Los Tigres del Norte

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Los Tigres del Norte (The Tigers of the North in Spanish) are one of the most popular norteño bands, from Rosa Morada, Sinaloa, Mexico. The group was started by Jorge, his brothers, and his cousins, and began recording after moving to San Jose, California in the late 1960s, when all the members were still in their teens.^{[citation needed]} They were sponsored by a local record company, Discos Fama, owned by an Englishman named Art Walker, who took them under his wing and helped them find jobs and material, as well as recording all of their early albums.^{[citation needed]}

1 History
2 Members
3 Former Members
4 Discography
5 References
6 External links

[edit] History

The Tigres were at first only locally popular, but took off after Jorge and Art Walker heard a Los Angeles mariachi singer perform a song in the early 1970s about a couple of drug runners, Emilio Varela and Camelia la Texana. There had been occasional ballads (corridos, in Mexican terminology) about the cross-border drug trade ever since Prohibition in the 1920s, but never a song as cinematic as this, featuring a woman smuggler who shoots the man and takes off with the money. After getting permission to record this song, Los Tigres del Norte released "Contrabando y Traición" ("Contraband and Betrayal") in 1972^[1]. The song quickly hit on both sides of the border, inspired a series of movies, and kicked off one of the most remarkable careers in Spanish-language pop music.

In Norteño/conjunto form (a style featuring accordion that originated along the Texas border region), Los Tigres del Norte have been able to portray "real life" in a manner that most of the Americas can relate to, but also in a way most Americans are afraid to interpret through music. Many of their most popular songs consist of tales or corridos about life, love, and the struggle to survive in an imperfect world. They regularly touch on the subject of narcotics and illegal immigration, but they have also shared stories of love and betrayal between a man and a woman. Together, the band and its public has turned norteño music into an international genre. The band has modernized the music, infusing it with bolero, cumbia, rock rhythms, waltzes, as well as sound effects of machine guns and sirens integrated with the music.

The band has also earned several Grammys, the first for "Gracias America--Sin Fronteras" in 1986, and more recently for Best Norteño Album (Historias que contar^[2], Directo al corazón^[3] and Detalles y Emociones^[4]), and sold 32 million records^[5].

The band has performed before the United States Armed Forces in Japan and South Korea^[6].