When Israel Houghton and his band, Israel & New Breed, released the album Feels Like Home, Vol. 1 in 2021, one track had fans asking for more: “Coritos Medley.” The eight-minute song, featuring a series of linked praise choruses, captured Spanish-speaking listeners, who immediately recognized a style and practice their faith communities have long treasured.
The enthusiastic response to “Coritos Medley” prompted Houghton and his wife, Adrienne Houghton, to consider producing a full album of coritos—short, easy-to-learn praise choruses. Israel is a seven-time Grammy winner and veteran Christian recording artist; his music fuses gospel, jazz, and Latin American influences. Adrienne Houghton (née Bailon) is a recording artist and entertainer who started her career as a member of the pop group 3LW and a lead cast member of the Disney film The Cheetah Girls.
Both Houghtons sang coritos as children—Adrienne in her Hispanic Pentecostal congregation and Israel in his multiethnic church in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Both of them want to see more Spanish-speaking churches embrace the musical tradition today.
Coritos are ecumenical and transnational, sung by both Catholic and Protestant congregations and appearing across the Spanish-speaking diaspora. The history of the corito is complicated, obscured by the fact that the music predates modern copyright systems. Passed down through marginalized communities, the genre has often been carried to new places by displaced groups and immigrants.
“Coritos are simple tunes with repetitive words that people sing by heart,” said Rosa Cándida Ramírez, associate pastor of spiritual formation at La Fuente Ministries in Pasadena, California. “For Latina Christians, coritos are the footprints of faith of our spiritual foremothers and forefathers. They are the songs of the diaspora.”
The coritos tradition is generally vernacular; most worshipers learn the songs aurally, without musical notation or written lyrics. (Recently, though, a hymnal from GIA publishing produced notated versions of some widely known coritos.) In practice, the songs are often arranged in medleys called cadenas, or chains. Musicians and congregations create novel blends of choruses, linked together by musical transitions and sometimes connected by theological themes.
Coritos have generally fallen out of fashion with Latino Protestants, who increasingly use contemporary worship music produced in the US, the UK, and Australia. But Ramírez said this isn’t the first time in recent memory that an artist has sought to breathe new life into them; Marcos Witt recorded and helped repopularize some coritos in the 1990s. More recently, the popular Guatemalan group Miel San Marcos included a medley of coritos on their 2023 album, Evangelio.
Israel and Adrienne Houghton spoke with CT about Coritos, Vol. 1, their personal experiences with coritos, and their hopes for the music they are contributing to the repertoire of the global church. Their responses have been edited for clarity and length.
There might not be a simple definition of this varied, widely used genre, but can you give us a little explainer? What is a corito?
Israel Houghton: A corito is no different than a well-known chorus, in evangelical speak. Think about “Amazing Grace.” These are little one- or two-section songs—maybe a verse and a chorus. They carry so much meaning; they have so much nostalgia and memory attached to them.
As we’ve recorded these coritos, we’re finding out in real time how connective they are, even for people who don’t speak Spanish. They hear a corito and say, “I don’t know what you’re saying, but I want to be a part of it. I want to sing it. I want to dance to it.”
Adrienne Houghton: Growing up in the Hispanic Pentecostal church, we put these songs into medleys so that each one would connect to the next.
Israel: It’s musical Jenga.
Adrienne: Exactly. That sort of medley creating is a really special aspect of these coritos. Like Israel said, they are nostalgic. People have told us, “My grandmother used to sing this song to me before I went to bed.” During the process of putting the album together, we made a list of songs my family and other church members knew. Someone would sing me a voice note and send it over, like, “Oh, remember this one?”
Is Coritos, Vol. 1 primarily recordings of these older coritos, or did you also write some originals?
Israel: There are four original songs. The rest of them are so old that they’re in the public domain now.
Adrienne: They’re so old that we don’t know who wrote them. They were written by a congregation, then passed around. And the odd thing about them is that although a lot of the songs I grew up singing were brought from Puerto Rico to New York, they were also sung in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Ecuador, and Colombia. How did these songs even get there? We don’t know.
Israel: It really has felt like we are stewards of this tradition. We didn’t want to create something that felt tossed together. You know the difference between walking into a restaurant and tasting something that was microwaved in the back versus somebody’s mama making it.
Among Spanish-speaking Christians both in the US and in Latin America, have coritos been continuously included in worship? Or have they fallen out of use in recent decades? Praise choruses were popular in American churches in the ’80s and ’90s, but they went out of style in the mid-2000s as contemporary worship music evolved. Is there a similar story here?
Adrienne: This project is absolutely helping to revive the coritos tradition. It had kind of disappeared. People weren’t singing them anymore; they would have been considered passé.
Israel: It’s like Extreme Home Makeover in the best way. We’re taking these antiques and going, “Oh my gosh, I haven’t seen one of these in years! Imagine if we polished it up and got the greatest musicians in the world and honored these songs.”
The energy of these coritos is so celebratory and exuberant. One of the complaints I often hear from worship leaders is that they have a hard time finding energetic, upbeat, joyful songs. It’s not really the dominant vibe right now when it comes to popular contemporary worship music. What do you think we lose when we don’t have songs like this in regular rotation?
Israel: I can’t wait to answer this question. I think we have enough heaviness and bad news in the world—minor keys, so to speak. I need these infusions of joy and simplicity. The more I walk with God, the more I require simplicity.
We’re four and a half years removed from a global pandemic, and now we’re wondering, “Can we get our legs back? Can we have some lighthearted moments?”
Adrienne: God deserves celebratory praise. He deserves a whole fiesta of worship, and that’s what we were able to do with this project.
On our first clip of the song “Coritos de Fuego,” the main comment was, “I wanna be in that room.” I want to be in a room like that, where people are worshiping God with their whole hearts and dancing and singing.
Adrienne, you mentioned growing up singing these songs, and it sounds as if coritos are part of a vernacular, word-of-mouth tradition. That strikes me as an inclusive approach to worship for children. Could you talk more about the formative power of these songs in childhood?
Adrienne: I joke with my mom that I know the Bible melodically, because of songs. I’ve been in services where a preacher is about to read the Word of God and I can finish the Scripture because I know a song with that verse in it. When we sing these songs, we are literally singing the Word of God. When children are memorizing these songs, they are learning the Word of God.
We have a two-year-old son who can sing almost all of “Coritos de Fuego” [a song from the album], and I now have a son who will forever know those verses. Those things stay with you. I sometimes deal with a fear of flying. I’ve been on airplanes, and songs will come back to me in scary moments.
It’s such an honor and privilege to give these songs to the next generation because I know the impact they have had on my life. When you plant those seeds in your children, they never depart from them.
Where Worship Doesn’t Translate
Many primarily English-speaking Christians do not sing translated worship songs; they’re used to having their own music translated for other people. Do you think you’re going to translate some of these songs into English?
Israel: I went into this project knowing I wanted to write a song or two that, when we translate it into English, it’s just as effective. Then when someone asks, “Where did this song come from?” we can say, “It’s a song from Latin America.” We have some attempts at that on the record, like the song “Digno.”
That would be the ultimate bridge right there—to be connecting people across languages and generations.
