[Deathwatch] Compay Segundo, Cuban musician, 95

[Deathwatch Central <cdw@slick.org>]

Cuban Musician Compay Segundo Dies at 95
By Anthony Boadle

HAVANA (Reuters) - Compay Segundo, the veteran Cuban guitarist and
singer who won international recognition late in life as frontman for
the Grammy-winning Buena Vista Social Club group, has died. He was 95.

Compay, whose real name was Francisco Repilado, died of kidney failure
at his home in Miramar, Havana, shortly before midnight on Sunday, his
son Salvador said.

The musician, whose rise from oblivion to global popularity helped make
traditional Cuban music known worldwide, will be buried on Tuesday in
his native Santiago in eastern Cuba, where he started out as clarinet
player in the municipal band.

Compay won international fame with the 1997 Grammy Award-winning
recording Buena Vista Social Club produced by American guitarist Ry
Cooder.

The record brought back into the limelight a group of talented
musicians who had all but been forgotten in Cuba, including Compay,
pianist Ruben Gonzalez, and singers Ibrahim Ferrer and Omara Portuondo.


The group's fame was spread by the film Buena Vista Social Club by
German director Wim Wenders.

Compay, who was born in 1907 in Siboney, outside Santiago, enjoyed a
second youth traveling around the world entertaining audiences with a
repertoire topped by his best-known song "Chan Chan."

TRADEMARK PANAMA

Wearing his trademark Panama hat and suit, Compay gave concerts until
May this year, when his health deteriorated.

"The flowers of life come to everyone. One has to be ready not to miss
them. Mine arrived after I was 90," the cigar-smoking musician said in
a recent interview.

"Compay is to Cuban music what the Cuban flag is to the Cuban people,"
a saddened fellow Buena Vista singer, Omara Portuondo, said at a Havana
funeral parlor where she and members of his band paid their last
respects.

Cuban President Fidel Castro sent a wreath of flowers.

"He leaves a vacuum in traditional Cuban music that will be hard to
fill, because of his charm and the love of the Cuban people," Compay's
son said.

"He made it to the world stage without ever making any concessions and
kept his authenticity as a great figure of Cuban popular music," said
Cuban culture minister Abel Prieto.

Compay began composing music in his teens and playing in groups with
the "armonico," a seven-string guitar he developed to increase the
harmony of the Cuban "son," a traditional musical form which was a
forerunner of today's salsa.

He acquired his nickname singing the bass harmony second voice in the
duo Los Compadres he formed in 1942 with his friend from Siboney,
Lorenzo Hierrezuelo. Compay is Cuban slang for "compadre," or buddy,
and Segundo referred to the second voice.

In the 1940s and 50s, Compay played with well-known Cuban musicians
such as Miguel Matamoros and Benny More.

After the triumph of Castro's 1959 revolution, which cleaned up Havana
night-life and ended Mafia-run gambling and prostitution, many old time
musicians were swept aside by the new folk music of a communist
society.

Compay hung up his guitar and worked rolling cigars at the H. Upmann
cigar factory in Havana for two decades.

In an interview with Reuters TV last year, Compay said he rolled 150
Montecristo Number 4's a day for 20 years.

"I began smoking cigars when I was five years old. I have been smoking
for 80-odd years and it still has not harmed me," he said.