When it comes to the history of popular music, we can trace how authors played with various trends and crosscurrents of the times. And at a certain point, we can observe that the biggest influence on the tango was in fact the tango itself. The tango “Zorro gris” provides an interesting case in point.
The success of Samuel Linnig’s song “Milonguita” in 1920 was immediate and it proved very influential on other songwriters. Its portrait of the flapper as an inward, sympathetic figure drew on the previous decades of contemporary opera, then hugely popular in Argentina, and it captured the mood of the times. Even more than that, it projected a fiction for the age—a picture of liberated youth, in a dizzy moment of reckoning as it weighs the jiggle of its spit-curls against the world of vice.
Francisco García Jiménez drew directly on “Milonguita” for the lyrics to his early hit “Zorro gris,” adding another angle to the story of the flapper sadly navigating the demimonde of the nightclubs. The venue Armenonville (also mentioned in Cadícamo’s lyrics for “Shusheta,” among others) was the pinnacle of the cabaret nightlife in Buenos Aires from its opening in 1910 until 1920, and its presence in the background of this tango adds the shimmer of footlights and stage entertainment to the champagne-flooded hoopla of the 1920s.
Gray Fox Fur
(Tr. Jake Spatz)
YouTube: Carlos Gardel | Oscar Larocca
How many fateful nights of vice
You threw sweet girlish hopes away,
And like roses at some frenzied bash
Flung its petals round the cabaret.
And walking out of Armenonville
As false love’s farce becomes a blur,
It was your own soul’s inward chill
You wrapped up in your gray fox fur.
With every gleeful cackle feigned
You stifled deep and kept repressed
Amid the fleeting gold champagne
An urge to cry within your breast.
And thinking, between a kiss and a tango,
Of the happier, humbler times that were,
You tucked away your holy tears
Between the folds of your gray fox fur.
And so your sum of anguished years
Weighs this garment with tales untold.
It keeps watch over your sacred tears,
It wraps around your spirit’s cold.
And when that longed-for day arrives
To end your sorrows soon for sure,
The secret of all your sad, sad life
Shall lie within the gray fox fur.
Zorro gris (1921)
Music: Rafael Tuegols
Lyrics: Francisco García Jiménez
Cuantas noches fatídicas de vicio
tus ilusiones dulces de mujer,
como las rosas de una loca orgía
les deshojaste en el cabaret.
Y tras la farsa del amor mentido
al alejarte del Armenonville,
era el intenso frío de tu alma
lo que abrigabas con tu zorro gris.
Al fingir carcajadas de gozo
entre el oro fugaz del champán,
reprimías adentro del pecho
un deseo tenaz de llorar.
Y al pensar, entre un beso y un tango,
en tu humilde pasado feliz,
ocultabas las lágrimas santas
en los pliegues de tu zorro gris.
Por eso toda tu angustiosa historia
en esa prenda gravitando está.
Ella guardó tus lágrimas sagradas,
ella abrigó tu frío espiritual.
Y cuando llegue en un cercano día
a tus dolores el ansiado fin,
todo el secreto de tu vida triste
se quedará dentro del zorro gris.