Susana Baca tells the story of how she discovered her passion for music. Her father was a great guitar player and singer who used to play for birthday parties in her town, so music was always in her life and in her home from a young age. When her father was out on Sunday her aunts and cousins would get together, go to the beach to cook fish for lunch, sing and play guitar. The children played together but when Susana would hear the music she would run over and join the musicians. She cites this as her beginnings in music that she will never be able to separate herself from. Her parents were terrified of her young desires to become a musician since it wasn't seen as a legitimate career where she could live and make money so they encouraged her to study teaching as her profession. She started off as a school room teacher and then later became a dance teacher. Her music required that she travel often throughout Peru and South America so she eventually decided to leave teaching and fully dedicate herself to her singing career. She then recorded María Landó, a very famous poem about a hard working woman. She had a very independent career and had to knock on many doors for people to listen to her music. She always knew in her heart that she was a good singer but none of the record labels thought that people would be interested in listening to poetry in song. One day, David Byrne heard María Landó in his Spanish class and became curious about the singer, the poem and the landó rhythm which were all new to him, and he began to further investigate Afro-Peruvian music. In this era, the rest of the world only saw Peru as indigenous people, the Andes, and Machu Picchu, and had no idea that the Afro-Peruvian population existed. Byrne wanted to share this knowledge with the rest of the world (with the release of his compilation "Afro Peruvian Classics: The Soul of Black Peru"). One of Baca's musicians called it poetic vengeance because when no record label would put out her record because she sang poetry it was precisely the poem of María Landó that opened the doors to the world for her.
