Cuban composer Moisés Simón Rodríguez (1889-1945) was known professionally as Moisés Simons. He showed prodigious musical talent from an early, becoming a church organist at age 9 and pursuing composition studies at 15. In his adult years, he started his own jazz band, studied the history of Cuban music, and was a proponent for Afro-Cuban composers. He spent much of the 1930s and 40s in France and Spain, and died in Madrid at age 55. His work encompassed popular hits and classical compositions, including several zarzuelas. He is featured at Wikipedia, Cubaplus, and Discogs.
Simons’s most popular and enduring work has been El Manisero (The Peanut Vendor), which he wrote for a dance band in the 1920s. The lyrics imitate the cries of a Cuban street vendor trying to sell peanuts (“maní!”). It was first recorded in 1927 by vocalist Rita Montaner:
It rose to fame in the United States after the release of this 1930 recording by Don Azpiazú and his Havana Casino Orchestra, with a vocal by Antonio Machín. Both the recording and its sheet music sold over a million copies. This set off a “rumba craze” in the USA, despite the song’s proper classification as a son-pregón based on its rhythmic (son) and lyrical (pregón) content:
Stan Kenton brought the song back to the charts in this 1947 instrumental version:
The definitive concert band arrangement is John Moss’s delightful grade 3 version:
This arrangement is available from J. W. Pepper. For more on the song, read the Wikipedia article. And search YouTube – there are literally hundreds of versions! Here’s one bonus version: it inspired an experimental animation in 1933: