Cucurrucucú Paloma

Lola Beltrán got her start by refusing to stay behind a typewriter. She had moved from Sinaloa to Mexico City with her mother and found work as a secretary at the radio station XEW, where she kept pestering the staff to let her sing. When they finally did, listeners were so taken that within a year she had her own show. At XEW she met the songwriter Tomás Méndez, who began writing songs for her. Méndez wrote Cucurrucucú Paloma in 1954, a huapango whose title copies the call of the mourning dove that echoes through the refrain, in a lyric about lovesickness. Pedro Infante sang it first on screen, in the 1955 comedy Escuela de vagabundos, and Harry Belafonte made the first record of it in 1956. But it was Beltrán who claimed it. In 1965 the song gave its title to a film by Miguel Delgado in which she starred as a character named Paloma Méndez, and her version became the one the world associated with her name, alongside Paloma Negra. Known as Lola la Grande, she went on to sing for Charles de Gaulle, Tito and Leonid Brezhnev, among other leaders. The dove kept flying long after. Caetano Veloso sang it as a hushed art song in Pedro Almodóvar's Talk to Her in 2002, and it has turned up in films from Happy Together to Moonlight. Singers from Nana Mouskouri and Joan Baez to Natalia Lafourcade have recorded it, and in 2019 the tenor Juan Diego Flórez sang it at La Scala, accompanying himself on guitar.