The diocese of Seville has an excess of extraordinary processions and religious acts that, regardless of the stifling heat,cante that has come upon us, and with the utmost respect, I believe it transcends the bounds of excess. These external cults have increased since the arrival of the archbishop José Ángel Saiz Meneses in 2021, which I have nothing to reproach, but I do miss the cante traditional religious, that is, the saeta, which, in addition to narrating the Passion and Death of Christ, also in its molds flamencoEucharistic and Marian passages can be carved.
I bring this up because memories take me back to the teacher and friend Antonio Mairena when he addressed the Lord's Prayer, and how Manuel Fernández, Manolo el Clavero, institutionalized it in the Brotherhood of the Nazarene of San Juan, of Écija, having such a reach that even the admired journalist Antonio Burgos He collected it in his famous panels like August arrows.
But not everything is warmth, joy, and color in the summer season. The warmth of memories also emerges every July 16th with The Alfalfa Girl, nickname by which she is known as a result of an interview she did on Radio Nacional de España. It is said that her mother worked in Don's house Francisco Vázquez Armero, in the Seville neighborhood of La Alfalfa, and invited the girl to sing during Holy Week. Once she finished, he asked her Gallery"What's your name?" I replied, "Rocío Vega." The journalist replied, "No. Your name is La Niña de la Alfalfa."
A Rocio Vega Farfán, which is her given name, we cannot consider her as a strictly flamenco singer, but the fact that she holds the scepter of the popular saeta well deserves that we remember her on the fiftieth anniversary of her death, which occurred in Seville due to a malignant tumor.
She was born on March 24, 1895 in Santiponce, moving as a child with her family to Boteros Street in the Seville neighborhood of La Alfalfa, from where she adopted her stage name.
At an early age, she developed exceptional lyrical talent, but a double throat ailment at the age of 16 almost halted this child prodigy's brilliant career. The attentions of the Cadiz native Dr. Portela and the supplications to Our Lady of the Star made her recover definitively. This explains why she kept her promise to sing to the Virgin of the Star, every Palm Sunday, on the balcony in front of the Triana church of San Jacinto:
My Mother of the Star,
protect me with your tears.
As long as I have a way,
I must send you in my song
my arrow felt more.
Opera and zarzuela singer, La Niña de la Alfalfa stood out as a soprano, taking singing lessons from Master Torres, from the Seville Cathedral. He also studied with the master Luis Álvarez Daudet, and perfected his tenor Anselmi, debuting alongside Hippolytus Lazarus in 1923, at the Llorens Theatre in Seville.
The chronicles say that the infants Don Carlos and Doña Luisa, seeing the qualities of the Sevillian, promoted a benefit in order to expand her studies and debut as a professional in Madrid. Be that as it may, the truth is that the King Alfonso XIII he came to name her Queen of the arrows in 1916, after hearing it at the Círculo de Labradores fair booth. He collaborated on the premiere of Marshmallow, the work of the brothers Joaquín and Serafín Álvarez Quintero, who, given the success obtained, presented him with a saeta that they wrote on his fan:
It's your arrow song
that rises to the sky,
cry of your heart,
that when passing through your throat
becomes a prayer.
"We cannot consider Rocio Vega Farfán, which is her given name, to be a truly flamenco singer, but the fact that she holds the crown of the popular saeta is well worth remembering on the fiftieth anniversary of her death."
It would be on Holy Thursday in 1932, a year after the Second Spanish Republic was proclaimed, when the Brotherhood of the Estrella was the only brotherhood that made a penitential station, hence it earned the nickname of The Brave, leaving this saeta of La Niña de la Alfalfa for history:
They say on the blue bench
that Spain is no longer Christian,
and even if she is a republican,
Here you are the one in charge
Morning Star.
In addition to saetas recorded in the Plaza de La Campana (Gramophone, 1928), he would also record on the Regal label in 1929 and 1930 sevillanas, peteneras, media granaína and fandangos, all with the guitar of Nino Ricardo. But as time went by, she would withdraw from the stage when she married Jose Guzmán Montes, then an official of the Seville City Council.
However, she was always faithful to her appointment with Holy Week, both with Estrella and with Los Negritos. For her, the saeta was an impressive self-confession, and she developed them influenced simultaneously by popular music and by her prodigious abilities, always worrying about seeking greater tonal freedom. Thus, as she herself confessed to the Queen Victoria Eugenie Regarding the origin of his saeta, apart from the echoes of seguiriyas and martinetes, he had based his construction on the Proclamation of the Sentence that was sung in his town.
The great talent of La Niña de la Alfalfa lies in her modulations, from which she knew how to extract all their timbral and expressive possibilities, in order to make them more accessible and spectacular. Her tonal strength appears synonymous with happiness and mastery, with highly controlled compositions, revealing, in her siguijari background, a goodness of spirit closely related to that inner truth that translates everything into beauty.
The popular Sevillian saeta has thus found its greatest representative in La Niña de la Alfalfa. Her expressionist compositions paved the way for later works that deliberately sought to follow suit. Furthermore, her range of registers was such that it is no coincidence that her discography continues to appeal to a multitude of singers as an object of interpretation.
The neighborhood where he grew up witnessed the mosaic that the City of Seville He discovered him on December 15, 1974, in the house where he lived, thus perpetuating the man who knew how to express his beliefs and feelings in the sinuous thirds of a couplet, where the intention was fully identified with the result.
We commemorate the half-century of the farewell of La Niña de la Alfalfa, and I remember, finally, that five decades ago, just like next Wednesday, July 16, I went to number 41 San Jacinto Street, in the Chapel of the Brotherhood of the Virgin of the Star, of whom she was her honorary sister, to say a prayer for the soul of the person who filled with light and life the festive and ritual atmosphere of a Seville that only perpetuates it when Holy Week arrives.
