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Angela Alvarez, Nonagenarian Winner of the 2022 Latin Grammy for Best New Artist, Dies at 97

Angela Alvarez is dead. She was the 2022 best new artist Latin Grammy winner at age 95.

“I loved music very much,” she told Billboard Español in November 2022 from Baton Rouge, where the work of her husband, a mechanical engineer in the sugar industry, took her decades ago. Music, nevertheless, was always there for her, as it helped her cope with the ups and downs of life: from love and motherhood to a near-two-year separation from her children after the Cuban Revolution triumph, when she was supposed to travel to the U.S. with them but was not allowed to board the plane; to her relentless efforts to reunite her family and the eventual loss of her beloved husband and, years later, of her only daughter — both to cancer. “I think that music is the language of the soul,” Alvarez said in the same interview with Billboard, estimating at the time that she had written around 50 songs, including “Romper el Yugo” (“Break the Chains”), “Añoranzas” (“Yearnings”), “Mi Gran Amor” (“My Great Love”) and “Camino Sin Rumbo” (“I Wonder Aimlessly”), all included in that first and only album that led to her improbable nomination for best new artist and her eventual victory — in a tie with Silvana Estrada, who was 70 years younger.

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