La Llorona

The "La Llorona" that Ángela Aguilar made her breakout vehicle is a centuries-old piece of Mexican folk mythology — the weeping woman who wanders, grieving and searching — and her youthful voice brings an uncanny poignancy to the material. At the time of her earliest performances of it she was barely in her teens, and that quality of a young voice carrying ancient sorrow gave the recordings an eerie authenticity that older interpreters sometimes miss. The arrangement is spare: guitarrón, vihuela, guitar, the occasional violin, nothing softening the emotional directness of the melody. Her intonation is clean and controlled, her phrasing unhurried, trusting the melody to carry its own weight. Culturally this song exists at the intersection of pre-colonial and colonial Mexico, encoded with indigenous grief about loss of land, of children, of identity. It should be heard quietly, alone, when the weight of something unnameable settles in.