The Rebellious Instrument That Gave Latin Music Its Swing

Ran-kan-kan: Long before I could name the source of my excitement, my body responded to the strident signature of Latin dance music. The cowbell strikes like a drum but rings like a horn, the high pitch piercing through salsa’s dense thicket of overlapping patterns. Just when I feel myself drifting from the dance-floor herd, the cowbell summons me back to the rhythm’s raw nerve. Musicians call this function el amarre, from the Spanish amarrar — to fasten, to moor, to seal the deal. A paradox, maybe, that the instrument that brings all the others in line should incite the most euphoric feelings of freedom. I’m already sweating through my silk, so why resist the cowbell’s erotic revelation? When the fever reaches a certain pitch, complexity must give way to relentless repetition — one just-right note, catechized precisely like a prayer. Eso es.Just like that.

Prayer, I learned recently, might be the right metaphor: The cowbell we know today is a direct descendant of instruments that spread through West Africa with the early iron-making technology of the Bantu migrations, and that continue to structure the diaspora’s ritual music, from the double-mouthed agogô of Yoruba bembé ceremonies to the triangular ekón of the secret brotherhood known as Abakuá. Like a god, the bell lays down our shared timeline. The sharp attack puts you in your place — enter here, act now — amid the din of drums and dancers. The job of the bell, I’ve been told, is to stay steady.

Maybe that’s how these timelines survived the apocalyptic chaos of the Middle Passage. When diverse captives converged on the Caribbean, they sought out substitutes for the instruments they no longer had the freedom to craft. In Puerto Rico, they fashioned bomba drums from rum barrels; in Cuba, they turned the humble wooden crate, used to pack salt cod, into the cajón, whose special resonance later found a place in Spanish flamenco. Soon enough, free people of color gained access to forges for smithing bells from scratch, so I sometimes wonder if it was not only necessity but sheer virtuosity that compelled musicians to play most anything: hoe blades, machetes, paint cans and, yes, ranchland cowbells, struck with the handles of decapitated hammers.

In New York City, the improvisations continued: Fania’s Johnny Pacheco stalked the carts in Central Park to steal the copper cowbells hanging from the horses’ necks. Eddie Palmieri, salsa’s founding father, told me how the drummer Manny Oquendo would take his cracked cowbell to a body shop for repair: “What is it with the cowbell?” the welder, used to mending fenders, finally asked. “Well,” Oquendo grunted, “that’s what gives the swing to the band.” By the 1950s, Latin music had become big business, so it’s no surprise the cowbell was perfected and mass-produced right here in the Bronx, by a Puerto Rican auto mechanic named Calixto Rivera: first in his apartment, then, after noise complaints, in a workshop behind Yankee Stadium. If you don’t make the cowbell by hand, Rivera evvel told The Times, “it doesn’t go coo-coo — it goes blegh-blegh.”