Guajira is a musical form which evokes a rural ambience in its texts, instrumentation and style.

In the years around 1900 a style of guajira emerged in association with Cuban music theater, especially as composed by Jorge Anckermann

Jorge Anckermann

Jorge Anckermann was a Cuban pianist, composer and bandleader. He started in music at eight with his father. At ten he was able to substitute in a trio...

.

This genre had some similarity to the criolla

Criolla

Criolla is a genre of Cuban music and song. It is a type of countryside music, or música campesina. The term is said to derive from canción criolla, or creole song. This Cuban genre developed in the late 19th century, and it also occurred in Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico at about the same time...

 and, to a lesser extent, the punto. It contains bucolic countryside lyrics, rhyming, similar to décima

Décima

A décima refers to a ten-line stanza of poetry, and the song form generally consists of forty-four lines...

 poetry. The music is a mixture of 3/4 and 6/8 rhythms. According to Sánchez de Fuentes

Eduardo Sánchez de Fuentes

Eduardo Sánchez de Fuentes was a Cuban composer, and an author of books on the history of Cuban folk music.The outstanding habanera Tú, written when he was sixteen, was his best-known composition...

, its first section is in a minor key, its second section in a major key.

In general, the songs in this repertoire are no longer well known in Cuba. Hence, for most Cubans, "guajira" connotes a quite different genre that emerged in the 1930s, as a sort of fusion of the son

Son (music)

The Son cubano is a style of music that originated in Cuba and gained worldwide popularity in the 1930s. Son combines the structure and elements of Spanish canción and the Spanish guitar with African rhythms and percussion instruments of Bantu and Arará origin...

and the guajira, the "guajira-son," in 4/4 time. It resembled the son in rhythm, but presented a rural ethos by foregrounding the guitar (or tres) more than horns, percussion, or piano.

The guajira could be sung by a single musician accompanying himself on guitar (Orovio 1981:227); see trova

Trova

Trova is one of the great roots of the Cuban music tree. In the 19th century a group of itinerant musicians known as trovadores moved around Oriente, especially Santiago de Cuba, earning their living by singing and playing the guitar...

. The lyrics of the guajira typically extol the beauty of the Cuban countryside and the lifestyle of the guajiros (countryside peasants). (Alén 1994:64).

Popularity

Guajira was refined and popularized by the Cuban singer-songwriter

Singer-songwriter

Singer-songwriters are musicians who write, compose and sing their own musical material including lyrics and melodies. As opposed to contemporary popular music singers who write their own songs, the term singer-songwriter describes a distinct form of artistry, closely associated with the...

 and guitarist

Guitarist

A guitarist is a musician who plays the guitar. Guitarists may play a variety of instruments such as classical guitars, acoustic guitars, electric guitars, and bass guitars. Some guitarists accompany themselves on the guitar while singing.- Versatility :The guitarist controls an extremely...

 Guillermo Portabales

Guillermo Portabales

Guillermo Portabales was a Cuban singer-songwriter and guitarist who popularized the guajira style of Cuban music from the 1930s through the 1960s...

, whose elegant style has become known as guajira de salón. From the 1930s until his death in a traffic accident in Puerto Rico in 1970, Portabales recorded and performed salon guajira throughout North and South America to tremendous popular acclaim. Guantanamera

Guantanamera

"Guantanamera" is perhaps the best known Cuban song and that country's most noted patriotic song.-Music:The music for the song is sometimes attributed to José Fernández Diaz, known as Joseíto Fernández, who claimed to have written it at various dates , and who used it regularly in one of his radio...

, in the form composed and recorded by Joseito Fernández, is a guajira-son which has been covered by many singers and groups.

Spanish version

A Spanish variant of the Guajira has evolved into a form of flamenco

Flamenco

Flamenco is a genre of music and dance which has its foundation in Andalusian music and dance and in whose evolution Andalusian Gypsies played an important part....

cante (song-type).
http://www.esflamenco.com/scripts/news/ennews.asp?frmIdPagina=201http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-9632328_ITM.