One of the historical attributes of Spanish culture has been, since the mid-20th century, its patent inferiority complex with respect to France, which has caused our most distinguished artists to Frenchify their ways, in literature, cinema or art. as a sign of prestige. It even happened with singer-songwriters, marked at the end of the sixties by the powerful sones of Serge Gaingsbourg, Charles Aznavour, Jacques Brel, Georges Brassens or Françoise Hardy. Under the black beret of National Catholicism, artists such as Aute, Serrat, Víctor Manuel or Mari Trini looked at each other in the freedom and chords of the neighboring Fifth Republic to cry out for freedom and modernity.
Perhaps that made Cecilia such a hypnotic singer-songwriter. Evangelina Sobredo Galanes (El Pardo, 1948, Colinas de Trasmonte, 1976), which was her name, had the cosmopolitan education that only a military man of the regime, dedicated to a diplomatic career, could provide to an offspring of eight children. As a child, the family lived in Southampton, Philadelphia, Algiers, Lisbon, and Jordan. Cecilia, who began playing the guitar encouraged by an American nun, would end up more influenced by American blues and folk than by the heirs of the chanson française.
Lady, Lady was the biggest success of her first long-play, titled Cecilia. Evangelina Sobredo's name was changed, as so many times, by the record company, and she – who had gained experience in Madrid in the early sixties singing in English in colleges – chose for her baptism to be called after Simon's song
The fractious and favorite daughter of the Madrid military bourgeoisie, Cecilia turned in Lady, lady a combination of satire and portrait of customs that condenses the combination of decadence and longing for modernity in which the bourgeoisie of late Francoism lived, with greedy eyes on the revolution of customs that crossed the democratic West in those years. At the same time, the audacity of its lyrics concentrated another unresolved tension in the traditional Madrid of rosaries and novenas, in conflict with the world that was contemporary: the feminist and sexual revolution, the emancipation of cultured and well-to-do women who owed that fortune to the iron social control of societies lacking freedom. So, with a point of self-portrait –or as a portrait of Dorian Gray that would conjure up that destiny–, she filled her particular Portrait of a Lady with allusions to the cultural and love concerns of her protagonist.
On the one hand, she was “a punctual keeper of the third commandment”, with “a few slips in the sixth”, but “a good mother and wife, with a religious education”. On the other hand, she "ardent admirer of a decadent novelist, being a thinker and writer, author of some versillo, although they are no longer in fashion."
Cecilia's song was a great success –although it had been published as the B-side of the first single from the LP, which opened on the A-side, Fui– and with its scant six verses and its chorus, it was inscribed in its own right in the literary tradition of the adulterous woman, the archetype that inaugurated the modern novel with Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina and La Regenta. It is eloquent of the country's situation that the fresco of bourgeois decadence and the female yearning for freedom that assailed upper-middle class women to broaden literature in the 19th century were still a description of everyday life in Spain in the 1950s. seventy.
The review of the Madrid environments of mantilla and gossip, of trickery and high culture, reveals to what extent the young Cecilia, who frequented them, could vividly feel the fear of seeing herself embodying the lady of her song: “Brilliant conversationalist in cocktail from seven to nine – «today it snows, tomorrow it rains, maybe the day after it will thunder»–, wrapped in silk and fur. (...) Devourer of obituaries, births and other pains, broadcaster of rumors, assiduous in the funerals of very black mourners they (...) On Saturday art and rehearsal, on Sunday the horses, in the boxes of the Real the teas of charity, playing remedy”. And hunger for protagonism: "If it weren't for fear, it would be the bride at the wedding, the child at the baptism, the dead person at the funeral, as long as he left his mark." It was necessary to see Raphael, two years later, interpret, from his delicious engrossment, these verses of satire.
Perhaps the proof of the extent to which Cecilia speaks of a lady who could be her is her intention that her second album be titled I will stay single and the cover be illustrated by a photo of her with a clear pregnancy. The record company replaced the photo with another less obvious one and changed the title: Cecilia 2. Loafers, as well as pacatos.
