This fall has been a season of death for the people of my ancestral town of Jerez, Zacatecas. “They’d blast the volume on the radiola!” my dad said with glee, rattling off the names of long-gone cantinas he haunted — El Hernandez, La India Bonita, Flamingo Inn — and Chente’s big songs back then, “Tu Camino y El Mío” and …
No one would’ve held it against Vicente Fernández if he had flamed out early in his career. But the most famous track from “¡Arriba Huentitlán!” is “Volver, Volver.” Once again, Arriaga helps his compa on the chorus to this weeper, one so heart-wrenching that no less an authority of melancholy than Harry Dean Stanton sang it for one of his …
