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Gabriel Garcia Marquez will forever be remembered as a man of letters<\/strong>; a literary icon almost without equal, and the originator of the Latin American literary ‘boom’ with whom he is synonymous. However, what many people may not know is that music was as much, if not more, of a part of his life than literature.<\/strong> He once said: “Home is where your books are, they say, but for me it’s where my recordings are. I’ve got more than five thousand of them.”<\/strong> He even once admitted that he would like to have written salsa classic, Pedro Navaja<\/i>.<\/p>\n His love of music originated in his Colombian Caribbean upbringing<\/strong>, surrounded by the sounds of salsa, cumbia, and, above all, vallenato. The sound of the accordion was a strong memory of his childhood<\/strong> and his happy years spent as a youth in Aracataca, Cartagena and Barranquilla<\/strong>. In fact, when he first came up the Magdalena River to the capital, the cold air and lack of dancing made a young Garcia Marquez pine for the coast of his youth. Yet his musical taste was rich and varied<\/strong>, developed and inspired by his years living in Paris and Mexico City, and his colourful and cultural group of friends and acquaintances.<\/p>\n So here are some of the maestro’s favourite songs, in celebration of his memory.<\/strong> We can choose to mourn the great man any way we like, but I get the feeling that a few aguardientes and the vallenato of his youth<\/strong> might be one that he would have appreciated. His love of music was deep and varied<\/strong>, and his musical loves were too numerous to list here in their entirety, but here is just a sample of the music Garcia Marquez loved.<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n “More than any book, I think what opened my eyes was music, vallenato songs.”<\/i><\/p>\n Gabo often wrote and spoke of his passion for vallenato.<\/strong> This music was the sound of his youth and his family. One song he specifically mentioned was La Gota Fria<\/i>, a classic 1938 vallenato song.<\/strong> It is seen as a Colombian classic, and was originally performed, as seen in this video, by Emiliano Zuleta. Gabo proclaimed it, in a 1983 interview, to be “the perfect song.”<\/strong><\/p>\n