Ruben Blades
Ruben Blades
Rubén Blades Bellido de Luna, known professionally as Rubén Blades, is a Panamanian singer, songwriter, actor, musician, activist, and politician, performing musically most often in the Afro-Cuban, salsa, and Latin jazz genres. As a songwriter, Blades brought the lyrical sophistication of Central American nueva canción and Cuban nueva trova as well as experimental tempos and politically inspired Nuyorican salsa to his music, creating "thinking persons'dance music"...
NationalityPanamanian
ProfessionWorld Music Singer
Date of Birth16 July 1948
CityPanama City, Panama
CountryPanama
In those days the big U.S. labels didn't have any particular interest in the Latin market.
So that I saw music as a way of documenting realities from the urban cities of Latin America.
I was the first person to come into New York with a Latin American point of view which was also very much influenced by political happenings in Latin America.
I think in New York we had respect and we would pretty much fill up the places where we went, but I never got the sense that we really were Number 1 here in New York among the Latin crowds.
It's almost as if people think that in Latin America we're not hip to what's happening here.
I decided we should book ourselves, so I started booking the band.
The grandmother, the mother, the worker, the student, the intellectual, the professional, the unemployed, everybody identified with the songs because they were descriptions of life in the city.
It was very interesting, and we went to Germany and we toured Germany like we were a German band in 1985.
And, we watched the Beatles one week after they showed up on the Ed Sullivan Show because of the U.S. Southern Command TV network.
This is important to clarify, because a lot of people don't understand that I came in '69 and then went back to Panama to finish school.
We had something to say. Whenever we played, people didn't dance, they listened.
I was a kid, and I remember my mother singing. She was also a radio soap opera actress, but my mother sang.
And music was a very important part of our lives. The radio was on all day.
So that when I came from Panama... my family was exiled in 1973 and they went to Miami.