Pregón, a Spanish word meaning announcement or street-seller's cry, has a particular meaning in Cuban music, and Latin American music generally. It means either a song based on a street-seller's cry or a streer-seller's song ("canto de los vendedores ambulantes").[1]
The cries of hawkers and costermongers could once be heard in every city in the world, though their use as a basis for song is particularly notable in South America and the Caribbean. In Cuba, ethnologist Miguel Barnet noted that cross-fertilisation was common as hawkers also often based their pregones on rural tunes or popular genres such as son and guaracha. The Cuban music historian Cristóbal Díaz lists nearly five hundred examples of popular tunes based on hawker songs, mostly from Cuba, but also Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Panama, Venezuela, Peru, Argentina, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.[2]
The most famous example is El manisero, the Peanut Vendor, written by Moisés Simons, and first recorded by Rita Montaner in 1928. The version recorded by Don Azpiazú in New York in 1930, with Antonio Machín as the singer, became a world-wide hit. This recording started a 'rumba' craze which swept North America and much of Europe in the 1930s. Peanut Vendor had a second life as a hit number when Stan Kenton recorded it as an instrumental in 1947.
Some other great pregones and their authors: