The home of Don Felipe de Jesus Urrutia Delgadillo and his family is an open house. In the garden the shade of an enormous laurel tree opens its hospitable branches to all those who visit this family of musicians, a family who have saved some of the most beautiful pieces of northern Nicaraguan folk music from being lost forever.

Don Felipe was born in the small rural community of La Tunoza near Esteli, north western Nicara-gua, on February 5th 1918. His mother, Modesta Delgadillo, a native of La Tunoza, dedicated her home to bringing up her children. His father, Daniel Urrutia, an agricultural worker who also bred and sold mules, was originally from the nearby community Santa Rosa del Peñon.

At the age of eight, Felipe, who would become a talented worker and musician, started helping his father in the fields where the family grew their crops. At twelve, although still unable to play the guitar, Felipe began his work collecting traditional folk melodies, learning by memory the melodies and pieces he heard being played by adults in the nearby communities of El Bolsón and Rodeo Grande. His musical genius and his love for music enabled him to remember perfectly each and every melody he heard, saving from extinction the musical works of fellow musicians and campesi-nos (rural inhabitants). Today Felipe and his sons and grandsons continue to play and promote these musical works.

Felipe became a man of many trades. As a teenager he began full-time work in various different rural activities. He worked in the fields with oxen, he attended his own and other people’s crops, he was a hunter and learnt how to make his own weapons, he also became a very talented saddle maker. In fact there was little he could not do. He even worked as a labourer in the construction of what is now a busy main road between two towns in the north of Nicaragua in 1936 and on the con-struction of the Pan American Highway, now the main road running right through Nicaragua to Costa Rica in the South and Honduras in the North.

While still an adolescent Felipe taught himself to play the guitar by watching and listening to older musician friends. Once he had mastered the instrument he became one of the most well known gui-tar players and singers in the region. The famous romantic songs of the era formed part of his reper-tory and he was regularly called on to perform serenades accompanied by his friends Juan Rayo, Efraín Valdivia, Lorenzo Dávila, Guilibaldo Sosa and Carlos Benavides, other well known regional musicians. Many of the musicians of the time are remembered today by their beautiful melodies, which have been kept alive by Felipe.

Felipe worked for many years as a cattle herder, looking after large numbers of cattle for land own-ers. This work often included long trips by foot to far away places in Nicaragua and even outside the national borders. A keen musician he always took his guitar along and become well known in many towns and communities across the country. As soon as Felipe arrived in the area a party was planned. Fellow campesinos from the local area of wherever he happened to be would stay up all night dancing to the folk melodies Felipe played on his guitar.

Doña Juana Arauz Gutierrez was the muse that inspired Felipe and he gave her the best years of his life. A strong, generous and beautiful woman, Juana was also a highly talented musician. She sang in the choir of Esteli cathedral for many years and was even a member of the renowned Managua Cathedral Choir for some years. Juana and Felipe met and fell in love in 1945 and are still together today. They had eight children although only six are alive today; Francisco, Luis Felipe, Pedro An-tonio, Leopoldo, Maura and Maria Josephina.

A practising Christian and a nurse Juana worked in hospitals in Esteli and Managua. When she went to live with Felipe in La Tunoza she became a midwife. With vast knowledge and great patience she assisted numerous births (without the use of any conventional medication or qualified medical assistance) and none of her patients or their children ever died.

A few years after Felipe and Juana got together his mother died. This took its toll on Felipe who, out of respect for his dead mother, gave up his guitar. These events coincided with the introduction of gramophones, radios and imported music to Nicaragua, something that caused the sudden and almost complete disregard of local musicians who played live and traditional music. Felipe did not touch his guitar for fifteen years.

At the beginning of the 1960s three old musician friends, Ulises Gonzalez, and Alejandro and José Floripe, however, were able to persuade Felipe to return to his musical roots. Between the long hours of his hard agricultural labour and his general efforts to keep his large family going, one by one all the old melodies he had learnt thirty years before came back to Felipe. Each meeting of the old musician friends became an opportunity to play different melodies that he had remembered, to recall the story of each one and how it had come into being. The names by which we now know these melodies today were born out of those meetings with old friends back in the 1960s.

Felipe’s sons started becoming more and more enthusiastic in the musical work of their father. Firstly Luis, then Pedro and Leopoldo until one day in 1972, while at a concert, Carlos Mejia Godoy, the famous revolutionary singer-songwriter from Nicaragua, baptized the group, Felipe Ur-rutia y Sus Cachorros (Felipe Urrutia and His Litter), the name with which they have risen to na-tional and international fame.

Carrying on the family tradition, five of Felipe’s grandsons now form part of the group; Cesar Ger-san, Roger Felipe, Roberto Carlos, Luis Moises and Marvin del Pilar. There is also a great grand-son, David, who is waiting for the chance to be able to play with his great grandfather.

Now 86 years old, at times Don Felipe Urrutia seems tired, melancholy and as though he is lost in thought. Perhaps he is reflecting on the seeds he has sown during the lifelong pilgrimage he made for Nicaraguan popular campesino music.

His skilled hands trained by decades of hard and intricate work in so many different trades, together with his indisputable musical genius were the perfect combination to capture a part of the musical history of Nicaragua, a history which, without his work, would surely now be lost.

These works created by our ancestors must surely be considered a valid tool for teaching our chil-dren about the love for our country. Will our sons and daughters grow up without understanding what a polka or a waltz means and how to dance to it? Will we let the history of the women and men who, with the strength of their humble hands created the Nicaraguan cultural identity be for-gotten forever?

The strength of our present is fed by the vitality of our past, and this album is a way of getting in touch with that past, it helps us discover a little of the national identity we have been cut off from today in so many ways. This album is part of an effort to recognize and preserve the amazing work of the men and women who have helped to create our national identity.