Jimbo wrote:
My junior high school music teacher exposed us to a lot of music by playing records from his own collection. That's when I heard Yma Sumac for the first time. He told us about the Inca princess story, but she was really "Amy Camus" from Brooklyn.
I've heard that for years too, but Yma's Wikipedia article makes me wonder, especially the New York Times piece:
Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo was born on September 13, 1922, in Ichocán, Cajamarca, Peru. While one of her "official" websites says that the "official date" of her birth is September 10, the date on a different "official" website is given as September 13, 1922 (according to her personal assistant, who claimed to have seen her birth certificate). Other dates mentioned in her various biographies range from 1921 to 1929. Some sources claim that she was not born in Ichocán, but in a nearby village, or possibly in Lima, and that her family owned a ranch in Ichocán where she spent most of her early life.
Stories published in the 1950s claimed that she was an Incan princess, directly descended from Atahualpa. Her New York Times obituary reported that, "The largest and most persistent fabrication about Ms. Sumac was that she was actually a housewife from Brooklyn named Amy Camus, her name spelled backward. The fact is that the government of Peru in 1946 formally supported her claim to be descended from Atahualpa, the last Incan emperor."
