Babalu (1939 Song)

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Babalu is not a song that mentions a Santeria deity in passing. It is written as direct address, a singer standing before an image of the orisha Babalu-Aye and asking what is owed him now that a rite has been invoked. Margarita Lecuona wrote the song and it was first published in the United States in 1939, though it had already been recorded the year before in Cuba by Orquesta Casino de la Playa. The lyrics call for seventeen candles arranged in the shape of a cross, plus a cigar and a glass of aguardiente, the ordinary elements of Babalu-Aye's public devotional offerings, described in the same plain, practical language a worshipper might actually use.

Babalu-Aye is closely associated in Cuban devotion with the Catholic Saint Lazarus, a healer and afflicter of disease whose public veneration has never been treated as closed the way initiation into the Santeria priesthood is. Nothing in the song touches that closed material; its subject from the first line to the last is an open, public relationship between a devotee and a deity who is sung to, not secretly invoked. Miguelito Valdes made the song his own through the 1940s, performed widely enough across the Caribbean and Latin America that he became known simply as Mr. Babalu, years before most of its later English speaking audience ever heard it.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

When Desi Arnaz performed Babalu on I Love Lucy, dropping into character as nightclub owner Ricky Ricardo, beating a conga drum, building to the song's dramatic close, the vast majority of the American television audience watching him almost certainly had no idea they were hearing a devotional song addressed to a specific Afro-Cuban deity. Arnaz was Cuban born, and the song had already been a Latin American standard for years by the time he made it his signature number on American network television.

Reina Alejandra Prado Saldivar, an art historian and lecturer at California State University, Los Angeles and CalArts, argues in a 2016 essay on the academic sound studies site Sounding Out! that this was not simply a musical number performed out of professional habit. She reads Arnaz's repeated performances as functioning as a genuine act of devotion, an offering and healing ritual carried out for Babalu-Aye in front of a national audience that could not recognize what it was watching, letting Arnaz maintain a real connection to the Cuban heritage his television character otherwise kept at arm's length behind comic exaggeration.

This atlas records both halves of that reading honestly: a song built from real Santeria devotional practice, carried into American mass culture by a performer whose relationship to it, on the record scholarship available, appears to have been more sincere than the show around it. Nothing in the song or in Arnaz's performance of it touches the closed initiation the tradition itself withholds from outsiders; both the song's content and its broadcast history sit entirely on the public side of that line.