The day he was going to die, Arnulfo Briceño got up, as always, before five in the morning. His wife, Oliva Vera, prepared him a succulent breakfast with chocolate and scrambled eggs. She packed his suitcase the night before, upon returning from the town near Bogotá where his mother-in-law lived, while Arnulfo directed the Mass for Choirs in G Major which he composed for the visit of John Paul II to Colombia in 1986. Senator Ernesto Samper asked him to perform it at the mass he would offer in the Veinte de Julio church to give thanks for having survived an attack three months earlier that was not even directed at he. After breakfast, he said goodbye to Oliva and her three youngest children with a quick kiss and hurried out. He was methodical, organized, he didn’t like to improvise; He wanted to arrive on time to take flight HK 2486 of the Aerotaca airline to Tame, in the department of Arauca, before arriving there he would make a stopover in Yopal, the capital of Casanare.
Oliva remembers that that Saturday, the day before the trip, her husband made many recommendations to her in the tone of someone who senses that they are living their last day. She asked him to talk about something else, but he insisted. Six months earlier she had traveled to Villa Sucre, the township near Cúcuta, capital of Norte de Santander, where she was born. Her son Arnulfo Jr. believes he was picking up after her. When she turned 50, her family held a party. Briceño was obsessed with the idea that he would not live more than five decades and warned his nine children that he would not leave them money, but education. “But the most important thing is my name: that when someone knows they are my children, that opens doors for them,” he said. He was hyperactive, nervous and temperamental; Strong character, but friendly, charismatic, joking and talkative. He attributed his fate to divine intervention. He lived with strange eagerness: “I have no time to waste,” he often repeated. He wanted to know and experience it all. Squeeze every last drop out of life.
He was born poor in a family of 10 siblings. His parents combined carpentry with farm work and he worked since he was a child to earn money, but he wanted to study. He was very intelligent and disciplined. No one in his family was into music, but he had an aptitude for singing and learned to play guitar. He coincided in a contest with a child prodigy of the accordion, his name was Alfredo Gutiérrez. A producer decided to join them and create Los niños vallenatos, a group for which Arnulfo composed his first song, Light of my life. They were a success, and trips and concerts abounded. When he left the group as a teenager, he continued working as a musician, singer and announcer to survive and help his parents, and he fell further and further behind in his studies.
He met Oliva in Cúcuta when she was 16 years old and he was 17. They lived “a beautiful, passionate and crazy love,” says she, who at 85 years old still talks about him like a teenager in love. His parents didn’t love Arnulfo because he didn’t have anything to die on, but he fell asleep in class because he stayed up late working and got up early to study. She liked that he was tender and familiar, honest and hard-working. He always neat, impeccable; He had beautiful hands and a warm, manly, captivating voice. They got married at four in the morning so that no one would see that she didn’t have a proper wedding dress because they had no money. She became pregnant and stopped working. He finished high school at the age of 23, when they already had two children, and won a scholarship to study Law at the Universidad Libre, in Bogotá, where they traveled with two more children and with the hope of having a better life.
Arnulfo met the music producer Marco Rayo, creator of the group Los Vlamers, where he replaced the guitarist Gentil Montaña. They made several national and international tours and that’s how he met the singer Zulma Gómez, mother of his children Ricardo and Catalina, who is a singer and speech therapist. They lived together in Mexico and had a relationship for several years, which ended later. The Briceños are a musical family: they all studied music since they were children and some combine it with other professions. Arnulfo, now an adult and accomplished as an artist, studied Music at the Pedagogical University with Rafael, his eldest son, to write his own songs without depending on arrangers and be more the owner of his work. He mastered many genres and composed ballads, boleros, tropical music, among others, and directed choirs in public and private entities. On the occasion of the 450th anniversary of the founding of Bogotá, he composed a hymn that exalted it as a cultural city that never became the official one.
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Briceño had a rebellious and independent spirit. He embraced left-wing ideas, although he was not a member of any party, he was respectful of institutions and had political friends of different tendencies. He composed widely known songs in which there is no criticism or reflection on violence or poverty, such as Who are you kidding grandpa, What will happen to my people and Flower Maria, which was vetoed due to the military’s annoyance, although it never stopped playing on the radio. She became a notable voice in Colombian social song, she loved her country and her pain hurt her: “I stand up from the people and sing their pains. “I am a rebel because I am a people, a deceived people.” She was in Cuba and Costa Rica, and sang with Silvio Rodríguez. As a lawyer he was also brilliant: he wrote his arguments with elegant, profound and poetic prose. He defended the rights of Colombian artists and worked hard to achieve a legal framework that protected them, but he did not succeed.
Marco Rayo annually sent an acetate with unpublished songs to compete in the Colombian Song Festival and in 1967 he offered Briceño to include that song that he often heard him hum and that ended up being called Oh, my plain. Nobody knew him, but he won. He composed it without ever having visited the eastern plains, inspired by reading The Maelstrom and in love with the epic of the tough llaneros who fought with Simón Bolívar and won independence for Colombia during the Liberation Campaign with no other weapon than their courage. The song catapulted him to fame and became the anthem of the Meta department in 1978. Briceño knew llanera music well due to the proximity between Cúcuta and the border with Venezuela. He identified with the llanero character. Physically, he could have been one due to his indigenous features: dark skin and eyes, and jet black hair. In the eighties he acted and composed the music for the film Canaguaro and the soap opera Canaguay Herd.
He was going to Tame to direct the choir that would sing the city anthem during the commemorative presentation of the 170 years of the Ruta Libertadora. It was raining heavily and the pilot of the small plane traveling from Yopal was flying over a river. He tried to rise when he found himself face to face with a hill, but he did not succeed: the aircraft crashed and broke in half. As best he could, Arnulfo crawled and got out. He climbed to the roof of the plane and helped other passengers out. Suddenly the plane exploded, a piece of the plane crossed his forehead, he lost his balance and rolled down a ravine. Some farmers took care of him and kept his belongings intact while help arrived, but bad weather prevented the arrival of rescue organizations and he did not survive. He died from the severity of the head trauma.
The news saddened Colombia. Arnulfo Briceño died at the peak of his career, although he was a simple man who did not believe in fame. He enjoyed everything that life denied him as a child and being a strict, but loving father. “I felt like a blow that left me in shock and a very deep abandonment, for a time I couldn’t cry. Something in me broke,” says his son Emmanuel, who has worked with Juanes since 2002 and won the Latin Grammy in 2023 as co-producer of his album. Daily life. Emmanuel directed, musically produced and recorded the album in his own studio Sing Plain, in which Juanes, Fonseca and Reinaldo Armas, among others, perform their arrangements of several songs composed by their father, some of them unpublished. His brother Arnulfo is the executive producer, his sister Catalina sings one of the songs, and the whole family performs. Oh, my plain. “It’s the album of my life,” she says. It has been a very emotional experience for everyone. Fifteen days after that fateful June 11, 1989, Arnulfo Briceño turned 51 years old.
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