Every artist is a tree with roots and branches. In the case of Serrat, the fruits have grown to reach a universal audience, thanks to a singular voice that resonates in the hearts of sister cultures. In the same way that his life has been the subject of multiple biographies, we must listen to the murmur of the sources that have fed him and see the ingredients with which he has amassed his songs. Each composer has his own discretion when it comes to filtering the melodies and rhymes of ancestors and contemporaries that will influence his work in some way. This walk around the singer-songwriter’s sound universe explores the trace of the music and musicians that have made him grow, also the variety of his repertoire and the artistic legacy that he has left to subsequent generations.
Having been born near the sea, in a port city, Serrat sets his nets to catch popular songs from here and there, which flood a neighborhood with an intense artistic history. He never abandons the music that moves him, it shows him the way. Through attachment to the land, he has carved the songs and rhythms whistled by the wind, and has watered them to harvest them like ripe fruit. Art is in nature, it is not created or destroyed, it simply circulates and transforms. Like the cloth maker, he has woven pieces of all styles, and, like the merchant broker, he has distributed them throughout his world. His job is close to that of the magician who pulls a few notes out of his hat on a verse handkerchief and dazzles the staff. There is no trick, but there are mysteries to reveal.
The mothers of old were the first teachers. They sang in the kitchen or while darning a sock. People not only sang at home, but also while walking down the street or from the top of a scaffolding. Singing and dancing was a way to relax. Anyone who didn’t know how to sing or dance was a social outcast. Today there is hardly any singing, and dancing is very bad. The radio constitutes the first soundtrack of the time that allows the listener to imitate the songs it broadcasts and absorb the titles one by one like a sponge to caress the first guitar, rehearse four precarious chords and begin to dream about what is on. While French song, Italian melodies and British pop open paths in Spain, in Catalonia in the sixties some of these influences lead to the simple, almost naked recitations of the first bars of the Nova Cançó. Serrat’s virtue is explained by the eclectic spirit of his musical desires, with which he embraces the vast compositional material that he will store in his workshop.
When Joan Manuel was born, not so many years had passed since Franco’s so-called peace. The luck is that childhood always sweetens sorrows and obstacles. In addition, it forges the person’s memory, lays its foundations and builds a magical world of smells and images. He grows up happy and free in a harassed Barcelona that still has spaces for fun. There he cultivates the five senses without realizing it, obeying instincts that will become the main spirit of his artistic life. The gaze pushes him to touch with his hands everything he discovers outside the home, and for a future musician smell is as important or more important than hearing. From these four senses he will create the fifth, a broad personal taste, without disdaining any style, always attentive to the voices of his time. Here is the backbone of a job that he will develop during his adolescence.
Serrat’s parents meet in Barcelona. The singer-songwriter’s future mother arrives in the city walking along the train tracks and across fields with a brigade that picks up young people and children. Ángeles Teresa flees from Belchite, where the nationals, when the Civil War breaks out, have shot her parents and a good part of the family on the cemetery wall. Their bodies are poorly buried in a terrace. Josep Serrat, born on Nou de la Rambla street, fought in the Republican army. At the end of the war he spent time detained in the Orduña concentration camp, in the Basque Country. When he returns to Barcelona, ??the story ends in a wedding. The bride gets married in black, like all women in the postwar period.
Serrat came into the world in 1943 at the La Alianza clinic, located in the Guinardó neighborhood, where the family lived at the time. He was a five kilo baby that filled his mother with pride, who lifted him in her arms as if he were already half grown. Soon they moved to Poble Sec, under the slopes of Montjuïc. From the crib, located to the right of his parents’ bed, he sees the bars of the balcony. Time creates this image in which he sees himself wearing an empire shirt. He also remembers the photographer who goes to his house to capture the first snapshot of him, sitting in an armchair, wearing a turtleneck sweater and a comic in his hands. The inseparable street of Poeta Cabanyes will forever be his childhood homeland, the one that never changes sides. He dedicates one of his first songs to her, “El meu carrer”, a declaration of basic principles that one can understand as a particular constitutional text.
In the simple delimitation of a physical and sentimental space, the street of childhood, lies the only possible homeland of people with a universal spirit. You can’t say more in a song, with so few words. A mature Serrat will share this song with the neighbor who lives in front of his house, who is also embarking on a career as a singer-songwriter, Jaume Sisa. And, years later, in a recording of anthological songs, he sings it as a duet with Miguel Poveda in a performance that begins in a conventional way and leads to a temperamental soleá with a clapping background. The flamenco singer, who also dabbles in copla and setting Catalan poets to music, repeats Serrat’s theme in another pair of anthological albums. To the singer Miguel Poveda, being a young boy, music enters through the window of the native neighborhood of Llefià, in Badalona. He grows up in his room, where, when his mother is not there, he grabs his records with the sole obsession of listening to music. He also plays cassettes and follows the cante jondo programs on the local station. And, as soon as he can, he tours the flamenco clubs of Catalonia, begins to win competitions and embarks on a career that takes him to perform all over the world.
