{"id":12559,"date":"2025-11-13T21:52:00","date_gmt":"2025-11-14T02:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/?p=12559"},"modified":"2025-11-20T22:49:43","modified_gmt":"2025-11-21T03:49:43","slug":"tumbandero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/2025\/11\/tumbandero\/","title":{"rendered":"Tumbandero"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A comment by Axel D. Rodr\u00edguez, a musician and cultural researcher from Puerto Rico (his band on Spotify<\/a> \u2014 Youtube<\/a>), recently appeared on one of my old posts about the washtub bass. He gives some interesting information about the washtub bass that I wanted to highlight:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“For the past few years [he writes], I\u2019ve been studying a Puerto Rican one-string bass known locally as the tumbandero. It appears historically in the northeast of the island — Lo\u00edza, Can\u00f3vanas, R\u00edo Grande, and Fajardo — and shares a clear lineage with African earth bows and the broader family of one-string, tension-controlled basses found across the Caribbean and the Americas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Through workshops, fieldwork, and conversations with older musicians, I\u2019ve documented several Puerto Rican variants — the traditional washtub with stick and string, also a 5-gallon pail version used by plena musicians, and an older earth-bow-type form described in ethnographic literature. I\u2019ve also traced connections with related instruments such as the Haitian mosquito drum (karol\u00edn\/kalori-n), the Dominican gayumba, the Cuban tingo talango, the Makalapo y Seychells Islands, Gayumba Dominicana in the Dominican Republic….”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rodr\u00edguez also writes that he has played the tumbandero himself on stage for several years. I found very little about the tumbandero on the web, but I did find one video on Youtube where it’s featured<\/a>. There’s also a video on Facebook showing people making a tumbandero out of a five gallon bucket<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since the washtub bass derives from the earthbow, an African instrument, it should be no surprise to find related instruments throughout the African diaspora. Nevertheless, I was fascinated to learn about the tumbandero.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Two
Screen grab from the Facebook video. They’re attaching the neck to the bucket.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n

See this follow up post with tons of tumbandero videos.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A comment by Axel D. Rodr\u00edguez, a musician and cultural researcher from Puerto Rico (his band on Spotify \u2014 Youtube), recently appeared on one of my old posts about the washtub bass. He gives some interesting information about the washtub bass that I wanted to highlight: “For the past few years [he writes], I\u2019ve been … Continue reading “Tumbandero”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[129,1189,1064],"class_list":["post-12559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musical-arts","tag-diy-chronicles","tag-tumbandero","tag-washtub-bass"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12559"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12601,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12559\/revisions\/12601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}