Manolo de Huelva
Who is Manolo de Huelva?
Manuel Gómez Vélez, known artistically as Manolo de Huelva, was born on 16 November 1892 in Río Tinto (Huelva), half an hour after his twin brother Aurelio. He was the son of José Gómez Pérez de León, a lathe craftsman, and Isabel Vélez Mallofrett, and spent his early years at his maternal grandmother’s house on Calle Gravina. At eight the family moved to the Huelva capital, where he attended barely two years of school — just enough to learn to read and write — before starting as a tailor’s apprentice, a trade in which he rose to cutter and with which he made his own suits.
Unlike other great tocaores of his generation, Manolo de Huelva was a non-gitano, and he had no formal guitar teacher: he trained by listening to and absorbing falsetas from figures such as Paquirri el Guante, Patiño, Javier Molina, Habichuela and Miguel Borrull, though his most marked influence was Paco de Lucena, whom he considered himself a distinguished follower of.
Career
He accompanied cantaores such as Manolo de Jerez in seguiriyas and Canalejas in bulerías and fandangos de Huelva, always working in the field of pure cante accompaniment, a territory in which he felt more at ease than as a soloist. In fact, he was firmly opposed to solo flamenco guitar and never performed that way in public, convinced that the instrument should be at the service of the singer. His last public appearance took place in the summer of 1974 at the Palacio de la Magdalena in Santander, as part of a music course run by the Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo.
During the last two decades of his life he worked closely with researcher Virginia Harrison de Zayas, who, thanks to the guitarist’s prodigious memory, was able to transcribe much of the songs he had accompanied and his playing techniques, leaving behind a documentary record that partly makes up for the scarcity of his recordings.
Style and discography
He was extremely reluctant to record albums, so his recorded legacy is minimal: what survives is his accompaniment to Canalejas in bulerías and fandangos de Huelva, and in 1989, years after his death, an excerpt of an alegrías of his, set to a poem by José María Ruiz Fuentes, was released on the album “Diapasón.” Those who heard him described his playing as simple but deeply flamenco, relying more on natural talent than on showy technical work.
Legacy
His prestige among connoisseurs was enormous despite the small size of his recorded output: Andrés Segovia himself recalled him in an interview for Guitar Review magazine in autumn 1977, stating that Manolo de Huelva “was the best when I was young.” He died in Seville in the early hours of 12 May 1976, leaving the image of a tocaor who preferred the purity of accompaniment and fidelity to an almost secret style over public exposure, which explains why his name, despite the admiration he inspired among his contemporaries, remains today one of the least known in 20th-century flamenco guitar.