Son Cubano: Etymology and Naming

Son cubano stands at the foundation of Cuban popular music — the genre from which salsa descends, in a lineage so firmly established that scholarship compresses it into the recurring formula that runs from son to salsa.^[4] Its sound is identified above all with the montuno, the recurring guitar figure that is the style's defining signature.^[7] This double standing — ancestral to the salsa that grew out of it, yet possessed of a sound unmistakably its own — is what lends the question of where the word son comes from its weight, and what places the term at the head of any account of Cuban musical nomenclature.

A first place in the nomenclature

That primacy shows in how the genre is catalogued. In surveys of Cuban popular music, son is conventionally listed first among the island's many named styles.^[1] Such surveys regularly note that Cuba — far larger than its common billing as a small island implies, and roughly equal in area to the rest of the Antilles combined — generated an unusually dense vocabulary of distinct musical forms, where most neighbouring islands produced only one or two recognised national genres.^[2] This comparative abundance is the immediate setting in which son is named, for the word rarely appears in the literature on its own.

Within that abundance, the literature situates son at the head of an extended catalogue of genre names, enumerating it alongside rumba, the contradanza and danzón, the habanera, mambo, the cha-cha-chá and the bolero, among many later forms — and presenting son, repeatedly, as the first and most consequential entry.^[3] The term's recurrence at the front of these enumerations registers the priority that scholarship assigns it within the genealogy of the island's popular music; yet the same surveys foreground this ordering while declining to advance an etymology for the name itself.

Naming and descent to salsa

The descent encoded in that ordering carries through to the naming of son's successors. The literature holds that salsa's Cuban paternity is widely acknowledged — including among the largely Nuyorican musicians who consolidated the genre in New York during the 1970s — so that the newer name rests on foundations credited to son.^[5] Here the naming of the descendant form is inseparable from the recognition of its parent: to call the later music salsa is already to invoke the older son from which it is traced.

African origins and an unsettled name

Questions of naming in son also sit within a longer scholarly tradition concerned with the African elements that pervade Cuban musical and dance forms.^[6] That tradition — associated with the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz and revived in the more recent ethnomusicology of Robin Moore — treats what these forms are called as bound up with their cultural and racial origins, so that nomenclature and provenance are examined together rather than apart. Read in this light, the absence of a settled etymology for son is less an oversight than a reminder that the term's history is inseparable from the layered origins of the music it names.