La Llorona: A Song History
"La Llorona" ("The Weeping Woman") is a traditional Mexican song, best known in the form of a son istmeño from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in the state of Oaxaca.[1] Writing for the Library of Congress, folklorist Stephen Winick reports that the oldest printed versions he could find appeared in a Tehuantepec student publication in 1935 and a Mexican journal of popular culture in 1936.[1] Some credit the words to the poet and musician Andrés Henestrosa, an attribution Winick finds plausible given his age and his roots in the same region, but most folklorists treat the song as traditional, with no known author.[1] Its stanzas are self-contained rather than links in a continuous story, and although it borrows the name of the legendary weeping woman, the song makes no direct reference to her tale.[1][2]
José Guadalupe Posada, Cover for 'Cantares Oaxaqueños: Nueva Coleccion de Canciones Modernas para 1898', chiaroscuro engraving and letterpress in red and black ink on yellow paper, ca. 1898. An 1898 songbook cover from Oaxaca, the state where the song is best known; the songbook is not known to contain it.
Concha Michel contributed a version to Frances Toor's A Treasury of Mexican Folkways (1947).[1] In 1964 Henrietta Yurchenco recorded Pablo Castañejo singing it in Spanish and Zapotec at Juchitán, and that performance opens her Folkways album Mexico South: Traditional Songs and Dances from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (1976).[1][2] Her notes call it one of Mexico's best-loved songs and set it beside a quite different "Llorona" from Jalisco, sung by Chavela Ledesma, whose run of opening cries she traced to the tonadilla escénica, an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spanish stage form popular in Mexico.[2] Lola Beltrán, Joan Baez and Lila Downs are among its many interpreters, Chavela Vargas sang it in the film Frida (2002), and Alanna Ubach and Antonio Sol sang it in Coco (2017).[1] Ángela Aguilar, Aida Cuevas and Natalia Lafourcade performed it together at the 61st Grammy Awards in 2019.[1]
Autoharp players will find it in The Doofus - Occasional Number 4, where Neal Walters and Heidi Cerrigione, who play together in a band called The Doofus, gather eighteen favorite waltzes as sheet music; the listing stresses that these are autoharp arrangements rather than dulcimer ones.[3]
Sources
- Library of Congress, Folklife Today: "Picante Pero Sabroso: Songs of La Llorona".
- Smithsonian Folkways: "Mexico South: Traditional Songs and Dances from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec" (liner notes).
- Neal Walters and Heidi Cerrigione: "The Doofus - Occasional Number 4 - 18 Favorite Waltzes For Autoharp".
- Image: José Guadalupe Posada, Cover for 'Cantares Oaxaqueños: Nueva Coleccion de Canciones Modernas para 1898', chiaroscuro engraving and letterpress in red and black ink on yellow paper, ca. 1898. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.