Nueva canción centres on Andean folk instruments such as the quena and charango together with acoustic guitar, carrying social and political messages. Spare, unadorned accompaniment and a sincere, conversational vocal are at its core. Built on themes of land, poverty, dignity and solidarity, it keeps a plainness that sets it apart from commercial pop.

In the 1960s, Violeta Parra's collecting and re-creation of Chilean folk songs became the wellspring, and Víctor Jara and the group Quilapayún tied the music to movements for social change to form 'nueva canción chilena'. It spread as a cultural movement supporting Salvador Allende's Popular Unity government, and reached across Latin America through figures such as Argentina's Mercedes Sosa.

Nueva canción rewards close attention to lyric and voice. Víctor Jara's 'Te Recuerdo Amanda' (1968) is five minutes of Spanish narration about his lover Amanda meeting him at the factory gate during a strike, with only guitar and background harmony. That stripped, undecorated form is the movement's sonic centre. Violeta Parra's 'Gracias a la Vida' (1966), written just before her suicide, stacks ten blocks of gratitude for life; her deliberately raw voice reads as unpolished on purpose. Mercedes Sosa (Argentina) took the same form pan-Latin.

Start with Violeta Parra's 'Gracias a la Vida' (1966), then Víctor Jara's 'Te Recuerdo Amanda' (1968) with the political history in mind, then Mercedes Sosa's 'Alfonsina y el Mar' (1969) for the pan-Latin extension. Jara's posthumous 'Manifiesto' (1974) is his final testament — 'I sing because I am Víctor Jara' — and reads as an act of self-affirmation from the edge of death.

Violeta Parra took her own life on 5 February 1967 at the age of 49. She was also a folk-song ethnographer whose recorded field archive (held by the Fundación Violeta Parra in Santiago) remains the most important source for Chilean folk. Víctor Jara was executed with over 40 gunshot wounds on 16 September 1973 in Santiago's Estadio Chile (renamed Estadio Víctor Jara after the return of democracy). In 2018 the Chilean Supreme Court convicted eight former military officers of his murder. Every 16 September, a free memorial concert is held at Estadio Víctor Jara.