The Rough Voice of Tenderness: Chavela Vargas, Who Came Out at 81
A red wool poncho. A single guitar. A blue house. A mountain that answers back.
Tonight we travel to Mexico to meet Chavela Vargas: born in the coffee hills of Costa Rica in 1919, a street singer in Mexico City, a guest in Frida Kahlo's blue house, and the woman who took ranchera away from the trumpets and sang it low and slow, in trousers, to women, without changing a word.
Along the way: coffee flowers on a green hillside, sawdust and lamplight at the Tenampa, torchlit divers at Acapulco, fifteen years of silence, a small cabaret in Coyoacán where she came back from the dead, Almodóvar…
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