The Vallenato Festival, Colombia

“Beethoven and Bach,” the Vallenato musician Alberto “Beto” Murgas began, and from deep within me, I knew this wasn’t going to continue as I had thought, “they were composers.”

A pause for thought or was it for emphasis?

“But, a Vallenato musician is both a composer and an author.”

And so Beto Murgas and the people of Valledupar think, for it is here in the arid semi desert of the department of Cesar, just several hours from the coastal city of Santa Marta, that Vallenato music was born and has since flourished into a fantastic beast.

Humility quite clearly is not on the menu.

Talking about Vallenato music isn’t a pastime in Valledupar, it’s an absolute necessity, in the similar vein as a Brit will open any conversation mentioning the weather, so if you are considering coming to Colombia’s most raucous festival after that of Barranquilla’s Carnival, you are advised to do some homework beforehand.

This year is the 44th Festival Vallenato runs from April 26 to April 30 and promises to be bigger more extravagant event than ever. There were be more acts, more events running along parallel and of course, the locals will have been gearing up for their Festival in order to party like folkloric rockstars.

An what of Vallenato music? Well it’s not for everyone, heavy on the accordion and combined with the indigenous guacharaca and the African tambor (drum) it’s believed to represent the most cohesive and representative of Colombian music.

But, like it or not, you’ll be up to your neck in it and more during Festival week and believe me you’ll be knocking back Old Parr whiskey as if it were water. Hungover? There’s no place for weaklings here, knock back another drink and party like it were New Year’s Eve.

And while Vallenato has its roots here it has spread beyond the confines of the Cesar department and into mainstream Colombian music. Some songs in the Top 20 may well be defined as Vallenato but such is the evolution of music in general points to it becoming more and more pop. Carlos Vives, for example, an artist well known from the Colombian Caribbean is a Vallenato Pop musician. For example the now deceased Rafael Escalona – the godfather of Vallenato music – was more of a poet and troubadour than pop artist.

Escalona’s music represents the literary aspect of Vallenato that led once to Gabriel Garcia Marquez stating that his tome One Hundred Years of Solitude, was nothing more than a Vallenato prose of more than 500 pages. And it is comments like this that have helped the music be launched into national imagination.

Put on your drinking boots and hike it over to Valledupar for a uniquely Colombian experience.