Poveda is an artist close to the singer-songwriter from Poble Sec due to social extraction, despite the generational difference. Serrat, as a child, had also found his favorite showcase in the fifty-square-meter mezzanine balconies where he lived. A privileged viewpoint, scented with the occasional aromatic plant, ideal for observing the outside. Thus, among his first stimuli are the contemplation of the street and the murmur of its people. In the singer-songwriter’s house, two boys and two girls live together, united as a floodplain, and they grow up like four siblings. Carlos is the older brother, son of the father’s previous marriage, and the girls, María and Manolita, daughters of the mother’s sister, who makes pajamas to earn some money. The boy helps her. He even learns to sew, now a button, now the bottom of a pair of pants. First he calls her mom, then she will be Doña Ángeles, a woman of character, strong and determined, who commands respect. Josep, the father, works as a plumber at Catalana de Gas. Everyone remembers him with the blue jumpsuit on his way home. If there is a breakdown in the neighborhood, he fixes it and for some families he even installs a shower in their home.
The street is the boy’s first school, and his neighborhood friends, for whom he has always been Juanito, are his first colleagues. Boys and girls are legion, just from Magallanes Street to the end of theirs. Among the regulars, Paco, Alfredo, Aquilino, Maite, Tito, Lola, Cuqui, Isaac, Cheles, Manel, Albert… In addition to Sisa, another name will also achieve fame and recognition, the footballer Ferran Olivella. The kids from then still remember when he had an eye infection and Kubala, Manchón and Biosca appeared in the neighborhood. The day of the footballer’s wedding even aroused more expectation in the street because the entire Barça squad attended. When the food is ready, the familiar cry warns that it is time to leave the street: “Juanito!”, “Jaumet!”
The smell of the muffins his mother makes and the nearby dairy farms—a mixture of stables, animals, and milk—enters his skin. Also the one from the coal shop on the street that supplied fuel for the stoves and kitchens of the time, the one from the humidity of the school, and the ones from zotal, gas and mothballs, not so pleasant. He also gets under his skin the music and songs that soon after will naturally conquer his heart, without him feeling the need to pay special attention, or even thinking that he should study them.
The girls, with their arms on their hips, sing in a circle “la chata merenguera, como es so fine, trico trico trau…”, “Margarita has a cat on the toe of her shoe”, or “quité l’anell picapedrell”. They play soccer on the steep street and, of course, those who attack downhill always win. Bowling and spinning tops also entertain them, and they smear badges with soap to score a goal in the opponent’s sewer, which simulates a goal. Buttons are used as raw material to assemble toys, and they make their own scooters and improvised guns with a pair of clothespins to shoot cherry pits. They don’t forget the classic marbles or the “churro, half manga, mangotero” that destroys more than one back. Together they sit down to explain adventures, they make up stories and, half secretly, they play fathers and mothers and doctors. At the time, the boys escape to their own devices and they discover that they have gone to parties without telling them anything.
Juanito has been going to school since he was three years old. He will never erase the memory of his teachers, Miss Brígida and, above all, Miss Conchita, daughter of the milkmaid who lives in front of his house. It is she who accompanies him every day to the Piarist school, Can Culapi, in the Ronda de Sant Antoni. Conchita remembers him crawling and always getting dirty on the floor. His mother cleans him and changes his clothes. He is a naughty and restless boy. As they walk to school, hand in hand, he asks her about the letters on store signs and tram announcements and, sentence by sentence, she learns to read in the middle of the street. This teacher is an exception within the rigidity of those religious who imposed daily mass on the students.
An adult Serrat will collect his school memories in “Cançó per a la meva mestra”, focused on the National Catholicism of his childhood. There is the classroom, presided over by the crucifix between the portrait of the dictator and that of José Antonio, the blackboard, the chalk, the smells, while the child fixes his gaze on the teacher’s tight knees. Without a doubt, the passage of time allows the artist to create a nostalgic song of those moments. The school environment, however, contrasts with that at home. Among their people they talk openly about the war. This bitter postcard will always be present in the family’s memory, since the mother and father have suffered personally and that of their predecessors the most atrocious reprisals. The so-called “uprising” by the victors leaves an indelible mark on the singer, a tireless defender of humanitarian causes, a supporter from birth. Art, for him, has always been a cry from the courtyard of consciousness. It is sung both to cry and to laugh.
