La Llorona

The story

"La Llorona" ("The Weeping Woman") is a Mexican folk song that takes its name and its shadow from the legend of La Llorona. In the legend she is a ghost, rather like a banshee, who drowned her children, haunts the lover who left her, and weeps for her dead children; to see her foretells death. Folklorists of Mesoamerica have suggested that she is a survival of an old Mesoamerican myth of the earth that eats the dead.

The song's origins are obscure, and it exists in many versions, with scores of different verses heard on recordings. Around 1941 the composer Andres Henestrosa mentioned hearing it in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. He popularised the song and may have added to its existing verses. Its sad tone keeps it from being counted a love song, and across Latin America it is associated with the Day of the Dead. It is classed as Mexican folklore for its roots in the legend and as ranchera for its heavy use of the guitar.

Chavela Vargas recorded it in the 1950s, keeping the guitar at the centre in the ranchera manner but stripping away the trumpets and other arrangements to make a sound of her own. During the folk-song revival of the 1960s in the United States, the guitarist Jerry Silverman published a duet arrangement in The Folksinger's Guitar Guide (1964) and recorded it in Spanish. The Spanish singer Raphael recorded it in the mid-1960s, the Azerbaijani singer Rashid Beibutov in the 1960s, and Joan Baez on her album Gracias a la Vida in 1974; later versions include those of Eugenia León, Lila Downs (1999), Natalia Lafourcade and Ángela Aguilar (both 2018), and Dulce Pontes in Portuguese (2006).

In the film Frida (2002), about Frida Kahlo, Chavela Vargas, who had been a close friend and frequent guest of Kahlo and Diego Rivera, appears as a ghost and sings the song while Kahlo remembers her past. The Disney-Pixar film Coco (2017) features it as a duet sung at a sunrise concert. The Guatemalan film La Llorona (2019), by Jayro Bustamante, closes with a new arrangement whose almost entirely different words leave the legend aside and turn to the genocide of the Maya-Ixil people of the Guatemalan highlands during that country's civil war, from the 1960s to the 1980s.

What it says

A lament addressed to a weeping woman, mixing love with grief and the nearness of death. One reading hears a man bound by pity to a woman who weeps whenever he thinks of leaving, until he longs for death to end his suffering; another hears a mourner singing to a wife who has died or been abandoned. Its mood is slow, sorrowful and haunted.

The words

The words of this song are in the public domain, but no free, reliable edition of them has been found yet to import them from, and the Institute never types a song’s words from memory. “What it says” above tells what they are about.