La Niña de los Peines
Who is La Niña de los Peines?
Pastora Pavón Cruz, La Niña de los Peines, was born in Seville on 10 February 1890 into the Casa de los Pavones, a true dynasty of Andalusian Gitano cante. She was the sister of Arturo and Tomás Pavón, both cantaores of great prestige, and grew up training in the purest, most genuinely Gitano school under both of them, which made her, from a very early age, a direct heir to that family tradition.
She began performing on stage while still a small child: at only eight years old she was already singing in the cafés cantantes of Madrid, an early debut that foreshadowed what would become one of the longest and most respected careers in 20th-century flamenco cante.
Career
Over the years she mastered an extraordinarily broad repertoire, which included tangos, peteneras, soleá, seguiriyas, tientos, martinetes, alegrías, malagueñas, bulerías and fandanguillos, and went beyond mere interpretation by creating styles of her own such as the bamberas—inspired by Andalusian folklore linked to carnival swings—and the lorqueñas, in which she set poems by Federico García Lorca to music by bulerías. In 1928 she took part in a tour alongside Antonio Chacón, Manuel Vallejo and José Cepero, crossing paths with some of the great figures of the cante of her generation.
In 1931 she married the cantaor Pepe Pinto in the Seville neighborhood of La Macarena, forming one of the most well-known artistic and personal couples in the flamenco of the era. Throughout her career she performed accompanied by reference guitarists such as Manolo de Badajoz and Melchor de Marchena, with whom she left some of her most memorable performances.
Palos and discography
Her recorded legacy was gathered above all in the records she made for La Voz de su Amo between 1958 and 1959, already in the final stage of her career, where she condensed much of the repertoire she had mastered over the decades: from the cantes por tangos and peteneras, for which she was especially renowned, to soleares, seguiriyas and bulerías.
Legacy
She died in Seville in 1969, and today has a monument in her honor in the Alameda de Hércules, the same area of the city where much of Seville’s flamenco life of her time was forged. She is regarded as one of the greatest performers in the history of flamenco, with a school of cante that specialists describe as practically impossible to imitate, both for the breadth of her repertoire and for the personality she brought to each of the styles she tackled.