described him in a phrase that has stuck to him: «His voice is solemn, it has sap, because it has a trunk and deep roots.»
The Records, and What Is Inside Them
He recorded a lot and early: between 1963 and 1971 he released more than a dozen albums, and almost everything that matters is there. The first, from 1963, already carries the house mark — Moreno Galván’s lyrics, orthodox cante — and wins him the National Record Prize. In 1964 come the Saetas, another of his specialities and no curiosity: the saeta is cante with no guitar and no safety net, and that bareness suited him. In 1967, Cantes flamencos básicos, which is exactly what the title says: a map of the repertoire drawn by someone who had studied it. And in 1970, Renuevos de cantes viejos, which sums up his whole programme in three words.
He went on releasing records for forty years. In September 1997 he presented A mi madre Remedios at Madrid’s Conde Duque barracks, within the Veranos de la Villa, with Enrique de Melchor on guitar and Chano Lobato and Juan Habichuela as guests. That same year he received two of the honours most often cited about him: the Calle de Alcalá Flamenco Award and the title of «Patriarch of Cante» at the Murcia Flamenco Summit.
BIO
Name and birth
José Menese Scott.
La Puebla de Cazalla (Seville), 3 December 1942.
Fourth of nine children. No flamenco family: his father was a shoemaker.
Who discovered him
Francisco Moreno Galván (1925-1999), a painter from the same village, heard him at the bar Central and interceded with Antonio Mairena. He wrote most of his lyrics.
Antonio Mairena introduced him at his debut, at the Cine Carretería in Osuna, in 1959.
Milestones
1963: first album and National Record Prize. Joins the Zambra tablao.
1965: Tomás el Nitri Prize of Honour, Córdoba.
1967: founds the Reunión de Cante Jondo de La Puebla de Cazalla.
1973 and 1974: first flamenco cantaor at the Olympia in Paris.
1997: «Patriarch of Cante» at the Murcia Flamenco Summit.
Death
La Puebla de Cazalla, 29 July 2016, aged 73, at home, from a cardiovascular condition he had carried for years. (Many obituaries said 74, following the town council. He was four months short.)
What He Left Behind
He died in the same village he was born in, and his coffin lay in the contemporary art museum that bears the name of the family who discovered him. There is a bandstand named after him in Madrid, and his village lists him among its distinguished residents.
His position is an odd one, and that is why it is interesting: he was a payo singing orthodox at a time when orthodoxy was a gypsy matter, and a cantaor of the right by repertoire and of the left by lyric, which in the flamenco of the seventies had no comfortable place. He did not look for one. As one of his own verses put it: «Firm I stand, firm until death.»
Where to Watch José Menese on ALL FLAMENCO
The catalogue has «Menese», the eighty-minute documentary portraying the free, untameable artist he was, in which his cantes are recovered and reinterpreted by young women’s voices. And it has him singing: «José Menese por toná», from the series Cavilaciones by the Andalusian director Pilar Távora. Everything of his is on his artist page.
To place him, two readings: his entry on the Andalusian regional government’s flamenco site and the farewell the specialist press gave him in 2016. The facts of his biography are on his Wikipedia page.