Who is the singer sumac

People like Angelyne — these self-invented people. Whether that made Sumac a real-deal royal or someone who could even claim indigenous identity is unknown. She likely spoke some Quechua, one of the principal indigenous languages of the Andes, as did most people who then lived in the highlands. But she was a fair-skinned mestiza, a mix of Spanish and Indian. She and my mother were very close friends.

My mom also has green eyes. So they were these two pretty Andean women with green eyes. But Sumac emerged at a time when Peru was paying more attention to its indigenous roots. Recordings were made, radio programs launched and festivals held. Sumac and Vivanco became well known in Peru and had successful engagements in the important Latin American media centers of Argentina and Mexico. Hollywood took this nice girl who wanted to be a folk singer, dressed her up and said she was a princess.

And she acted like it. The trio nonetheless developed a following. One local television appearance sparked the interest of a talent agent who helped Sumac land a deal at Capitol. The record deal necessitated a move to Southern California, and by the late s the couple were comfortably ensconced in tony Cheviot Hills on L. But in Los Angeles, you had the film industry and everything that entailed.

Her whole transformation, it does smack of Hollywood. It was very cinematic. The tarted-up Inca princess identity was not something that Sumac was initially wild about. But once Sumac re-invented herself, forced like many performers to create a new sound in the name of success, she embraced the role with haughty grandeur. In it, Sumac gives a pair of surreal mountain-top performances at Machu Picchu. Sumac was way too royal for that. Sumac was channeling a concocted notion of Inca identity as an invented Inca princess.

A fiction born in Peru adds another layer of fiction in Hollywood, and from that fiction rises Yma Sumac. What could be more Los Angeles? She was never out of character. Around the same time, Sumac also appeared — in sleek shades and plumed hat — in one of l. Eyeworks co-founder Gai Gherardi, who recalls a petite woman of monarchical bearing with a taste for bananas. In her late years, Sumac played regular cabaret engagements at the now-defunct Cinegrill and the Vine St.

Her cabaret shows brought out a crowd that author Tom Lang, who worked at Vine St. A group of tiny Peruvians, impeccably dressed, at one table. Bill Murray and his entourage, up front. Sumac was an uneven performer in those years — with good nights, as well as terrible ones, her voice cracking, her temper foul.

The show at Vine St. There are other L. The singer, who was sold to American audiences as a wonder from a strange land, was, in the end, just another grand dame living on the Westside she later moved to West Hollywood , who might enjoy an afternoon of listening to Eurodance with her assistant. Ultimately, it was in L. He frequently played a Native American in the movies and told the press he was Cree and Cherokee. In another part of the building lies Constance Talmadge, the silent-screen star.

But Los Angeles, a mestizo city and land of the faux historic, requires a ruler. Why not Sumac? Today, almost years after the birth, the late Peruvian singer and her otherworldly voice could be on the verge of another revival thanks to a Madrid-based record label which hopes to introduce new generations of listeners to some of the greatest female Latin American singers of the second half of the 20th century.

They also gave rise to the urban myth that she was actually a woman from Brooklyn called Amy Camus who had simply reversed the letters of her name. She and Vivanco toured the world in the s and s, and Sumac appeared in the film Secret of the Incas, in which Charlton Heston plays a roguish treasure-seeker who wears a brown leather jacket and a fedora hat. She was a pioneer when it came to spreading Latin American culture around the world from the late s — she laid the first stone.

Carmen McEvoy , who teaches Latin American history at the University of the South-Sewanee and has spent the past few years writing a biography of Sumac and Vivanco, offers a slightly more nuanced appraisal. We were also making super cool music in the , s and s. This article is more than 9 months old.