Linda Ronstadt’s “La Cigarra” doesn’t begin so much as arrive—like a doorway opening onto another climate. The trumpets don’t just announce; they frame a space where grief can glow. Strings arc upward, harps flicker in the margins, and then Ronstadt steps into focus with a tone that’s both luminous and unyielding. The song is a huapango made famous in the mariachi repertoire, composed by Raymundo Pérez y Soto; in Ronstadt’s hands, it is less a cover than an act of return, a way of asserting what has always been true about her voice and where it comes from. Many sources note the piece as a huapango within traditional mariachi, and her performance honors that lineage while foregrounding the singer’s centered, unornamented authority.
Context matters here. “La Cigarra” appears on Canciones de Mi Padre, Ronstadt’s 1987 Spanish-language release that became a watershed: a platinum-selling landmark and, widely reported, the best-selling non-English album in U.S. history. The record was produced by Peter Asher and Rubén Fuentes—the latter a towering figure in mariachi arranging—and issued on Elektra/Asylum. The project formalized what Ronstadt had said for years: her roots and family culture were always intertwined with the songs of northern Mexico. On this track, the credits and the craft align perfectly; you can hear Fuentes’s orchestral sense of drama in the brass voicings and string suspensions, and you can hear Asher’s meticulous clarity in the balance, where Ronstadt’s vocal sits forward without ever crowding the ensemble.
Even if you come to “La Cigarra” without the album’s liner notes, the arrangement tells you how seriously the team takes the material. The rhythmic bed is the huapango’s heartbeat—triplet-lilted, buoyant but not hurried. Violins answer the voice with tight unison lines that blossom into harmonized sighs at cadential points. Trumpets carve melodic banners across the top register, sometimes leading into vocal entrances, sometimes leaving just enough air for a phrase to land. Guitarrón and vihuela ground the meter with a tactile, percussive push; their wood-and-string breath gives the track its lived-in warmth. You feel the room around the instruments: a cool bloom of reverb, short enough to keep the edges crisp, long enough to let a note hang like a question. None of this is grandstanding. It’s architecture—space made audible—so that when Ronstadt sings, the walls support her.
Part of the song’s power is its poetic conceit. The cicada sings on the cusp of death, a paradox that makes the voice itself a wager against silence. Pérez y Soto’s lyric—performed by many great interpreters across decades—accepts that bargain with a clear gaze. Ronstadt doesn’t over-interpret; she trims vibrato at the beginnings of lines to keep the attack clean, then releases into a wider shimmer at sustained peaks. The vowels are shaped as if sculpted on a potter’s wheel—long, spun, a little sun-warmed—and the consonants arrive as firm hinges. In her phrasing you hear restraint as a kind of courage: amplified intimacy rather than theatrical excess.
There’s a real thrill to the dynamics. Listen to the first major ascent of the melody. The strings lift like a wave rising under a boat, the trumpets crest, and Ronstadt meets them with a tone that brightens rather than hardens. This is not belt-for-belt’s-sake; it’s controlled extension, calibrated to the harmonic pressure of the moment. As she moves into the upper register, you can hear the way she curves into a pitch before she claims it—microseconds of approach that read as human breath, not studio trick.
We should place “La Cigarra” inside Ronstadt’s career arc. By 1987, she had already vaulted through country-rock, standards, and operetta, working closely with Asher and a circle of elite Los Angeles players. Canciones de Mi Padre was a pivot that felt like a homecoming more than a detour. The album reunited her with repertoire that her family cherished, and it did so with canonical collaborators from the mariachi tradition. Her public comments have often emphasized how natural this music always felt to her, and contemporary reporting noted the presence of world-class ensembles on the sessions. The result wasn’t fusion; it was fidelity.
One way to hear the track is as a study in contrasts: glamour versus grit. The glamour is in the orchestral sheen—the way the strings gild the harmonic changes, the way the trumpets flare at the skyline of the arrangement. The grit is in the rhythmic cut of the strumming and the earthy bass thump, that insistent dance-floor lift. Ronstadt stands between them, bridging with tone. She keeps the glamour honest and the grit luminous.
