Linda Escobar

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Linda Escobar (born in 1957) is an American singer-songwriter. Referred to as the "Queen of

U.S. Representative Filemon Vela Jr. acknowledged Escobar for her contributions to Tejano and conjunto music during Women's History Month. In 2019, she was inducted into the South Texas Music Walk of Fame and received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Tejano Music Awards
. With a music catalog of circa 500 songs, Escobar is widely recognized for boasting one of the longest and most prolific music careers in the Tejano market.

Career

Linda Escobar was born in 1957

b-side track and reminded her band about "a little rhyming song" called "Frijolitos Pintos" and recorded it after the band requested to listen to her rendition.[7] Writing for the San Antonio Current, Matt Stieb found the track to be somewhere "between [a] novelty song and purebred pop". Stieb believed that the "rubber band beat" transforms the song into a danceable track over a lively accordion and praised Escobar's voice, noting its captivating and melodious ascent.[7]

Escobar's family relocated to

Escobar won a Female Vocalist of the Year at the West Texas Music Awards in 1987.

traditional Mexican music genres.[11] Her most renowned recordings are "Mi Cantina" and "Lonely Letters".[9]

Escobar started the El Veterano (The Veteran) Conjunto Festival,[6] in 1998.[12] It started off as a three-day Memorial Day event, before transitioning to a single-day festival within a few years.[12] She started the festival in honor of her father and to raise money for the Eligio Escobar Scholarship Fund.[4] The festival pays tribute to American war veterans on Veterans Day, and showcases Tejano conjunto music, concluding with the awarding of a music scholarship. In 2000, the festival included a performance by the Japanese conjunto group known as Kenji Katsube y Los Gatos de Japon, which drew criticism from those in attendance. Most attendees were veterans who served in World War II in Japan and held certain reservations towards Japanese people. Despite objections from attendees, including some relatives, Kenji Katsube y Los Gatos de Japon were permitted to perform.[1] She later married Kenji "El Gato" Katsube.[7] By 2020, the festival had given out 27 scholarships.[12]

American music scholar, Alejandro L. Madrid, examined the El Veterano Conjunto Festival through the lenses of cultural citizenship and necro-citizenship in his book Transnational Encounters (2011). Drawing from Renato Rosaldo's concept of cultural citizenship and Lazaro Lima's interpretation of necro-citizenship as articulated by Russ Castronovo, Madrid's assessment highlighted how El Veterano served as an expression of belonging to the United States within the context of Mexican American cultural forms, thus embodying the concept of cultural citizenship.[6] In 2011, her single "Amigo Freddy Fender" ranked as the most popular requested song on KEDA AM, one of the top conjunto/Tejano radio stations.[6]

On July 31, 2014,

Conjunto Album of the Year for La Revancha.[18]

During her music career, she became one of the "most important women" in her genre along with

lymphoma cancer after previously being diagnosed with cancer in 2021.[10]

See also

References

Works cited

External links