Martin Goicoechea (Go-ka-CHAY-uh) has a passion for preserving the Basque (Bask) language through song. He was eighteen years old when he left Spain headed for Rock Springs. He had followed his brother to the U.S. in 1966 to take a job on a sheep ranch.
Goicoechea grew up participating in improvised Basque-verse singing competitions, where he was a Bertsolari (BARE-so-lar-ee) or singing bard. Decades after moving to America, he took up singing and competing again.
Bertsolari have to think on their feet – they are given a subject and then must develop rhyming lyrics and a tune on the fly. Listen to Goicoechea describing a contest:
You’ve got to be quick. They give you a topic and you have five to ten seconds to move to the microphone, you got to say the story, you got sing the verse with the rhymes, and you got to give your songs with the tunes, has got to be fast. Knowledge of the language is important.
Learn more in the Martin Goicoechea papers at UW’s American Heritage Center.
For more information, visit the American Heritage Center site.