Covid-19 hit the tango scene really hard, and we’re all hopefully on the road to recovery. I spent some of my time listening to and editing music. A few days ago, I heard a video online by Pink Martini that really intrigued me. It featured a Japanese children’s song with the lovely title ‘Kuroneko no Tango’ (English: Tango of the Black Cat). I remembered that I had the song somewhere in my collection, and after a bit of searching, I found it, but it was in Danish and unmistakably a children’s song. This piqued my curiosity, and I spent several hours researching the background of this song.
While it was very fashionable on the internet a few years ago to present pictures and videos of cats – now this page also features cat content – Meow!
I had some difficulty finding sources about this title online, so all my background information comes from a single article [1]. The story began in 1969 when Vincenza Pastorelli – then four years old – sang the song ‘Volevo una gatto nero’ with considerable success in a song contest (she reached 3rd place in the Zecchino d’Oro). The song was written by Francesco and Mario Pagano, Armando Soricillo, and Francesco Saverio Maresca as a European tango in chorus/verse format.
In the same year, the song was recorded in Japan by six-year-old Osamu Minagawa under the title ‘Kuroneko no Tango’ (黒ネコのタンゴ) and immediately reached number 1 in the charts.
Here are the two original versions:
Meanwhile, there have been numerous cover versions, including the version by Pink Martini that caught my eye, the one by Trapps, and the Danish version, sung here by Monique (the latter unmistakably the children’s song version):
The Wikipedia article cited at the beginning drew my attention to the Hebrew version ‘Kulam Halkhu LaJambo’ by Tzipi Shavit from 1987. All that’s missing now is the Korean version by Turbo, ‘Black Cat Nero’:
And here, finally, is the cat content:
Literature