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Coronavirus Corridos: Tales of the Pandemic
The coronavirus pandemic has all the makings of a corrido, the historic narrative ballad of Mexico. The public health crisis has brought fear, death, tragedy, and social conflict – all of which have...
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Artist Biography: Margarita La Chaparrita, Mother, Singer, Survivor
The recording career of Margarita La Chaparrita was modest and short-lived but remarkable, nevertheless. After struggling through a series of traumatic relationships and raising seven...
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Store Stickers: Windows on a Lost Way of Life
A true record collector is more than a mere music aficionado. Collectors are also part historians, part archivists, part treasure hunters, and part detectives. They look at records like archeological...
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Artist Biography: Rumel Fuentes - Corridos, Chicano Politics, and the Birth...
This year marked the 50th anniversary of the National Chicano Moratorium, the massive anti-war march in East Los Angeles held on August 29, 1970. The milestone inspired major media retrospectives on...
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A Single, Overlooked Recording Opens a World of Music
The story of this Eydie Gorme recording starts with my friend Harvey Averne, a musician, producer, and label executive from New York. We first met in the mid-1970s when he was running Coco Records,...
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"Partners" LP by Flaco Jimenez: Audio Treasure for the Ages
The music business is bloated with award shows that serve as mass marketing events, meant to magnify artist exposure and, hopefully, boost record sales. But there are certain honors that have a...
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History Revisited: Los Tigres del Norte at Folsom Prison
In late 2019, Los Tigres del Norte released a live album that marked a milestone in their storied career. The two-CD set captured the band’s historic performance at Folsom State Prison, staged to...
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The Eternal Bolero, Part 1: Love Songs that Endure for Decades
The bolero is one of the top song styles from Latin America, as ubiquitous as the tango, the mambo, or the bossa nova. Among the genres identified in the Frontera Collection, the romantic bolero ranks...
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The Eternal Bolero, Part 2: Songs I Learned in College
In the first installment of my three-part series on the bolero, I offered an overview of the romantic genre and highlighted songs I had learned from my parents as a child. In Part 2, I’ve...
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The Eternal Bolero, Part 3: Staying Alive
“As the end of the millennium drew near, the lyrical bolero seemed like a thing of the past. Yet, the bolero is not a passing fad, like disco or La Macarena, nor a style stuck in history, like ragtime...
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