Moraito Chico is an EXTREMELY TALENTED musician. His tone is just so powerful, so massive, with that energy, that very few guitarists have – in fact just the first few best ones – he reminds me of Niño Miguel. Moraito is a word that is written the way it is pronounced, without a silent “D”. It means “black tanned”, or in a case when used for a woman, it is “morada, while “chico” means “small”, but in this case, it is more like a “little boy”. But he is NEITHER DARK, AND NEITHER SMALL..!!! When used for female sex gender, the word “Mora”, “Morada”, or “Morena” can mean everything from having dark skin (by ethnicity, with really black skin color), to just having a “darker nuanced” hair… So, over the centuries, El Moro, or Los Moros, or Moras, through the ages – became the word for something negative, and “not clean”. The entire Spanish Royalty considered a white color skin to be beautiful, and dark color skin to be ugly. That is because they were capturing the black population from Africa, to sell them in the Americas… (both) During the middle ages, the “white” part of the Spanish population women were always walking in the shade, always picking the shaded side of the street to walk through. They were aware that their skin would go darker in the case of sun exposure, so the white part of the population was never working in the fields, which was also considered a low-class society job. As the gold started coming to Spain, from the colonized countries in South America, the whole society went through a big decadence. But that is a whole other subject, I just wanted to throw some light on the subject of the etymology and on the provenance of the word MORO. It could have a negative connotation, like the word “Moro” almost like a “nigger” in old English, but it can also be used in a positive context like: “my lovely Morena”, “darker tanned (both skin and hair) girl”…
So, Moraito Chico means something like a “little dark one”. He played with everyone. From various collaborations with other guitarists and musicians (Paco De Lucia or Tomatito)… to following almost everybody as far as the flamenco singers are concerned… In this video, he is following Jose Mercé and Isabel Pantoja, two very pure and famous flamenco artist/singers:
