Give the People Their Due
| "Give the People Their Due" | |
| Single by Marketa Piaget and Teodoro Belén | |
|---|---|
| Released | III.1755 AN |
| Recorded | I-II.1755 AN |
| Studio | Phoenix Studios, Punta Santiago |
| Genre |
|
| Length | 5:12 |
| Label | Discos del Pueblo |
| Songwriter(s) |
|
| Producer(s) | Teodoro Belén |
"Give the People Their Due" is a Cibolan Son soul song written by Teodoro Belén and Marketa Piaget and performed by the two as a duet, released as a single on Discos del Pueblo in III.1755 AN. Written while the Alliance for a Just Nouvelle Alexandrie (AJNA) sat in opposition after its defeat at the 1754 general election, the song sets a plainspoken demand for dignity and a fair share against a slow-building arrangement that fuses Belén's gospel keyboard with Piaget's raw contralto.
The single sold modestly on release and grew into a standard of the New Alexandrian protest and labor repertoire over the following years. AJNA adopted it as the anthem of its 1759 general election campaign, whose slogan "A Fair Deal for Every Region" it echoed, and it was sung at the celebrations when the Federal Accord brought the alliance into national government for the first time in I.1760 AN. The song is closely tied to that rise: written when AJNA was out of power and demoralized, it became the music of its first turn in office.
Background
AJNA lost ground at the 1754 general election, falling from 265 seats to 219 and remaining in opposition to the Federal Humanist Party government. In the days after the result, the alliance's largest party was thrown into an internal crisis, La Carta Muerta ("the dead letter"), a challenge to the leadership of Marcos Ferreira Gonçalves that collapsed within two days. The alliance's platform, the People's Deal released in 1751 AN, remained its program, but with AJNA out of power and quarreling the mood in its cultural circles was one of exhaustion rather than defiance.
Teodoro Belén, a Cibolan Son keyboardist, singer, and producer from Puerto Carrillo, had grown up in the Movement of the Most Holy Nazarene Church, a Black Alexandrian Nazarene movement built around gospel worship and a theology of social justice and economic equality, in which his father was an ordained minister and precentor. Belén carried the movement's gospel phrasing into his secular music throughout his career. He later said he wrote the first draft of "Give the People Their Due" not as a campaign number but as "a hymn for people who were tired of being told to wait", for a movement that had set its promises down in the People's Deal and then lost the election that would have delivered them.
Belén brought the song to Marketa Piaget, the Aldurian soul singer whose years working as a corrections officer in Punta Santiago had given her a public reputation as a voice of ordinary people. Piaget reworked Belén's second verse, sharpened its language, and took joint writing credit. The two recorded the song across two sessions at Phoenix Studios in Punta Santiago in early 1755 AN, backed by a small band and a four-voice gospel chorus. Piaget and Belén came from the alliance's two rival regional wings: she was Aldurian, he Santanderian, and its Aldurian base had grown estranged from the Santanderian leadership in the aftermath of La Carta Muerta.
Composition and lyrics
"Give the People Their Due" is built on the Black Alexandrian and Martino foundations of Cibolan Son, but it leans harder toward soul and gospel than most records in the genre. It opens with an unaccompanied gospel piano figure from Belén before bass, tres, and a soft clave pattern enter beneath him. Belén takes the first verse in a restrained tenor; Piaget answers in the second with the rougher, fuller delivery that became the song's signature. The two trade the chorus before it opens out, in the last two minutes, into a call-and-response coro over a repeated vamp, a structure that draws on both the consciente tradition of socially engaged New Alexandrian song and the call-and-response of Piaget's own Aldurian soul.
The lyric is deliberately unspecific about party or program. It never names AJNA, the People's Deal, or any politician; its demand is framed in the older language of what is owed to those who work. The bilingual refrain, alternating Martino and Common Tongue, states the theme directly:
| Martino | Common Tongue |
|---|---|
| No pedimos favores, pedimos lo justo | We are not asking for favors, we are asking for what is fair |
| al pueblo lo suyo, al pueblo su día | to the people what is theirs, to the people their day |
| lo que se nos debe, con la frente en alto | what we are owed, with our heads held high |
| y la mañana que tanto esperamos | and the morning we have waited so long for |
The English hook, "give the people their due", is repeated over the closing coro with mounting intensity, and it is this section, rather than the verses, that audiences came to sing back at performances.
Release and reception
Discos del Pueblo released the single in III.1755 AN with little promotion, on the same label that had carried Héctor Colón y La Verdad's protest hit "El Milagro". It reached the lower half of the national chart and did better on regional Cibolan Son and soul stations than on mainstream pop radio. An early review praised Piaget's vocal as "the finest thing she has recorded" while judging the song itself "a fine sermon in search of a congregation."
That congregation arrived slowly. Community choirs, union gatherings, and church socials took up the chorus over 1756 AN and 1757 AN, and the song circulated well beyond its original sales through live performance. By 1758 AN it was a fixture of the protest and labor-movement songbook, and a live recording of Piaget performing it at a benefit at Solidarity House marked its passage from chart single to movement song.
Association with the Alliance for a Just Nouvelle Alexandrie
The song's identification with AJNA began with its audiences rather than its organizers. Rally crowds had been singing the chorus at AJNA events for two years before the party's organizers cleared "Give the People Their Due" as the anthem of the 1759 general election campaign. Its refrain fit the campaign slogan, "A Fair Deal for Every Region", and its deep red single sleeve was close enough to AJNA's own color that campaign designers leaned into the resemblance.
Both Piaget and Belén performed the song at AJNA's closing rally before the 1759 general election, at which the alliance recovered strongly, winning 260 seats. When the Federal Accord was concluded and the government of Premier Marcos Ferreira Gonçalves took office in I.1760 AN, the first time AJNA had held national government,[1] crowds outside the Cortes Federales sang the chorus late into the night.
Not all of the response was celebratory. Figures on the New Alexandrian left objected that a demand for justice had been turned into a governing party's theme music, and Belén said he was uneasy at hearing the song used as applause, repeating that he had written it "for the people, not for a podium." AJNA's opponents treated its ubiquity as evidence of the alliance's preference for sentiment over substance.
Legacy
"Give the People Their Due" became a lasting part of the New Alexandrian protest and labor songbook and the record most closely identified with Marketa Piaget. It is still sung at labor and community events with no party attached, as its writers intended, and has been covered by Cibolan Son, Boriqueña, and gospel artists. Its closing coro has served as a template for later socially engaged New Alexandrian records, in the tradition of protest singles such as "El Milagro" and the diaspora anthem "This Is Oportia". It later received a Golden Lyre Award nomination for Song of the Year.
For Teodoro Belén the song marked the shift from session and production work to a performing career of his own, built on the fusion of gospel keyboard and Cibolan Son that defined the record. Piaget closed her concerts with it for the rest of her career, and audiences sang the last chorus back to her.
Personnel
- Marketa Piaget - lead vocals (verse 2, chorus)
- Teodoro Belén - lead vocals (verse 1, chorus), piano, organ, production, arrangement
- Session musicians and gospel chorus, Phoenix Studios, Punta Santiago
Charts
| Chart (1755 AN) | Peak position |
|---|---|
 Nouvelle Alexandrie national singles chart |
34 |
| Nouvelle Alexandrie Cibolan Son / soul chart |
6 |
See also
- Alliance for a Just Nouvelle Alexandrie
- La Carta Muerta
- People's Deal
- Cibolan Son
- El Milagro
- This Is Oportia
- Music of Nouvelle Alexandrie
