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Conjunto meets western swing on "Buena Vista Swing" by Conjunto Alamo, while their homies Conjunto San Antonio Alegre anchor the careening boogie "Mi Dolorcito" ("My Little Heartache") with a prickly guitar line. Lalo Guerrero, who already had an established career in East L.A., and who is often mistakenly credited with creating Pachuco boogie, actually followed Tosti by a year with such sides as this CD's great 1949 finger-popper "Chicas Patas Boogie" (which translated Louis Prima's "Oh Babe"), the booming "Muy Sabroso Blues" ("Tasty Blues") and the hynotic "Chucos Suaves" ("Cool Chucos"). Yet the witty "Los Blues" came from deeper in the alley, while "Guisa Guaina" ("Wino Girl") satirized the Mexican standard "Borrachita" with such extreme camp you can almost picture the nightclub choreography that should go with it. His followup duplicated the pattern, with the hapless "Wine-O Boogie," a jump tune reminiscent of Amos Milburn, backed by the guaracha "El Tirili" ("The Reefer Man"). "Guisa Gacha" ("Stuck-Up Girl"), the B-side to the original single, was a guaracha with distinctly Latin percussion. Tosti liked it, too: He cut another version, called "Chicano Boogie," around the same time, and came back a year later with a new "Pachuco Boogie" that told a different story to the same music. It was cool it was atmospheric it reportedly sold more than a million copies - mind-boggling numbers for a regional, Spanish-language record. Next came an infectiously sung verse and then a jivey, spoken calo dialogue between two pachucos about the merits of dressing sharp and staying high, followed by some insouciant scatting and more singing and talking. The song opened with brushed drums and a delightfully skewed, eight-to-the-bar Latin piano figure by Eddie Cano (who later, through his work with Cal Tjader and others, became a fixture on the West Coast Latin jazz scene). In 1948, when Reyes failed to show for a recording session, Tosti worked up his "Pachuco Boogie" with the other three musicians in the studio band. Though he was writing conventional Mexican-American hits like the bolero "Vine Por Ti" for balladeer Ruben Reyes, Tosti was also experimenting with the black jazz and blues sounds of Central Avenue. When he was 15, his family moved to L.A., where he picked up the sax and then bass, eventually playing in the jazz and dance bands of Jack Teagarden, Charlie Barnett, Les Brown, and Jimmy Dorsey (who was best man at Tosti's wedding). Born out of wedlock in El Paso in 1923, he was raised by his mother and grandparents, and played violin in the local symphony at age 10. This was the crucible that forged Edmundo Martinez Tostado, who later took the stage name Don Tosti, and whose groups are responsible for nine of the 21 tracks on the new compilation Pachuco Boogie (Arhoolie). Most moved to Los Angeles, where the infamous Sleepy Lagoon Murder and Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 (which should more correctly have been called the Navy Uniform Riots), helped codify pachucos as an identifiable subculture at odds with both the larger American society and the emerging Chicano middle class.
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In the early '40s, El Paso police and the National Guard finally managed to break up the pachuco gangs and run them out of El Paso. Their hero was Tin Tan, a Mexican DJ who in 1938 created a zoot-suited, tirlili-speaking character for his XEJ radio show from across the border in Juarez. So that they couldn't be understood by Anglos or other Mexicanos, they spoke their own made-up, jive-talking language of tirili ("hoodlum talk"), a variation on the ancient Spanish gypsy dialect calo. Gangs virtually controlled Segundo Barrio downtown, led by the fearsome 7-X. In the '20s and '30s, "El 'Chuco," as it was nicknamed - probably because so many of its residents hailed from the Hidalgo, Mexico, city of Pachuca - epitomized the Wild West border town. Pachuco boogie, the postwar, Mexican-American adaptation of jump blues named after the 1948 Don Tosti single that launched the subgenre, came to fruition in East L.A., but its roots are in El Paso, Texas.