A Song Written for an Orisha, Not About One

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Babalu is not a song that mentions a Santeria deity in passing. It is written as direct address, a singer standing before an image of the orisha Babalu-Aye and asking what is owed him now that a rite has been invoked. Margarita Lecuona wrote the song and it was first published in the United States in 1939, though it had already been recorded the year before in Cuba by Orquesta Casino de la Playa. The lyrics call for seventeen candles arranged in the shape of a cross, plus a cigar and a glass of aguardiente, the ordinary elements of Babalu-Aye's public devotional offerings, described in the same plain, practical language a worshipper might actually use.

Babalu-Aye is closely associated in Cuban devotion with the Catholic Saint Lazarus, a healer and afflicter of disease whose public veneration has never been treated as closed the way initiation into the Santeria priesthood is. Nothing in the song touches that closed material; its subject from the first line to the last is an open, public relationship between a devotee and a deity who is sung to, not secretly invoked. Miguelito Valdes made the song his own through the 1940s, performed widely enough across the Caribbean and Latin America that he became known simply as Mr. Babalu, years before most of its later English speaking audience ever heard it.