Los Hermanos Lovo, a family band based in northern Virginia, plays traditional Chanchona music. Smithsonian Folkways traveled to Guatajiagua, El Salvador, home of the Love patriarch. There, they met with family members who also play chanchona, and visited a radio station famous for promoting this regional music.

The low–slung mountains and rural villages of eastern El Salvador are home to one of the most joyous yet little-known regional musics of Latin America. Called chanchona—“big pig,” the local name for the string bass—it is music made by and for country people. When the family group Los Hermanos Lovo fled the civil war of the 1980s and 1990s, they took their homegrown music with them to Washington, D.C. There, the lively sounds of the cumbia are as much an invitation to dance as a way of creating a sense of “home” and cultural solidarity.

This album is part of the Smithsonian Folkways Tradiciones/Traditions series of Latino music albums, produced with support by the Smithsonian Latino Center.