One voice, one tambora, and a claim centuries in the making: “Que me devuelvan la tierra que me han quitao los de arriba”. Give me back the land that those above have taken. La Muchacha, the project of cantautora Isabel Ramírez Ocampo, opened her 2020 album Canciones Crudas with this copla, cut live in one take for Bogotá label and collective In-Correcto. This year she took it back to Manizales, her hometown, for a performance at Teatro El Escondite: Luis David Acosta Rodríguez on camera and edit, Ramírez directing herself.

The verses build like a court record. She has worked this land; the men who arrive to parcel it out have heads of gold and poison between the ribs, swallow pavement, dance on her dead. Each stanza opens with the line that closed the last, handing the charge forward until the chorus circles back to the demand itself, the tambora steady underneath.

La Muchacha began as research, Ramírez digging into the song forms of her own region, following the path Violeta Parra cut through Chilean folk song decades earlier. She calls this track “una denuncia y una posición“, sung for land she addresses as kin. Colombia’s armed conflict has driven millions of campesinos off their soil, and that dispossession has not stopped.

Listen to “Que Me Devuelvan la Tierra” HERE and get your copy of Canciones Crudas following THIS LINK