“Emotion without ornament is the bravest kind of singing, and on ‘La Cigarra’ Ronstadt makes bravery sound inevitable.”
That line speaks to why this performance has endured. Watch the PBS-era concert footage and you see the same poise: the traje de charro, the still shoulders, the sound that seems to open outward rather than bore inward. One senses a living conversation with the tradition—an exchange between singer and ensemble in which mutual listening is the uncredited co-producer.
It’s easy to reduce this song to its climaxes, but the quiet moments are where Ronstadt’s craft is most visible. Notice the soft landings at the ends of phrases, where she dims the intensity without losing pitch center. Or the way she allows the violins to finish a thought, leaving just a heartbeat of silence before she re-enters. The piece of music breathes; its exhale is as telling as its cry.
Instrumentally, the color palette is vivid. Trumpets often carry the melodic counter-statements, answering the voice with noble, near-heroic arcs. Violins provide both rhythmic animation—short bow strokes that flicker like sunlight on water—and lyrical tissue, those long notes that bind verses. Harp lines, if present in your chosen recording, function like a lace border, drawing attention to the edges of phrases. The plucked skeleton of the rhythm section—vihuela’s bright chop, guitarrón’s round pulse—gives the track a distinct topography. When a stray acoustic guitar appears in the spectrum, it reads as glue more than spotlight: another strand in the braid.
The arrangement’s pacing is a lesson in narrative. Early on, the ensemble gives Ronstadt wide berth. As the verses accumulate, the countermelodies grow more assertive, heralding that final ascent where voice and brass arrive together. Then the curtain pulls back ever so slightly—the fade allows the resonance to carry a little longer, like dusk after a brilliant afternoon.
Facts anchor the reverie. “La Cigarra” is credited to Raymundo Pérez y Soto, a Mexican composer with a broad catalog of popular songs, and the piece is widely described as a huapango within mariachi tradition—music that often demands agility from singers, especially in the upper register. Ronstadt’s recording—placed on the 1987 album produced by Asher and Fuentes—belongs to this river of interpretations and stands among its best-known modern versions.
I often think about how listeners meet this song in different rooms. One listener hears it on late-night radio, headlights tunneling through rain, and feels the lyric’s paradox: singing at the edge of ending. Another finds it at a family gathering, where a grandmother closes her eyes at the first trumpet call and whispers the words from memory. A third discovers it on a weekday morning, through small speakers, and simply knows that the voice they’re hearing is telling the truth.
When people talk about Ronstadt’s versatility, they sometimes frame it as genre-hopping. That description misses the point. What “La Cigarra” makes plain is that an artist can be multi-lingual and still singular—if the core values remain: exact intonation, narrative intent, a refusal to use volume as a shortcut to feeling. Ronstadt’s tone here is satin-tough; it does not fray under pressure, but it carries grain. That grain is where experience lives.
The lyric’s central image—the cicada whose song foretells death—gives the performance a metaphysical tinge. There’s acceptance, but also defiance: if singing signals the end, then sing more beautifully. Ronstadt’s reading is not morbid; it’s lucid. She lays the vowels on the line like offerings, and the ensemble ornaments the gesture without smothering it. If you’ve ever listened closely enough to hear the reverb tail after a trumpet stab, or the slight catch in the voice before a high entry, you know that the record rewards attention.
One can also situate the track in the larger cultural moment of the late 1980s, when visibility for Mexican and Mexican American music within mainstream U.S. markets was still limited. That Canciones de Mi Padre achieved wide commercial success helped broaden the frame for subsequent artists and projects. Ronstadt’s stature ensured the music entered households that might never have sought it out, and yet the treatment was anything but watered down. The recording’s faithfulness—mariachi ensembles, traditional repertoire, Spanish-language lyrics—was the point.
