Tango Argentino: A Glossary

Tango argentino names both a musical genre and the partnered social dance inseparable from it, a tradition that crystallized in the working-class outskirts of Buenos Aires and Montevideo toward the end of the nineteenth century.^[1] The terms gathered in this glossary belong to that world of the Río de la Plata, where a single word came to designate at once an idiom of music and a way of moving to it. That the genre was never one fixed style is clear from how its breadth was later staged: the 1983 production titled Tango Argentino was built around the history of the form and its many varieties, presenting it not as a single manner of playing or dancing but as a cluster of related practices.^[2]

Several of the genre's defining words concern its lyric tradition. Lunfardo, the argot of Buenos Aires, supplied tango song with its characteristic register, and the poet Celedonio Flores — a fixture of the city's bohemian life — built much of his reputation on his versos lunfardos.^[3] The craftsman of that text is the letrista, the lyricist who furnishes a tango's sung words; Flores filled the role across a long list of titles, a kind of authorship that sets the sung tango apart from purely instrumental performance.^[4]

Two further terms recall how tango lived in the street before it reached the cabaret and the concert hall. The payador was the itinerant singer who improvised verse to his own guitar, a figure of the porteño street culture from which the genre's lyricism grew.^[5] The organito, a hand-cranked street organ, carried tango melodies through the neighbourhoods and is summoned in the era's own poetry as part of the soundscape of a humble city childhood.^[5]

The vocabulary extends to the canonical song titles that anchor the repertoire. Flores supplied several — among them Mano a mano, Margot and Corrientes y Esmeralda — lyrics that passed into wide circulation and became associated with the singer Carlos Gardel.^[6] Collected with others in volumes such as Chapaleando barro, these titles show how the sung tango drew its material from the everyday life of common people rather than from elevated literary subjects.^[6]

Read together, these terms trace tango's passage from the periphery toward formal presentation. What began in the riverside suburbs^[1] had, by the late twentieth century, been codified for audiences abroad on the stage, as the 1983 revue devoted to the genre's history and varieties makes plain.^[2] A glossary of tango argentino accordingly reaches across both the argot of its lyrics and the means by which its music and dance were eventually carried into the wider world.