What 1978 song by Rubén Blades and Willie Colón tells a story about a gangster?

The 1978 Rubén Blades and Willie Colón song about a gangster is “Pedro Navaja.”

Blades wrote and performed the salsa narrative with Colón, and the song appeared on their landmark 1978 album Siembra. It follows a street criminal and a woman through a fatal confrontation in New York, using dark humor and unexpected reversals to tell a compact urban story.

The title character’s name is a pun: navaja means “folding knife” in Spanish. The song was inspired by “Mack the Knife,” the English-language adaptation of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s 1928 song “Mack the Messer.”

The recording is sometimes dated 1979 because the single was released then, but it was recorded in 1978 and belongs to the 1978 Siembra collaboration. That release-date distinction does not change the song’s canonical title. Blades later revisited the character in “Sorpresas,” a sequel that complicates the original ending.