who was the first artist to record the song guantanamera i.e. first to
popularize the song in the 20th Century...

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Request for Question Clarification by efn-ga on 18 Dec 2005 00:03 PST

Hi afoot2000,

I think I can answer the part about who popularized the song, but the
artists who popularized it were not the first to record a version of
it.

Would you be interested in an answer that does not definitively answer
the part of your question about the first recording?

--efn

Pete Seeger was the first to record "Guantanamera" in North America.
He changed the title by leaving "Guajira" out of it. The lyrics are by
Hector Angulo who first sang the song in North America.

This information can be found on the site of a famous Belgian singer:
Helmut Lotti.

http://www.helmutlotti.be/Latinoeng.htm

The first couplet begins with a fragment from the Versos Sencillos,
"simple verses", a work by José Marti, who was a 19th century Cuban
poet. "I am an honest man and I come from the place where the palm
trees grow..." Hector Angulo  added a few couplets to it at the
beginning of the 1940s, basing himself on a story popular in Havana.
Twenty years later, when the same Angulo sang the song for children at
summer camp in New York, a certain Pete Seeger fell under its spell.
He took the Guajira out of the title and became the first of a long
line of famous performers. Helmut Lotti is a worthy name on a list
that includes Joan Baez, Trini Lopez, Digno Garçia, Joe Dassin, Nana
Mouskouri, Julio Iglesias, Phil Manzarena and so on.

The tune was written by Joséito Fernandez. Fernandez, was an unusual
character who worked for the Cuban radio station CMQ: he would sing
his improvised comments on the day?s event on news bulletins. It was
in doing this that he "invented" the tune for Guantanamera in 1928. It
was only recorded for the first time in 1941, under the title of "my
biography" and with the sub-title of Guajira Guantanamera.