Yolanda Del Rio

Yolanda del Rio is a Mexican ranchera singer and film actress. Born Yolanda Jaen Lopez on May 27, 1955, in Ixmiquilpan, Hidalgo, she was the youngest of four children and modeled her singing on the golden-age ranchera vocalists Lola Beltran and Lucha Villa, studying voice as a child and recording her first album at fifteen. Her breakthrough came with La hija de nadie, issued on Arcano, an RCA subsidiary, in 1972; the record reportedly sold more than a million copies within six months of release, and by 1984 the label placed cumulative sales of the song above eighteen million copies. Other signature recordings include Valgame Dios and Una intrusa, both of which reached Billboard's Latin charts, and her success carried her onto stages across the Americas and Europe. Billed as La Gran Senora de Mexico, she has collected six gold records from RCA Victor, five Nippon music awards, and a Grammy nomination in the United States in 1984. Del Rio worked steadily in Mexican cinema as well, appearing in roughly eleven features between 1968 and 1983; the melodrama built around La hija de nadie was reported as the highest-grossing Mexican release of its year, and her filmography also includes Caminos de Michoacan (1979) and La India blanca (1982). Her delivery is characterized by a keening, melancholic phrasing that became one of the recognizable ranchera styles of the period. She has continued to record and perform into the present, touring for Mexican-American audiences in the United States with dates at rooms including the Moore Theatre and the Neptune Theatre in Seattle.

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