The soundtrack of our childhood

Marlore recording the original Canticuentos (c. 1975)

A woman born far from Colombia created the children's songs that shaped generations. Marian "Marlore" Anwandter Johnson, the creator of Canticuentos, passed away one week ago, on June 10th, 2026, at 92 years young. Her death was confirmed by Codiscos, the Colombian record label that published her work for 50+ years.

Somewhere between the mountain air, the animals she had never seen before, and the children she was raising in a country that was entirely new to her, the chilean woman began to write songs — which would become the best-selling children's album in the history of Colombia. In 2025, 50 years after its debut, the reimagined version won the Latin Grammy for Best Children's Album.

She came from somewhere else — and that was the point

Marlore Anwandter was born in Santiago de Chile in 1934. She grew up literally under a piano: her mother was a concert pianist, a student of the celebrated Chilean musician Claudio Arrau, and when she gave lessons at home, Marlore would crawl underneath the instrument and listen. When she married and her children arrived, she left her journalism career behind and opened a small music school at home — just a few children, basic solfège, rhythm, song. She started writing melodies for what she needed to teach.

By the early 1970s, she had already released two records in Chile under the name Minimonos Musicales — small cassettes of children's songs that found a local following. Then history intervened: Pinochet's coup began in late 1973, and the country Marlore knew started to disappear. With her husband Bryan Johnson's work as a pretext and the dictatorship as the real reason, the family left Chile and moved to Missouri, in the United States.

It was Bryan's next work transfer that brought them to Bogotá in 1973. Their time there was meant to be permanent — until the daughter of their employer was kidnapped the day before the contracts were signed. The family was devastated, they stayed only a year before being relocated back to Missouri.

What a year in Colombia does to a songwriter

Marlore had never seen an iguana. She had never seen guadua bamboo, or the particular green of Colombia's páramos, or the way donkeys moved through Bogotá's mountain neighborhoods in the morning, loaded with firewood. She had never encountered a snake that moved through lowland heat with such complete self-possession. None of these animals existed in Chile. She looked at all of it and heard melodies. She traveled very little during that year as her husband was always moving for work, and her children were in school. But what she didn't see in person, she imagined.

"I always say Colombia gave me the Canticuentos," she recalled in a 2020 interview with Radio Nacional de Colombia, "because everywhere I looked, I saw a little story waiting to be set to music. I was just the one writing it down — the stenographer, you could say, of what Colombia gave me."

The first song she wrote was "Los Burritos de Bogotá" — The Little Donkeys of Bogotá — and it arrived as a gift. Her neighbors had invited the family to spend Christmas with them, and Marlore had nothing to bring. She remembered a song she had already written about the donkeys that came down their street each morning carrying firewood, and she sang it to them instead. It was the only present she had. She wrote 30 songs in that single year. Then she packed them in her suitcase and went back to Missouri.

The kitchen where it all began

Canticuentos was born in Marlore's kitchen in Missouri, 1975. She hung a microphone from the kitchen light — the kind of old, heavy microphone that required something to hold it up — gathered her three children (Miguel, Cristina, and Carol) around the table along with the neighboring Rico family's kids, who had been their friends in Bogotá, and recorded everything onto a cassette tape. The voices are small. The arrangements are spare. The stories are alive.

From that kitchen came the characters that would define Colombian childhood for the next fifty years: the fierce pirate and his parrot, the little train moving through the sugar cane valley, the witch who had lost her broomstick, the Japanese mouse, the iguana in her wool ruana drinking coffee by the Magdalena River, the snake who dreamed of buying shoes despite having no feet — because, as Marlore explained, "all of us want what we don't have."

She sent the cassette to a contact she had in Medellín, as she later put it, "like throwing a bottle into the sea." The contact passed it to Codiscos, Colombia's most important record label. Codiscos said yes immediately and flew Marlore back to Colombia with her children and the Rico kids to record it professionally.

The studio sessions were intense. Recording technology in 1975 meant everything had to be done in a single take — no editing, no patches. When someone made a mistake, they started the whole song over. One song was recorded 19 times. Another, at least 23.

"A swarm of furious bees would descend on whoever had made the mistake," Marlore recalled with a laugh. The children adapted with complete professionalism.

The album was released in September 1975, with its iconic red cover — the little train, the witch, the animals. It spread, in Marlore's words, "like gunpowder." She went back to Missouri, but she had no idea what she had left behind.

What she made

To understand the scale of what Canticuentos became, you need a point of reference: imagine if a single album had soundtracked the early childhood of virtually every person in a country for fifty consecutive years. That is what happened in Colombia. The record became the best-selling children's album in Colombian history — not of its decade, not of its era, but of the entire recorded history of the country.

But the numbers don't capture what it meant. Canticuentos was present in the cassette players of the 1970s and 80s, in the CD collections of the 90s, in the streaming libraries of the 2010s. Parents who grew up with it played it for their children. Those children played it for theirs. The songs became part of the emotional vocabulary of a country — the kind of music that doesn't just remind you of childhood, but returns you to it completely, in one note.

For international readers, the closest analog might be something like the original Sesame Street soundtrack, or the songs of Raffi in North America — music that is genuinely good enough to outlive its pedagogical purpose and become art in its own right. But even that comparison falls short, because Canticuentos wasn't backed by a television show or a media empire. It spread because children loved it, and because parents recognized in it something true.

Some of the most beloved songs (translated to English by Toy Cantando, Colombia's first children's music publishing and record label:

• La Bruja Loca — The Crazy Witch. A witch who has lost her broomstick and cannot remember where she left it. Funny, slightly chaotic, enormously singable. Probably the most beloved track on the original album.

