Daughter of José Alfredo Jiménez prepares album with unreleased material

Paloma Jiménez Gálvez keeps a notebook with 80 songs that his father, the iconic Mexican composer José Alfredo Jiménez did not record during his lifetime

Half a century after the death of the Guanajuato composer José Alfredo Jiménez , his daughter Paloma Jiménez Gálvez, who is also one of the greatest scholars of the composer’s work , reveals her plans to launch an unreleased album. She assures that she has in her possession a notebook with at least 80 songs by José Alfredo, with which a new album could be published next year.

“These are unpublished lyrics, I wouldn’t call them songs because they lack music. I have received proposals to record them; probably in January I will be able to talk about new material that a singer who is having a lot of success and who is also a composer wants to do,” said the doctor in Hispanic Literature, in an interview.

José Alfredo Jiménez Sandoval was a Mexican singer and songwriter, whose songs are considered the basis of modern regional Mexican music and rancheras. During his lifetime, he wrote over a thousand songs, which have been covered by various artists.

After colorful tributes to who will continue to be the king, both in Mexico City, Guanajuato, and other states of the country, Paloma Jiménez assured that the celebrations and commemorations will continue next year with activities across the Republic, among them the presentation of the arrangements for orchestra that were made for the Fine Arts tribute to the singer-songwriter.

Recently, Paloma Jiménez presented, together with journalist José Luis Martínez, her book “It’s useless to stop loving you. 50 years without José Alfredo” (Madre Editorial, 2023), within the framework of the 37th edition of the Guadalajara International Book Fair.

It is a series of essays and chronicles, in which the student of her father’s work explains the reasons why he wrote songs such as The White Horse or Camino de Guanajuato; as well as the intricate paths and extraordinary coincidences that made this man, who never knew how to read music professionally, one of the greatest representatives of Mexican popular music in history.

“For me, it has been very enriching to have José Alfredo as an object of study because I have been able to learn other things that at the time did not interest me so much, because when he left I was 19 years old. Things that I could only have understood by having him in front of me to ask him personally,” the author concluded.

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