"The corrido, a type of narrative folk song, comes
from a region half in Mexico and half in the Unite
States known as the Lower Rio Grande Border.
Corridos, which nourished from about 1836 to the late
(5)1930s, are part of a long-standing ballad tradition that
has roots in eighteenth-century Spain. Sung in Spanish.
corridos combine formal features of several different
types of folk songs, but their narratives consistently
deal with subject matter specific to the Border region.
(10) For example, ""EI Corrido de Kiansis""(c. 1870), the
oldest corrido surviving in complete form, records the
first cattle drives to Kansas in the late 1860s. A single
important event is likely to have inspired several
corrido variants, yet the different versions of any given
(15) story all partake of standard generic elements. When
sung at social gatherings, corridos served to
commemorate significant local happenings, but more
portantly, their heavy reliance on familiar linguistand thematic
conventions served to affirm the
(20)cohesiveness of Border communities
Corridos take their name from the Spanish verb
correr, meaning to run or to flow, for corridos tell their
stories simply and swiftly, without embellishments.
Figures of speech such as metaphors are generally rare
(25) in corridos, and when metaphors are used, they usually
incorporate everyday images that are familiar to the
songs’ listeners. In the popular""El Corrido de
Gregorio Cortez, ""for example, the hero Cortez,
fighting off pursuers, uses the metaphor of a
(30)thunderstorm to boast that he has had harder fights
than the one they gave him: "" I have weathered
thunderstorms: /This little mist doesn't bother me.”
Similar storm imagery is found in other corridos
including""Kiansis, ""which tells of stampedes caused
(35) by thunderstorms during the Kansas cattle drives. Such
imagery, highly conventional and readily recognizable
to corrido listeners, reflects and strengthens the
continuity of the corrido tradition.
The comido is composed not only of familiar
(40)images but also of certain ready-made lines that travel
easily from one ballad to another. This is most evident
in the corrido's formal closing verse, or despedida.
The despedida of one variant of""Gregorio Cortez"" is
translated as follows: ""Now with this I say farewell/
(45)In the shade of a cypress tree;/This is the end of the
ballad/Of Don Gregorio Ceortez. ""The first and third
lines are a set convention. The second and fourth lines
are variable, the fourth carrying the name of the
corrido or expressing its subject, and the second
(50)varying according to exigencies of rhyme In the
despedida, perhaps the clearest marker of both the
corrido's uniqueness and its generic continuity, the
corrido's maker asserts that the task of relating an
authentic Border tale has been accomplished "