Artisan preserves musical tradition

TAMPA -- When Manuel Morgado was six and living in the tiny Puerto Rican pueblo of Corosal, he built his first musical instrument out of discarded string and a used sardine can.

When Morgado was 13, he and his brother were so curious about how a guitar was made that they soaked an old instrument in a drum of rainwater and disassembled the soggy wood.

Morgado, now 69 and living in Brandon, has built about 200 guitars in his lifetime. He also has carved a few dozen wood harps.

But his specialty -- and his passion -- is the cuatro.

"It's everything," Morgado said in Spanish. "It's home."

The cuatro looks like a super-sized violin, but is played like a guitar. It has 10 strings, in five groups of two. The cuatro produces a rich, dramatic sound most often heard in traditional Puerto Rican jibaro music.

"The cuatro represents more than just a small, guitar-like instrument," said William Cumpiano, a Massachusetts guitar maker and co-founder of The Cuatro Project, a group of Puerto Ricans who have chronicled the history of the instrument.

"It is iconic of what it is to be Puerto Rican," he said. "You can equate the cuatro to the Puerto Ricans like the bagpipes to the Scots."

Morgado, who also plays the instrument, has built more than 500 cuatros.

"He will never build one the same," said Roberto Lujan-Fremaint, a Brandon man who has bought three of Morgado's cuatros. "They're all different, they all have a unique sound. There are different details on every one."

Morgado built his first cuatro from a solid block of wood in the 1950s, after he served in the U.S. Army in Korea. Over the decades, he improved on his style, which improved the sound.

He now uses several different sheets and blocks of high-quality wood for the body, neck and face. He crafts dozens of tiny, colorful wood pieces for the inlay on the instruments' rosettes.

Morgado is well-known in Puerto Rico for his skill as a cuatro builder, Cumpiano said. He also is known on the island for his musical skill; he put out two record albums in the 1970s and 1980s.

But building instruments and playing music never paid his family's bills. Until his retirement, Morgado worked in a lab at a petroleum refinery in Puerto Rico.

Today, Morgado lives in a comfortable ranch home in Brandon. He and his wife of 48 years, Juanita, moved to Brandon eight years ago. The couple's three children live nearby; two of their sons frequently stop by to jam with Dad.

One son plays a traditional Puerto Rican percussion instrument called the guido. The other plays a Venezuelan cuatro, which has four strings and resembles a ukulele.

Morgado makes those, too.

He also teaches the cuatro to a new generation.

Lujan-Fremaint, 39, first started playing the cuatro when he was 14 and living in Puerto Rico. He gave it up for several years, until he moved to Hillsborough County and his barber told him about Morgado.

"When I was 30, I started to feel homesick," said Lujan-Fremaint. "With the cuatro, I always feel that I have a piece of Puerto Rico."

He began taking lessons from Morgado. Now he calls the older man "Papa," and Morgado recently made him his third cuatro. It took Morgado about three months to craft that cuatro; in Puerto Rico, the instrument would have sold for $2,500 but Lujan-Fremaint paid less than $1,000.

Made of blond curly maple and yagrumo hembra (wood imported from Puerto Rico), and varnished with several coats of lacquer, Lujan-Fremaint's newest cuatro glows and glistens.

It's almost too beautiful to touch.

But when Lujan-Fremaint plucks at the strings -- and Morgado accompanies him on guitar -- it yields a Latin ballad that is both sensual and melancholy.

The cuatro has humble beginnings, according to Cumpiano, the historian.

Its name means "four" in Spanish, and the instrument used to have four strings, adapted from a classic six-string Spanish guitar.

In the 17th century, the cuatro was the invention of the earliest Puerto Ricans in the countryside, whose heritage stemmed from Spaniards, aboriginal Indians and enslaved Africans. The baroque, violin-like cutouts on the instrument's sides were believed to be carved into the wood to make the instrument more "upper class."

The earliest cuatro music was played during religious observations and harvest celebrations. Later, the cuatro was one of many instruments in "seis" bands, which play traditional dance music.

By the 1970s and 80s, the cuatro and its sounds were considered hillbilly music, Cumpiano said.

"There were times where the cuatro almost disappeared," he said. "No academic, no government institutions had ever bothered to document it or study it. It was always considered kind of worthless."

But about 10 years ago, Cumpiano and other Puerto Ricans interested in the cuatro noticed a cultural shift, similar to the rise in popularity of American bluegrass music after the movie "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" was released.

Glamourous starlets on Puerto Rican music shows now dance to cuatro-based music. A TV station in San Juan uses a cuatro as its logo. And Puerto Rican pop stars such as Mark Anthony use cuatros in their bands.

"It's actually crossed into the mainstream," Cumpiano said. "The few cuatro makers that exist on the island are working overtime. Everybody wants cuatros. Everyone wants a piece of that old-time tradition."

On the Web

For more information on the cuatro or to hear its music, point your browser to: http://www.cuatro-pr.org

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