I found the new "Mimosa"!

The steel guitar was born in Hawaii in the last decades of the 19th century, and it began with an imported instrument. The Spanish guitar had reached the islands with Mexican and Spanish sailors and with the vaqueros — the Mexican cowboys hired to work Hawaiian cattle. Hawaiians took the guitar, retuned it to open chords, and made it their own. The decisive innovation is traditionally credited to Joseph Kekuku, a schoolboy at the Kamehameha School around 1885–1890, who discovered that sliding a piece of steel along the strings produced a smooth, voice-like glide between notes. Laid flat across the lap, the strings raised high off the fretboard, plucked with picks and stopped not with the fingers but with a polished steel bar ("the steel"), the guitar became something new — the kīkākila, the "steel guitar," an instrument that sang and wept.

What turned a local Hawaiian technique into a global sound was the American entertainment industry. The 1912 Broadway play The Bird of Paradise put Hawaiian musicians and their sliding guitars in front of mainland audiences, and the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, with its hugely popular Hawaiian pavilion, ignited a full-blown craze. Through the late 1910s and 1920s, touring Hawaiian troupes, sheet music and — crucially — the booming record industry carried the steel-guitar sound across the United States and out into the world, where it seeped into country music, the blues (as bottleneck slide) and countless popular styles. By the second half of the 1920s "Hawaiian" was one of the most fashionable exotic flavours in commercial music everywhere, an easily recognizable novelty timbre that a bandleader could drop into almost any arrangement to make it feel modern and cosmopolitan.

Francisco Canaro was exactly the kind of bandleader to notice. He was tango's great commercial entrepreneur — enormously popular, business-minded, willing to experiment. Beginning on 28 March 1928 he started adding a guitarra hawaiana — a lap-held steel guitar played with a sliding steel bar — to a series of recordings. Over roughly the next three to four years, from 1928 into the early 1930s, Canaro used the Hawaiian guitar on a surprising number of sides — more than 100 across 1928–1932, where he usually has the steel guitar play part A or B's main melody on the second round. The most cited and danced example is the tango Mimosa (recorded 27 November 1929); there is also the openly themed slow vals Bells of Hawaii.. Like most fashions it passed: as the Hawaiian craze cooled in the early 1930s, the steel guitar disappeared from Canaro's orchestra, leaving behind a small, charming and slightly eccentric corner of recorded tango history.

This is how we got Mimosa. Check it out here for example, with Jonathan and Clarisa dancing to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwrhkpHlUg4

Sergio Torres and Víctor Tapia sat through Canaro's entire discography and compiled every single side where that Hawaiian guitar sneaks in - and published it on the site Universo Epígrafe. The end result is a proper catalogue of around 107 Canaro recordings with Hawaiian guitar, from 1928 right through 1932. And Steven Thull created a playlist on spotify with Hawaiian guitar Canaros, compiled from a list in Michael Lavocah's books! It's here: PYfyyYKds1kzXFSSQ?si=10b5143b56ab4bf6

I was looking for songs to accompany Mimosa in a tanda, and started going through the list, my respect constantly growing for the people who compiled it. Some of these songs are ... slow! Somewhere in that long parade of gliding, whining steel-guitar sides I stumbled on Pajarito cantor. My personal new Mimosa, and current favourite song :-) . ¡Joya! One of those little finds that makes going through a playlist feel like treasure hunting.

They do not have the same character. To me, Mimosa gets spiritual towards the end. And Pajarito Cantor replaces that with a figurative banging on the table :-D. But it's at least another Canaro Hawaiian guitar song with potential. Also be aware there is a little jump towards the end that moves the timing by an 8th note - but maybe that is just in the cheap versions.

I am writing about it here because at the local milonga, half the room went empty when I put on this tanda... so I want to spread some of the enthusiasm. And also, there isn't a single performance to it on youtube, and as it would be LOVELY to see performances to it - help me spread the word!