The traditional music of the Puerto Rican jíbaro or peasant evolved from the music of the soldiers, farmers, artisans and enslaved Africans that took root on the island during the early 17th century. These early settlers hailed from the provinces of Andalusia and Extremadura in southern Spain, as well as the Canary Islands and the western regions of Africa.
 

From Spain came the traditional ballads, décimas and other song genres, such as the seguidillo, the aguinaldo, the copla and other vocal traditions, many of Moorish descent of great antiquity. The Canary Islanders brought their tiny tiples and the Africans brought their memories of syncopated rhythms, their stringed instruments made from fig trees and their drums. Eventually, some of these settlers moved to the mountainous center of the Island and in those isolated mountains their music developed unique character-istics. Together, they made up the first Puerto Ricans.
 
From those same mountains came the first "cantaores", humble people who remembered traditional songs and sang them during festivals.Peasant poets emerged who improvised their poems as they sang. The background music was usually the melodies of the various seises they knew—about a hundred variations of seises being counted so far. Among them are the slow seis mapeyé, the seis andino and the seis celines and among the fastest, the danceable seis chorreao and seis zapatéalo. The seis con décima was also very popular, its slow speed giving the troubadour the opportunity to highlight his art of lyrical improvisation. The décima forced the troubadour to sing in verses with lines of eight syllables, which rhymed in a specific way. And the singing was done to the accompaniment of a cuatro, a güiro and a guitar or another native instrument, such as the tiple and the bordenúa--both almost disappeared today. This kind of group was known as a Jíbara Orchestra and so it has remained for centuriet.