Lola Beltrán

El Rosario

María Lucila Beltrán Ruiz was born on 7 March in El Rosario, Sinaloa, one of seven children. Carmelite nuns taught her at school, and she sang at Mass and in the church choir, whose director played her the ballads of Pedro Infante and Agustín Lara. Her daughter has said she never had a singing lesson. She trained as a secretary, entered singing contests on the local station XERJL, and then left for Mexico City.

There she signed to Peerless. Her first single was José Alfredo Jiménez's Cuando el destino, backed with Por un beso, and through the early 1950s she cut a run of 78s, among them Gorrioncillo pecho amarillo and Desafío. In time she became known as Lola la Grande.

Tomás Méndez and the screen

She told the songwriter Tomás Méndez that he would be her compositor de cabecera, her house writer. He wrote Cucurrucucú paloma and Tres días for her, and in 1954 the huapango opened her first album, the ten-inch Cucurrucucú paloma on Peerless. It became her best-known song.

Films followed from 1953, mostly in musical numbers. She took her first lead in El tesoro de la muerte, appeared alongside María Félix, Pedro Armendáriz and Katy Jurado in La bandida (1962), and played Paloma Méndez in Cucurrucucú paloma (1965), a film named after her song. In 1973 she starred in the telenovela Mi rival. She married the bullfighter and actor Alfredo Leal, and their daughter, María Elena Leal Beltrán, also became a singer.

RCA and GAS

In 1969 she moved to RCA Víctor, starting with Mejor que nunca and an album of José Alfredo Jiménez songs. From 1972 she recorded for Discos GAS, later absorbed by Orfeón: an album of Cornelio Reyna songs, La grande de la canción ranchera (1974), and Que te vaya bonito (1975), whose title track was another Jiménez song, Que te vaya bonito. On television she hosted Noches tapatías in 1976 and El estudio de Lola Beltrán in 1982.

Bellas Artes

Until December 1976 the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City was a hall for classical music. That month she became the first ranchera singer to perform there, introduced by Carlos Monsiváis, who called her Nuestra Señora, and Carlos Fuentes, with the Mariachi Vargas and a symphony orchestra behind her. GAS issued the shows as the three-record El Palacio de las Bellas Artes abre sus puertas a la Reyna de la Canción Ranchera. She went back well over a dozen times, the last for her 40th anniversary concert in 1994, shown on Televisa.

Abroad she became the first Latin American woman to sing at the Olympia in Paris, where Sophia Loren came onstage to congratulate her, and a live album followed in 1980. She also sang at Carnegie Hall, Madison Square Garden and Tchaikovsky Hall in Moscow. The All Music Guide's Michael Erlewine called her one of the greatest woman singers in the pop-ranchera style. In 1982 she received the Medalla Artística del Extranjero, and she was also given the Virginia Fábregas medal for 25 years on stage.

Last songs and legacy

Her final album, Las tres señoras (1996), paired her with Lucha Villa and Amalia Mendoza under the production of Juan Gabriel. She died in Mexico City in 1996. Her body lay in state at Bellas Artes while eight mariachi groups played, and she was buried in El Rosario.

Linda Ronstadt ranked her with Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf, and Fuentes said her voice belonged to the soundtrack of memory. Pedro Almodóvar opened Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (1988) with her Soy infeliz. El Rosario has a museum in her name and a festival every March, there are statues of her there, in Mazatlán and in Plaza Garibaldi, and Google marked her birthday with a Doodle in 2024.