José Alfredo Jiménez
In a Mexico City restaurant called La Sirena around 1948, a waiter approached the table of the singer Miguel Aceves Mejía and said, "I admire you greatly, I really like how you sing" — then admitted he wrote songs of his own, though "I don't play anything... I don't know the key, I don't know music." That waiter was José Alfredo Jiménez. Within weeks Aceves Mejía had him singing for arranger Rubén Fuentes and Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán, and inside two months he was famous. Jiménez never learned an instrument or musical notation; he built a catalog of more than a thousand songs — among them "El Rey" and "Ella" — by whistling melodies for others to transcribe. Orphaned young in Dolores Hidalgo, Guanajuato, he had shined shoes and sold shoes door to door before that chance supper remade Mexican ranchera in his own plainspoken image.
we haven’t charted José Alfredo Jiménez yet
this stretch of the river isn’t mapped. we trace the watershed one artist at a time — and we’re always heading further upstream.