• La Serpiente de Tierra Caliente — The Hot-Country Snake. A snake who moves through Colombia's lowland heat with complete self-possession — and who dreams of going to a shoe store despite having no feet, and to the hairdresser despite having no hair. Marlore's explanation: "All of us want what we don't have."

• La Iguana y el Perezoso — The Iguana and the Sloth. Born from a real moment: Marlore saw a child trying to sell an iguana by the side of the road, thought the animal must be cold, and went home and wrote a song. The iguana in the song wears a wool ruana and combs her mane beside the Magdalena River. Marlore had never seen an iguana before Colombia.

• El Pájaro Carpintero — The Woodpecker. Improvised on a hiking trail when the family was exhausted climbing a hill. Marlore made up a marching song about a woodpecker to give everyone energy. They reached the top. She went home and wrote it down.

• La Ronda de las Vocales — The Vowel Round. The song that taught millions of Colombian children the five Spanish vowels. Deceptively simple. Structurally perfect. Still used in classrooms today.

A teacher first, an artist always

One of the qualities that made Marlore's work exceptional — and that explains its extraordinary longevity — is that she never separated the pedagogical from the artistic. Most children's music falls into one of two traps: it either condescends to children, producing something almost sappy and forgettable, or it prioritizes education so rigidly that it forgets to be joyful. Marlore somehow avoided both.

Her songs teach — vowels, animal names, Colombian geography, even values and manners — but they do it through characters so vivid and stories so complete that the learning becomes incidental. A child singing along to "El Trencito Cañero," following a little train through the sugar cane valley, is absorbing the rhythm of rural Colombia and the patience of a long, winding journey — all at once, without noticing. She once said that the cuento — the story — was always the most important thing.

"The story is what captures what you're telling," she explained. "The song comes after." 

That instinct, from a woman who had studied journalism before she ever studied music formally, is exactly what gives the Canticuentos their staying power. They are, first and foremost, good stories.

The legacy she got to witness

In the early days of the pandemic, Colombian musician and producer Gustavo Gordillo — bassist of the legendary 90s Bogotá band Poligamia — pulled out his old copy of Canticuentos to play for his daughters, who were three and four years old.

"Just like my mother used to play it for me, I played it for them," he said. "Three generations had passed through this record. Almost four. And I thought: how would this sound if it were produced today?"

That question became an obsession, and then a mission, and then one of the most ambitious musical projects in recent Colombian history. Gordillo spent years navigating a labyrinth of copyright holders — the rights to the recordings belonged to Codiscos, the compositional rights to a separate publisher — before someone gave him Marlore's email address. He sent her a message, and included a photo of his daughters with the old record. She responded that it would be a dream to remake it. He booked a flight to Kansas City, rented a car, and drove four hours on unpaved roads through Missouri until he arrived at her front door.

"She received me like I was her grandson," he said. "This became something more like family than anything else."

She was 85 years old at the time, and said yes to everything. What followed was years of recording, with Carlos Vives taking on the role of musical director, and approximately 80 Colombian artists joining the project — among them Andrea Echeverri, Andrés Cepeda, Nidia Góngora, and Velo de Oza. Artists who weren't invited called to ask why they hadn't been included; not in bad faith, but rather because everyone wanted to be a part of it. The goal, as Gordillo described it, was to make a record that sounded like all of Colombia:

"From the Amazon to San Andrés, from the Pacific to the Llanos."

10 songs made the final cut for Los Nuevos Canticuentos, among them "El Negro Cirilo" — the tale of a tailor who travels the Amazon on his shivering alligator. It's a song whose title leans on a racial descriptor in a way few children's songs would today, but to be honest, there's nothing in the song itself that reads as offensive. Instead, it's a gentle, generous little story, the same as any other Canticuento. It was re-recorded for the new album exactly as it always was — no rewritten lyrics, no edits — which says less about the song's politics than about how unremarkable that title felt to the people who grew up with it.

Los Nuevos Canticuentos: para los niños de ayer, de hoy y de siempre won the Latin Grammy 2025 for Best Children's Album. Marlore was 91 years old, but she was present at the ceremony, as alive and joyful as one could be. Gordillo, reflecting on what the project had meant, put it simply: "She taught us our vowels. She taught us to dance. She taught us to have fun with music. The least we could do was make sure this lasted another 50 years." At the launch event in Bogotá's Gaira, Marlore took the microphone and said:

"I arrived in this country because of my husband's work, and I am happy to say that I became Colombia's prisoner. I didn't make the Canticuentos — it was Colombia that gave them to me."

What stays

Marlore Anwandter passed away at 92 years old. She had lived long enough to see her kitchen cassette become a cultural institution, to hold a Diamond Record in her hands, to hear her songs reborn in the voices of a new generation, and to watch a room full of Latin music's most important artists stand and honor the work she had done.

She was an outsider who became essential. A Chilean woman who fled a dictatorship, arrived in a country she didn't know, stayed for one year, and left over 60 songs behind — songs that proceeded to outlive every expectation, every format, every era of recorded music in the country they described.

She did not know, for many years, what she had left. "Nobody knew me," she said once. "They knew the music. But not me." That may have been the most Colombian thing about her: the work traveled everywhere and the person who made it stayed quietly in Missouri, content.

Every classroom in Colombia that plays her music is playing history and love written in a kitchen in Santa Ana Oriental, in a year Marlore was only supposed to be passing through. That is the only kind of legacy that lasts.

Frontlight Magazine sends its deepest condolences to her family, her collaborators at Codiscos, and everyone who grew up with her songs.