Vicente Fernández liked contact with his audience

In each concert, Vicente Fernández excited the public: “While you clap, I keep singing,” he said. People would take him at his word and clap until the show lasted four or five hours.

Chente, as he was known, liked contact with his audience. It is what those who knew him think. He was the owner of a peculiar style of singing ranchera songs, the most characteristic music of Mexico.

“He had a powerful voice that combined with another very velvety”, tells BBC Mundo Pável Granados, director of the National Sound Library.

“There is something different that Vicente Fernández put to ranchera music. Their repertoire is very broad, from the original songs of the genre to others such as the bolero ”, affirms Granados.

With his death, which occurred this Sunday at the age of 81 and was informed by his family through his official account on Instagram, the era of the great interpreters of regional Mexican music ends, a period which began with Tito Guízar in the 1930s, Pedro Infante in the following decade and continued with Jorge Negrete, Javier Solís and José Alfredo Jiménez.

In bullrings, palenques (auditoriums where cockfights are held) or theaters, he attended without hesitation to people who asked him to interpret their favorite songs.

“There are two types of singers, those who live by singing and those of us who live to sing”, He confessed in an interview with the magazine Who.

“My vice is to go on stage and listen to the applause, I don’t care about the money.”

In Mexico, singers often give two-hour concerts, often accompanied by other time-consuming artists.

Fernandez no. His shows lasted at least three hours, and perhaps that is why he is one of the singers for whom Mexicans feel the most pride.

Vicente Fernandez Gomez was born in Huentitán El Alto, at that time a rural neighborhood north of Guadalajara, Jalisco. His father wanted to build a cattle ranch but was only able to buy a few cattle that he kept in a small barn.

When he finished primary school, Chente started milking cows, because he did not want to continue studying.

But the sale of milk was insufficient and so the family followed the path of thousands of poor Jalisco residents and emigrated to Tijuana, Baja California.

In the border town with the United States, Vicente He worked as a bricklayer, painter and cabinetmaker. And he had his first audience.

The artist claimed that construction painters fought to have him as a student.

And not because of his skills with the walls and furniture, but because the teenager He sang all the time and made the working day more enjoyable.

Chente worked long enough to buy her sister Alejandra a dress to celebrate her 15th birthday.

Then he gave up painting and cement and took a job as a cashier at an uncle’s restaurant, but it didn’t last long either: the young man spent more time singing between tables than collecting money.