walking upstream…
Jesús Virlán Báez García was born July 28, 1997, in El Tajito, Guasave, Sinaloa, but the town that made him, he says, was San Luis Río Colorado, Sonora — eight years in, as he put it, 'ahí fue donde empezó todo, donde nació Virlán como artista.' His mother taught him his first chords at thirteen, after years of filling school notebooks with rhymes instead of notes. The self-written 'Y Cambió Mi Suerte' (2016) crossed him onto US and Mexican charts, and by 2020 Sony Music México had signed him for 'Híbrido' (2021), whose title track — Virlán himself playing a horned demon in the video — he calls the genre's first diss corrido, part of the guitar-forward wave that also carried Ariel Camacho and Natanael Cano.
In August 2023, Miguel Montoya — guitarist half of the Sinaloan duo nicknamed "Los Migueles," whose paired 12-string guitars helped invent the modern sierreño sound in the 1980s — traveled to Los Mochis to record an original of his own, "El Corrido de los Grandes," with Virlán taking the lead vocal. "Es un gran honor para mí poder sacar esta canción junto al señorón Miguel Montoya," Virlán told Sony Music at the session. The pairing wasn't incidental: this is one of the two guitar-forward duos he names directly as the reason he built his sound on strings rather than banda horns or a norteño accordion.
listen forOn "Sonora y Sus Ojos Negros," listen for how Miguel y Miguel weave two acoustic guitars into a single conversational line — one holding rhythm, the other answering in a higher register — under close, unison-leaning harmony vocals. "El Corrido de los Grandes" puts that exact interplay in the same room as its source: Montoya's own guitar answers Virlán's lead vocal, the newer recording built on the same call-and-response the duo worked out decades earlier.
Long before he picked up a guitar, Virlán's earliest musical memory was riding out to his godparents' ranch near Navojoa, Sonora, for summer and Christmas breaks. "Me acuerdo de escuchar a Los Alegres de la Sierra, son de mis primeros recuerdos," he told The Cultura Media in 2023 — "mi música tiene un ADN conformado por esa música sierreña." The Sinaloan group, formed in 1995 and later a Billboard Latin Music Award winner for "De Rodillas Te Pido," supplied the childhood soundtrack he still names as shaping his instrumental choices.
listen for"De Rodillas Te Pido" rides on the accordion-and-guitar sierreño blend that carried Sinaloan romantic corridos through the 2000s, the vocal melody floating over an unhurried backing. Virlán's "Lluvia En Tus Pestañas" keeps that same patient romantic pacing and plainspoken delivery but drops the accordion entirely, leaving just guitars — the sierreño "DNA" he names, filtered through the guitar-only style he built his career on.
Asked why he built his sound on guitars instead of the accordion and horns that dominate norteño, Virlán didn't hesitate: "elegimos las guitarras porque nos gustaba el estilo de música de 'Los Migueles', de 'Bertín & Lalo', un estilo muy bonito de música de campo," he told the outlet El Botón in 2022. Bertín y Lalo — brothers Bertín and Teodardo "Lalo" Gómez García, a corrido dueto from Atoyac, Guerrero recording since the early 1970s — built a catalog of roughly 500 songs on exactly that formula: a story, two voices, and little else behind them.
listen for"Claudio Bahena," the corrido that launched Bertín y Lalo, strips its narrative down to two voices trading lines over a single guitar figure — no horns, no accordion, just the story carrying the arrangement. Virlán's "9 Balas" works from the same blueprint: a first-person account delivered plainly, acoustic guitar picking out the rhythm underneath rather than a full band — the bare, guitar-forward corrido he credits this dueto with modeling.