Two years ago, Manu Chao settled in Galicia for a few days to offer a mini-acoustic tour that he called El Chapulin alone. During the last of the two concerts with which he filled the Sala Capitol in Santiago, Chao made a special dedication. “This song comes from Bastavales and I want it to come back there to dedicate it to Josefa,” he said before performing Missing one of the biggest hits from his album Clandestinehis first solo album which, in 1998, established him as a mass artist and a reference in musical fusion, sold three million copies.
The Josefa cited by Manu Chao was Josefa Juncal Barreiro, one of hundreds of anonymous tambourine players who passed down their oral repertoire and who died yesterday at the age of 92. But Josefa Juncal, known to everyone as Josefa de Bastavales, emerged from anonymity mainly thanks to Manu Chao and that Missingwhich hides behind a story of coincidences and mutual affection.
Born in 1932, Josefa Juncal is from Tordoia, a primarily agricultural town located in the interior of the province of La Coruña. Josefa grew up in the harsh post-war period, working in the fields and trying to survive as best she could, after losing her husband and becoming a widow with six children to raise. Mrs. Josefa avoided the blows of life thanks to her cheerful character and took refuge in music, through the tambourine, songs and dance. “I was stuck in a well and the music made me fly,” she confessed to the historical program Alalah from TVG in 2008. At that time she was already known to everyone as Josefa de Bastavales, due to the village in which she settled, in the shadow of the most famous bell tower of Galician poetry, sung by Rosalía de Castro, in the municipality of Brión, near Santiago de Compostela.
As luck would have it, the Galician journalist living in Paris, Ramón Chao, father of Manu Chao, bought a house in this village in the 1990s, forever changing the anonymous life of Mrs. Josefa de Bastavales. Manu begins to be a regular in the kitchen of his neighbor, Mrs. Josefa. There, in the warmth of the fire of his lareira, also pass well-known Galician musicians and friends of Manu, moving in the orbit of the then nascent current that was Bravú, the last great movement of rock music sung in Galician. Chao surely imbibes many traditional and popular Galician songs, which he always introduces into his repertoire when he performs in Galicia.
Besides Chao himself, other musicians such as the repertoire of traditional songs he kept in his memory. “At the beginning, he always said he didn’t remember any songs, but when he went on stage, everything came back to him at once,” recalls musician and writer Xurxo Souto.
It is in this lareira, among other things, that the theme is born Missing. The artist himself tells it in the priceless archives of the program Alalah from TVG: “I went to visit Josefa and she and her daughter let me go, Manu, where are you? that you disappeared. » From there, the song took off alone and the refrain on which Ms. Josefa’s sentence hovers was heard throughout the planet: “They call me the missing one, when he arrives, he is already gone.” It was surely during one of these meetings in the kitchen that an idea was born: taking Ms. Josefa on tour across France, in a bus in which, in addition to Manu Chao and Galician musicians, artists like Amparanoia or Macaco.
“I had only been to León, so if I got to León, I thought I could also get to Lyon,” he joked in a tribute that several of his travel companions paid him in 2014 at the social center A Gentalha do Pichel, in Santiago. of Compostela. For several years, Ms. Josefa was treated in a day center in Concello de Brión, but despite the wear and tear of the years, she never lost her joy. “I thought they were taking me to the funeral and it was to have a party,” she said with a laugh on the day she arrived at the tribute, in which she remembered many old songs and also his unexpected reconversion as a television journalist.
In 2000, the journalist Xosé Manuel Pereiro, who with Luis Lavandeira ran the daily What will they be?had the idea of offering Josefa de Bastavales a job as a journalist, when she was about to turn 70. Shy at first but determined later, Ms. Josefa made endearing recordings with Galician groups like Berrogüetto, or international music stars like the Cubans Elíades Ochoa or Compay Segundo, whom she called “meu pai Segundo”, or Cape Verdean Cesárea Évora. About the latter, Josefa confessed that “I was very interested to see what her feet looked like after so many years of singing and dancing barefoot.”
Although the Chao family sold their house in Bastavales years ago, Manu Chao never forgot Ms. Josefa when he returned to Galicia for a few days. Both to quote her and dedicate songs to her during her concerts and to visit her. As confirmed to this newspaper by someone close to the artist, during the mini-tour he carried out in 2022, Manu wanted to visit, once again, his friend and neighbor with whom he shared so many hours of chatting and coffee. liqueur in his kitchen, in the shadow of the bell tower of the Bastavales church. It was perhaps his last meeting with his teacher. Because as Manu Chao says with emotion in the show Alalah: “Josefa is for me a teacher of life. »
