Chavela Vargas

The rough voice of tenderness

Maria Isabel Anita Carmen de Jesus Vargas Lizano was born on April 17, 1919 in San Joaquín de Flores, Heredia, Costa Rica, according to English Wikipedia; the Spanish article's infobox says Goicoechea, San José. She moved to Mexico as a teenager, at 17 by one account and 14 by another, lived there more than seventy years and took Mexican nationality. One of the first women to sing ranchera, she stripped the music to raw, guitar-driven arrangements, wore trousers, a red jorongo or charro suits, and refused to change the pronouns in love songs. Her nickname was la voz áspera de la ternura, the rough voice of tenderness. She sang on the streets for years and became a professional singer in her thirties, in artistic circles around Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Juan Rulfo and Agustín Lara, with José Alfredo Jiménez supporting her first album.

Noche Bohemia (Orfeón, 1961) and the self-titled Chavela Vargas on RCA Victor the same year, accompanied by Cuarteto Lara Foster, were her first records; the RCA album ranked 26th in a 2024 list of 600 greatest Latin American albums. She returned to the stage in 1991 at El Hábito in Coyoacán and Werner Herzog cast her in Grito de piedra that year. Manuel Arroyo brought her to Spain, reviving her career, and Pedro Almodóvar used songs she made known in his films. La Llorona was recorded in April 1993 at Musitron in Madrid (WEA, 1994, 44:08, guitarists Marcela Rodríguez and Óscar Ramos). In 1994 she sang at the Teatro Nacional in Costa Rica and at the Olympia in Paris, and in 2002 she sang "La Llorona" and "Paloma negra" in Julie Taymor's Frida. She made her Carnegie Hall debut on September 15, 2003 aged 83, urged by Almodóvar, released as En Carnegie Hall (2004).

She received the Latin Grammy lifetime achievement honor in 2007 and was named Citizen of Mexico City in 2009. La luna grande, a homage to Lorca, came out in April 2012, and her last public recital was at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid in July 2012. She died on August 5, 2012 in Cuernavaca, Morelos, aged 93, and the funeral was held on August 6 at Plaza Garibaldi. Almodóvar said that with her emphasis at the end of her songs she created a new genre that should be named after her. Remezcla and Wikipedia count more than 80 albums. The documentary Chavela (2017), directed by Catherine Gund and Daresha Kyi, premiered at the Berlinale, and Google devoted a Doodle to her on April 17, 2013.