I learned “Besos y copas” from the soundtrack album to Chulas Fronteras, Les Blank’s documentary about norteño music, which I’m pretty sure I owned before seeing the film. It was performed by Chavela Ortiz, a fine singer and accordion player, who fronted the San Jose, California, group Brown Express and was married to Eduardo Hernandez of Los Tigres del Norte. She only made a few recordings before dying in a freak accident, bucked off a horse during a photo shoot, and that’s pretty much all I know about her, though I loved the way she did this one.

The lyric is classic ranchera, the lament of a man whose lover is leaving him:

Perdona si te haya molestado
La voz de un hombre honrado que juró no volver.
Besos y copas he pagado, ya todo ha terminado,
No hay nada que perder.

(Forgive me if you have been bothered by the voice of an honorable man who swore never to return. I have paid kisses and drinks, now it is all finished, there is nothing more to lose.)

Until I started researching this post, I had no idea it was written by Victor Cordero, one of the greatest corrido composers of the 20th century and the main influence on Paulino Vargas, Julian Garza, and many of the later masters I wrote about in Narcocorrido.

Cordero was born in 1914 and grew up during the years of the Mexican Revolution — he told a story of trying to run off and join Pancho Villa at age seven, confronting the legendary hero and asking for a horse and a gun before being found and dragged home by his aunt, and of Villa commending him, saying, “Don’t worry, ma’am, your son has such valor that he will surely become a great Mexican.” (Along with writing songs, Cordero produced a lushly entertaining autobiography for the Mexican Society of Authors and Composers, which I recommend to anyone who can read Spanish.)

Cordero’s corridos include the classics “Juan Charrasqueado,” “Gabino Barrera,” and “El ojo de vidrio,” as well as such later topical oddities as  a Corrido al Che Guevara and Corrido de Elvis Presley. He also wrote all kinds of other songs — his own list of genres included “ranchero, bolero, huapango, tropical, chotis, vals, polka, cumbia, paso doble, danzón, tango, pasillo, cha-cha-chá, jocoso, moruno, danza, go-gó y los estilos colombiano, francés, español, italiano y autóctono,” and  in the 1960s, when most composers of his generation were bemoaning the arrival of rock ‘n’ roll, he was inspired by “el cuarteto más grande de todos los tiempos: Los Beatles,” and wrote a series of trendy rock ‘n’ roll songs… none of them particularly memorable, but proving he was a pro to the end.

Anyway… I’ve generally followed the rule of playing these songs as I remembered them, and not re-listening to refresh my memory, but in this case after I’d been practicing for a week or so, my wife, Sandrine, got it stuck in her head and I wanted her to hear Chavela’s version, so put it on and was struck by the way Chavela filled the spaces between each line with accordion fills, apparently improvised and extended as the mood suited her. So I started fooling around with a loosely similar approach, and although the result doesn’t sound anything like what she did, it’s a lot of fun to play.

As for what she did, here’s the clip from Chulas Fronteras. I strongly recommend checking out the rest of the film, which is full of great music, and I wish she had stuck around to do a lot more. (Incidentally, while looking for this clip, I found that the most popular version of this song online is by Jenni Rivera, another favorite performer of mine who died too young.)