Chalino Sánchez
Rosalino 'Chalino' Sánchez Félix grew up in poverty in rural Sinaloa and began writing corridos in prison and in exile in Los Angeles, composing his first ballad in 1984 after his brother's murder. Untrained and often out of tune by his own admission, he sang other people's true, violent stories in a flat Sinaloan cadence that became the template for narcocorrido, and he was posthumously crowned 'The King of Corrido' after being murdered in 1992.
Chalino's early influences included Los Tigres del Norte's corrido records, and their crime-ballad storytelling gave him a model for turning true, often violent local stories into song before he pushed the style rawer and more personal.
listen forLos Tigres' 'Contrabando y Traición' and Chalino's own 'Recordando a Armando Sánchez' both build a whole scene of crime and consequence out of plain, unhurried verses.
Chalino recorded corridos from the catalog of Paulino Vargas, the songwriter widely credited with pioneering the narcocorrido's sympathetic outlaw narrator, alongside his own original material.
listen forPaulino Vargas's 'Carga Ladeada,' one of the corrido's early sympathetic drug-runner narratives, anticipates the matter-of-fact outlaw voice Chalino uses throughout 'El Crimen de Culiacán.'
Antonio Aguilar's grand ranchera corridos were part of the corrido tradition Chalino grew up hearing, giving him the genre's basic vocabulary of horses, honor, and violence even as Chalino stripped away Aguilar's charro polish.
listen forAntonio Aguilar's orchestrated 'Caballo Prieto Azabache' and Chalino's bare-bones 'Nieves de Enero' sit at opposite ends of the same corrido tradition — one theatrical, one stripped down to a voice and a story.