Iconic Mexican singer Chavela Vargas, known for her mastery of the sad and sultry bolero has died aged 93.
I was never afraid of anything because I never hurt anyone... I was always an old drunk
“Here ends my story that started from nothing,” read one message that appeared on the Costa Rica-born star’s Twitter account moments after her death at a hospital in the southern Mexican city of Cuernavaca.
According to the post-mortum Tweets, Ms Vargas left “like the greats: with her (signature) shaman medallion and her red” poncho.
During her stay of just over a week in intensive care after returning from a trip to Spain to promote her album La Luna Grande, the artist asked for her shamanic medallion, a gift from the Huichol indigenous people, who called her a shaman.
The Huichol believe that among other spiritual gifts, shamans can transcend death.
“I’m not going to die, because I am a shaman and we do not die, we transcend,” Ms Vargas said. That night, a group of fans came to the hospital to serenade her.
Ms Vargas rose to fame flouting the Roman Catholic country’s preconceptions of what it meant to be a female singer: singing lusty “ranchera” songs while wearing men’s clothes, carrying a pistol, drinking heavily and smoking cigars.
Though she refused to change the pronouns in love songs about women as some audiences expected, many of her versions of passionate Mexican folk songs are considered definitive.
Born in San Joaquin de Flores, Costa Rica, on April 17, 1919, Ms Vargas immigrated to Mexico at 14. She sang in the streets as a teenager, then ventured into a professional singing career well in her 30s.
“I was never afraid of anything because I never hurt anyone,” Ms Vargas told the audience at a Mexico City tribute concert last June. “I was always an old drunk.”
Ms Vargas recorded 80 albums, becoming a major figure in Mexico City’s artistic explosion of the mid-20th century.
She was a friend and a frequent house guest of Mexican painters Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and was close to Spanish writer Federico Garcia Lorca.
Along the way she was honoured as a “distinguished citizen” of Mexico City and was given Spain’s Grand Cross of Isabella the Catholic.
She appeared in the 2002 film Frida, about her old friend, singing the eerie song La Llorona, or The Crier, in a hoarse but haunting voice.
“I don’t think there is a stage big enough in this world for Chavela,” wrote the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, who featured her music in many of his films.
Though her liaisons with women were known throughout her life, Ms Vargas did not publicly come out as a lesbian until publishing her autobiography, If You Want To Know About My Past, at 81.
“What hurt was not being homosexual, but what they throw it in my face as if it were the plague,” she wrote.