walking upstream…
Natanael Cano
sourcesRemezcla — We Spoke with Corrido Tumbado Wunderkind Natanael Cano About His Success & the Future of Corridos (Cano naming Camacho, Olivas, García as influences) · AllMusic — Natanael Cano biography by Thom Jurek (childhood, self-taught guitar from Camacho videos, corridos tumbados definition) · FreeMusicas — Conoce la historia y biografía de Alfredo Olivas (Olivas's early career and El Patroncito) · Wikipedia — Natanael Cano (birth date, Dan Sanchez / "Soy el Diablo" origin)
Natanael Cano was born in Hermosillo, Sonora, in 2001, and taught himself piano at thirteen by picking out Maná's "Rayando el Sol" from YouTube — then guitar, from Ariel Camacho videos, because his family couldn't afford lessons. He dropped out of school at sixteen, was uploading his own songs by seventeen, and at eighteen was signed to the Los Angeles label Rancho Humilde. His breakthrough came from grafting rap cadence and trap drums onto the requinto-driven corrido, a hybrid the songwriter Dan Sanchez first proposed for "Soy el Diablo," Cano's 2017 debut of the style he'd call corridos tumbados. A 2019 Bad Bunny remix carried it worldwide. Cano didn't invent the corrido; he gave it a different rhythm section, and a genre followed him into it.
the sound in question
2017
Soy el DiabloNatanael Cano
walk the tributaries ↓
Ariel Camacho2010s · Sierreño / Corrido / Regional Mexican
Cano was thirteen when he first picked up a guitar, learning not from a teacher — his family couldn't afford one — but from Ariel Camacho videos on YouTube. Camacho died in a car crash in 2015, and Cano never got the meeting he wanted. "He's the only person I've ever cried for in my life," he said in the Prime Video documentary Gen Mex. "I admired him, and I still admire him. I never got to meet him." Years later, visibly moved discussing him on Mexican television, he added: "Only when you die do they value you."
listen: upstream & heresource: Rolling Stone — Natanael Cano Shares Live Covers Album Honoring Ariel Camacho, the Icon He Never Got to Meet (Cano's quotes on Camacho; the 2025 live cover album) ↗
2014
El KarmaAriel Camacho
2025
El Karma (Live)Natanael Cano
listen forCamacho's 2014 "El Karma" rides twin requintos and a tololoche bass under a plainspoken, unhurried vocal — the arrangement that defined sierreño's stripped-down sound. On his 2025 tribute album, Cano doesn't so much cover the song as step into it: he's backed by Los Plebes del Rancho, Camacho's actual band, playing the same requinto figures live at a Guadalajara palenque, crowd audible between verses. The riff hasn't changed in a decade; only the singer standing in front of it has.
Alfredito Olivas2010s · Norteño / Sierreño / Regional Mexican
Asked by Remezcla to name the artists who shaped him, Cano didn't hedge: "My influences are Ariel Camacho, Alfredito Olivas and Virlán García. Those are people who I listened to." Olivas, a Sonoran accordionist and songwriter from Ciudad Obregón, wrote his first corrido at nine and had signed to the label Fonovisa by sixteen; his 2010 album El Patroncito, praised for the sharpness of its lyrics, made him one of the form's most disciplined young storytellers before Cano was even old enough to drive.
listen: upstream & here
2010
El PatroncitoAlfredito Olivas
2018
El de los Lentes GucciNatanael Cano
listen forOlivas's title track narrates a young man's rise to power in tight, unadorned verses, the accordion answering the vocal line without ever crowding it. Cano's breakout single swaps that accordion for requinto and adds a stuttering trap hi-hat, but keeps the same first-person, matter-of-fact accounting: a kid cataloguing what he's got and how he got it. The accordion is gone; the narrator's unhurried self-assurance isn't.
Virlán García2010s–20s · Sierreño / Corrido / Regional Mexicano
Virlán García was still an independent artist — a rhythm guitarist fronting a stripped trio with a twelve-string lead player and a tuba — when his 2016 album Y Cambió Mi Suerte broke him beyond regional Mexican radio. Cano named him alongside Camacho and Olivas as one of three artists he grew up listening to. García's arrangement, close harmonies over unhurried tempos and a confessional first-person voice, offered a contemporary, still-uncompromised version of the sierreño sound just as Cano himself was starting to write.
listen: upstream & heresource: AllMusic — Virlán García biography (instrumentation, debut single, Y Cambió Mi Suerte) ↗
2016
Y Cambió Mi SuerteVirlán García
2019
Amor TumbadoNatanael Cano
listen forGarcía's title track leans on requinto and rhythm guitar carrying an intimate, almost whispered melody, with tuba the only percussion in the room. Cano's 2019 hit "Amor Tumbado" keeps that same string-trio foundation nearly intact — the requinto figure sits right where García's does — but stacks trap drums and Auto-Tuned ad-libs underneath it, the clearest evidence of a singer keeping one foot in the acoustic tradition while reaching for something newer.