Flamenco

Romani people reached Spain in the fifteenth century. They became the Calé, speaking Caló, living for centuries under statutes that tried to forbid their language, dress and mobility. Music and dance were both livelihood and a private language.

By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the barrios of Seville, Jerez, Cádiz and later Barcelona, a song form with Moorish, Jewish, Andalusian folk and Gitano elements had a public name: flamenco.

Cante jondo is the grave register: seguiriyas, soleá — a voice that does not decorate grief. Cante chico and the dance palos (bulerías, alegrías, tangos) are the other lung. The guitar (toque) and palmas lock the compás. Django’s pompe and the csárdás belong to other grammars. This is a different family of music.

Toque families sit at the centre of this register: Montoya of Madrid and Habichuela / Carmona of Granada. Cante and baile families sit beside them — Pavón of Seville, Amaya of Barcelona, Monje Cruz of San Fernando. Non-Gitano artists, from Silverio to Paco de Lucía, were part of the same public art. The archive lists Gitano figures first because this chapter is a Romani history, not a complete flamenco encyclopaedia.

Two guitar families entered this register first. Ramón Montoya of Madrid (1879–1949), from a Gitano cattle-trading family, took the flamenco guitar out of the back chair and onto the concert stand. He partnered Antonio Chacón from 1912 and sat the Concurso de Cante Jondo in Granada, 1922. His nephew Carlos Montoya (1903–1993) took that solo guitar abroad.

Habichuela / Carmona of Granada: the nickname from the grandfather, Habichuela el Viejo. Sons Juan Habichuela (1933–2016) and Pepe Habichuela (Granada 1944 – Madrid 2026). Pepe moved to Madrid tablaos in 1964 and recorded with Camarón and Enrique Morente. Son Josemi Carmona (b. 1971) formed Ketama with the cousins. A family of toque. Restaurant violin and pompe are other traditions.

Rumba catalana and the guitar rumba of Gitane families in Arles and Montpellier — the line that produced the Gipsy Kings — is a popular cousin, not cante jondo. It still belongs in this family: Romani families, guitar, a public that wanted something it could dance to on the radio.