Chavela Vargas

Isabel Vargas Lizano was born in Costa Rica to parents who, she said, had never wanted her and were embarrassed by a daughter who dressed and behaved like a boy. She left for Mexico in her teens and sang on the streets and in bars for years before anyone paid attention. When she did begin to be known, in the 1950s, it was as something Mexico had not seen: a woman in a man\'s poncho and trousers singing rancheras, the drunken, heartbroken songs of the cantinas, in a raw voice, with a pistol in her belt and without switching the female love object to a male one.

Her first record came out in 1961, when she was 42. For a decade or so she was a fixture of Mexican nightlife, drinking with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and singing at parties. Then the drinking took over. By the late 1970s she had all but disappeared, and many assumed she was dead.

She stopped drinking in her sixties and in 1991, aged 71, returned to a small cabaret in Coyoacán. The film director Pedro Almodóvar heard her, used her songs and brought her to Spain, and she was rediscovered by a generation that had never heard of her. She played the Olympia in Paris and, at 83, Carnegie Hall. At 81 she said in public, for the first time, that she was a lesbian. She died in Cuernavaca in 2012, aged 93.