Tango Argentino: A Glossary

Tango argentino designates at once a musical genre and the partnered social dance that accompanies it, a form that took shape toward the close of the nineteenth century in the working-class outskirts of Buenos Aires and Montevideo.^[1] The vocabulary surveyed here is therefore bound to the Río de la Plata, where the word came to name both an idiom of music and a manner of moving. The breadth of the tradition was later placed on display: the 1983 production titled Tango Argentino was organized around the history and the many varieties of the form, a reminder that the genre has never been one fixed style but a cluster of related practices.^[2]

Among the genre's defining terms is lunfardo, the porteño argot whose words gave tango lyrics their characteristic register; the poet Celedonio Flores, a fixture of the city's bohemian life, built much of his standing on his "versos lunfardos".^[3] Closely linked to it is the letrista, the lyricist who supplies a tango's sung text, a function Flores performed across a long list of titles and one that sets the genre's verbal craft apart from purely instrumental performance.^[4]

Two further terms describe how tango circulated before it reached the cabaret and the concert stage. The payador, an itinerant singer who improvised verse to his own guitar, belonged to the street culture out of which the genre's lyricism grew, and the figure recurs in accounts of porteño life of the period.^[5] The organito, a hand-cranked street organ, carried tango melodies through the neighbourhoods and is invoked in the era's own poetry as part of the soundscape of a humble city childhood.^[5]

The lexicon also takes in the canonical song titles that serve as touchstones of the repertoire. Celedonio Flores furnished several, among them Mano a mano, Margot and Corrientes y Esmeralda, lyrics that entered wide circulation and were tied to the singer Carlos Gardel.^[6] Such titles, gathered with others in volumes like Chapaleando barro, show how the sung tango drew its material from the everyday life of ordinary people rather than from elevated literary subjects.^[6]

Taken together these terms chart tango's movement from the periphery toward formal presentation. The form that began in the riverside suburbs^[1] had, by the late twentieth century, been codified for international audiences on the stage, as the 1983 revue devoted to its history and varieties makes plain.^[2] A glossary of tango argentino accordingly spans both the argot of its lyrics and the means by which the music and dance were later carried abroad.