Me Voy Gitana

Remedios Amaya is one of Gypsy flamenco's most uncompromising voices — untrained in any formal sense, rooted in the oral tradition of the Triana neighborhood of Seville, capable of emotional intensities that more polished singers avoid because they cannot control what they might release. "Me Voy Gitana" — I Am Leaving, Gypsy Woman — is a bulerías, the fastest and most technically demanding of flamenco's palos, and Amaya rides it with the terrifying ease of someone for whom this rhythm is not learned but inherited. Her voice in the high register has a piercing, slightly abrasive quality that cuts through the guitar and palmas without effort, while her lower phrases land with an intimacy that the setting's ferocity makes all the more startling. The production is raw by design — this music loses something when cleaned up, needs the slight roughness of recorded live performance, the sound of real hands on real skin and wood. She achieved brief pan-European fame representing Spain in the 1983 Eurovision Song Contest with this song and finished last; the story says everything necessary about the contest and nothing about the music. What remains is a pure artifact of something ancient and alive, with no interest in your approval.