Atahualpa Yupanqui was the foundational voice of Argentine folk song, a self-mythologizing guitarist and payador whose austere guitar-and-voice recordings of gaucho life — beginning with his first Odeón sides in 1936 — became the bedrock vocabulary for milonga and zamba across Latin America. Trained in classical guitar by Buenos Aires teacher Bautista Almirón yet devoted to the anonymous songs of rural gauchos he grew up around, he carried his music to Paris in the 1950s at Édith Piaf's invitation and spent decades touring the world as Argentine folklore's elder statesman. Sources name no specific earlier recording artist as his influence — only a private classical guitar teacher and the anonymous oral tradition of gaucho payadores — so this record is treated as a headwater.

the sound in question

1936

Caminito del IndioAtahualpa Yupanqui