Ballet Folklorica de Amalia Hernandez
Most North Americans are very familiar with this song from Veracruz State, Mexico, but do not know what it means. A young man is trying to woo a fair young señorita in his neighborhood on the coast of Veracruz. He claims to be the captain of a ship, not a common sailor . . . but everybody knows the truth.
It is Jarocha style music, which developed from mixing traditional Gulf Coast Native American dancing with the Flamenco style music of southern Spain, which itself developed from Moorish belly dance music. Jarocha and Flamenco dancers wear special shoes with metal taps. The skilled dancers make the taps become one of the instruments in the song.
The major difference between Jarocha and Flamenco is that Jarocha utilizes a full-sized harp as the central instrument, whereas Flamenco utilizes various types of guitars and Moorish music is created by drums and metal flutes. In both Jarocha and Flamenco, the featured performers dance on wood platforms, which function as large drums.
It is quite likely that the common folks in Spanish Florida, plus the Andalusian and Spanish Sephardic gold miners in northern Georgia played and danced to a form of Jarocha music. Virtually all of the “ole time” families in Northeast Georgia, who claimed to be Cherokee, have discovered that their original ancestry was a varying mixture of Andalusian, Portuguese and Sephardic!
In fact, since Jarocha and Appalachian “Tap Dancing” shoes are almost identical, it has been speculated that Appalachian Dancing evolved from Jarocha – not Irish tap dancing. You see . . . Irish tap dancing originated in the Southeastern United States in the early 1800s as a blend of Spanish Flamenco, African slave dances and Ulster Irish folk dances! This was introduced back into Ireland in rather recent times.
There is a good reason why the members of this Jarocha Band look like folks on the streets of Ocmulgee, OK, Big Cypress, FL or Hawkinsville, GA. They are from the section of Veracruz, where several branches of the Creek Confederacy originated. The other branches migrated from Tabasco, Chiapas and Campeche States, but were culturally related to those in Veracruz.
The Americas Revealed 
The men look as if they’re clogging like I learned to do as a kid here in Appalachia.
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That’s what I thought too. I saw a lot of clogging during the decade that I lived in Asheville. We were told that it was brought to Appalachia by the Ulster Irish/Scots. However, that style of dancing was introduced from the Southeast TO Ireland, perhaps as late as the mid-20th century.
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Thanks for the great article, a song I sang when I was still playing clubs. I posted it on ChappellandDaveHolt Facebook page.
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Did you ever live in the Asheville, NC area? In the back of my head, I swear I knew you there, when I was planning the Downtown Revitalization Project.
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Ha, ha, no, there’s another David Holt, more famous than I who lives in North Carolina. He’s a prominent folk musician, assisted Doc and Merle Watson, also put together a PBS type (might’ve been PBS) series about the railroads.
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