walking upstream…
La Niña de los Peines
photo: anonymousunknown author · public domain ↗La Niña de los Peines
In 1901, having already made a local name singing a Seville copla about combs — "Péinate tú con mis peines, que mis peines son de azúcar" — the girl who inherited its nickname, La Niña de los Peines, carried it with her into Madrid's Café del Brillante and never set it down again. Born Pastora Pavón Cruz in Seville on 10 February 1890, daughter of the cantaor Francisco Pavón Cruz "El Paiti" and sister to the cantaores Tomás and Arturo Pavón, she worked the café cantante circuit through the 1900s and 1920s and recorded, prolifically, from 1910 onward — soleares, siguiriyas, tangos, bulerías, more styles than any one voice should hold. She married the cantaor Pepe Pinto in the early 1930s and died in Seville in 1969, three weeks after him. By then critics had stopped naming her rivals and started calling her, instead, the last one standing.
the sound in question
1930
Tientos (Salomón con ser tan sabio)La Niña de los Peines
walk the tributaries ↓
Antonio Chacón1910s · Flamenco / Cante Jondo
By the 1920s, the critic Fernando el de Triana wrote, Pastora stood "sin más competidores que Antonio Chacón y Manuel Torres" — without rivals but Antonio Chacón and Manuel Torres — Chacón the ornate, twenty-one-years-older master her generation measured its control against. The admiration outlasted reputation: a siguiriya discography study finds Pastora's 1910 recording of "Si Supiera las Lenguas" setting the same melodic line Chacón had recorded in 1909, noting she "greatly admired Chacón" and "seems to have recorded this following his version."
listen: upstream & heresource: esflamenco.com (archived) — Antonio Chacón biography ↗
1909
Seguidillas Nº 1: Si Yo Supiera la LenguaAntonio Chacón
1910
Seguidillas Gitanas (Si Supiera las Lenguas)La Niña de los Peines
listen forChacón's 1909 recording of this siguiriya line, with the guitarist Juan Gandulla, is measured and ornamental — every phrase held under tight control. Pastora's 1910 version of the same verse, cut months later with Ramón Montoya, keeps his shape but pushes harder against it: the same words landing with more bite than his poised original, a twenty-year-old singer testing how much of an admired elder's line she could make her own without breaking it.
Manuel Torre1920s · Flamenco / Cante Jondo
Manuel Torre settled in Seville in 1899 and, by the flamenco critic Manuel Bohórquez's account, "captivated" all three Pavón-Cruz siblings — Pastora included — right as Fernando el de Triana was naming Torre and her the only two singers still holding up a dying generation of cante. The bond went past admiration: a discography study of siguiriya recordings finds Pastora's 1910 "Por Tu Causita Me Estoy Viendo" setting the same melodic line as Torre's own 1909 recording of it, concluding she recorded it following "the version of her friend Manuel Torre."
listen: upstream & heresource: Archivo Expoflamenco — Manuel Bohórquez, "Tomás ↗
1909
Por Tu Causita Me Estoy Viendo (Seguidillas Nº 2)Manuel Torre
1910
Seguidillas Nº 3 (Por Tu Causita Me Estoy Viendo)La Niña de los Peines
listen forPlay Torre's 1909 "Por Tu Causita Me Estoy Viendo" against Pastora's 1910 recording of the same line and you're hearing two takes on one melody a year apart, with two different guitarists: his rougher and more declamatory, hers already reshaping the phrase toward something tighter. Listen for how she "cuts off the last word in the fourth and ninth sung lines" — the discography study's own description of the detail that makes the recording hers, not a copy of his.
La Serneta1880s · Flamenco / Cante Jondo
No recording of La Serneta survives — she died in 1912, before Andalusia's café singers reached a recording studio — but Pastora had known her. A biographical account of Pastora's life is specific about it: among the soleares she performed, "es preciso destacar la de Mercé la Serneta, a quien había conocido en su juventud" — it is worth singling out that of Mercé la Serneta, whom she had known in her youth. Pastora carried that particular soleá style forward into her own recordings, one strand of a repertoire she came to hold almost alone.
listen: upstream & heresource: Biografías e Historia — Pastora María Pavón Cruz biography (life facts, La Serneta acquaintance) ↗
No known recordingLa Serneta
1910
Soleares (Un Día Era Rey)La Niña de los Peines
listen forThere's nothing to play for La Serneta herself. Listen instead to Pastora's 1910 "Un Día Era Rey," recorded with Ramón Montoya: the winding, unhurried turn each line takes before it resolves is the soleá complexity La Serneta was known for and Pastora is recorded as having carried forward — a style kept alive only because singers like Pastora kept singing it after the woman who shaped it left no disc of her own.