La Llorona

Nobody knows exactly where "La Llorona" comes from. Around 1941 the composer Andrés Henestrosa said he had heard it in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and he popularised it, perhaps adding verses of his own. It draws on the legend of the weeping woman, a ghost who cries for the children she drowned, and its many verses circle mourning and cemeteries. In Latin America it is linked with the Day of the Dead. The singer who made it hers was born far from Mexico. Chavela Vargas came into the world in 1919 in San Joaquín de Flores, Costa Rica, had a hard childhood marked by her parents' divorce and polio, and left for Mexico at 17 because there was no future for a singer at home. She sang in the streets for years before turning professional, wore men's clothes, smoked cigars and sang rancheras alone with a guitar, often slowing them down to draw out their drama. She never changed the genders in her love songs. Then came the silence. A long struggle with alcohol, which she called her fifteen years in hell, drove her from the stage until she returned in 1991 at El Hábito, a bohemian club in Mexico City's Coyoacán. Her second career carried her to Europe and, at 83, to Carnegie Hall, encouraged by her admirer Pedro Almodóvar. In the film Frida she appeared singing "La Llorona", a fitting choice for a woman long rumoured to have been Frida Kahlo's lover. Her rough, tender voice turned an old lament into a song about survival.