Technically minded listeners will appreciate how the production engineers clarity without sterility. The brass bite remains intact, the bow scrape of violins is audible in crescendos, and the bass instruments occupy a warm pocket that never muddies the midrange. If you audition the track on good home audio, the stereophonic picture blooms: violins take a modest left bias, trumpets a haloed center-right, with voice at the fulcrum. Put on studio headphones and you’ll hear the micro-dynamics—the tiny swells within a single held note—that give the performance its lifelike presence.
The voice’s relationship to silence deserves its own paragraph. Between lines there are splits of second where you sense attention gathering, like a dancer lifting onto the ball of a foot before the leap. Those breaths and pauses prevent the track from sliding into mere prettiness; they restore touch. It’s a reminder that musicianship is velocity managed over time, and that the most meaningful gestures often happen below the threshold of obviousness.
I sometimes go back to one of Ronstadt’s televised performances of “La Cigarra,” where the stagecraft is somber—no fuss, no flash, just the architecture of mariachi and a singer who trusts stillness. The camera finds her eyes; the band lifts under her like a raised plaza; and somewhere in the middle eight, the entire hall seems to take a single, collective breath. That is the moment the song stops being a record and becomes a ritual.
For listeners approaching the track from outside mariachi, a few guideposts help. First: don’t worry about parsing every word on the first pass. Let the contours guide you—the upward arcs that resolve like swallows returning to a line of telephone wire. Second: track the dialogue between voice and trumpets; their call-and-response is both ceremonial and intimate. Third: notice how the rhythm section is both drummer and dancer—the snap of strum patterns functions as percussion and propulsion.
Finally, a word about legacy. Canciones de Mi Padre was not a one-off; Ronstadt continued to explore Mexican repertoire on subsequent projects, but “La Cigarra” remains a keystone performance. It encapsulates her ambition at the time: to use fame not as a refuge from tradition, but as a megaphone for it. If the cicada’s song foreshadows an ending, Ronstadt flips the image: song as continuum, a way of carrying memory forward.
You can listen for virtuosity here, and you’ll find it. But the greater gift is how the track normalizes transcendence. It isn’t about high notes conquered or arrangements outshouting grief; it’s about how a voice can make courage feel like a household word. Cue it up again—preferably with volume that lets the air move around the trumpets—and hear how the final cadence doesn’t close the book. It opens it.
Listening Recommendations
• Lola Beltrán — “La Cigarra”: A foundational interpretation; towering vocal command in the same huapango tradition.
• Lila Downs — “La Cigarra”: Modern earth-tone timbres and a duskier phrasing palette, bridging festival stage and folk lineage.
• Aida Cuevas — “El Pastor”: Similar vocal athleticism within mariachi; crystalline top register and ceremonial brass.
• Linda Ronstadt — “La Charreada”: From the same 1987 album, a bright, brassy whirl that shows her range within ranchera.
• Natalia Jiménez — “La Cigarra”: Contemporary sheen and expressive rubato, a 21st-century torchbearer for the repertoire.
• Fernando de la Mora & Mariachi Vargas — “La Cigarra”: Operatic poise with classic ensemble colors; a study in elegant phrasing.
Video
Lyrics
Ya no me cantes, cigarra
Que acabe tu sonsonete
Que tu canto aquí en el alma
Como un puñal se me mete
Sabiendo que cuando cantas
Pregonando vas tu muerte
Marinero, marinero
Dime si es verdad que sabes
Porque distinguir no puedo
Si en el fondo de los mares
Hay otro color mas negro
Que el color de mis pesares
¡Ay, la, ra, la!
¡Ay, la, ra, la!
¡Ay, la, ra, la!
Hay otro color mas negro que el color de mis pesares
Un palomito al volar
Que llevaba el pecho herido
Ya casi para llorar
Me dijo muy afligido:
Ya me canso de buscar
Un amor correspondido
Bajo la sombra de un árbol
Y al compas de mi guitarra
Canto alegre este huapango
Porque la vida se acaba
Y quiero morir cantando
Como muere la cigarra
¡Ay, la, ra, la!
¡Ay, la, ra, la!
¡Ay, la, ra, la!