Ana Ramallo

Radio was the window through which the blues slipped into her life when she was little, and she guessed that what Los Deltonos played — “the only rhythm&blues that came on the radio”, in her own words — was the rhythm she liked best. She began singing among friends, who encouraged her to polish her voice and steered her towards the Taller de Músics, where she fell for ever, utterly won over, to the devil’s music. “The die was already cast.” She began going up on stage in 1991, and after a promising start and a six-year break she returned to singing blues and jazz, but this time with a new weapon added to her magnificent voice: the electric bass, which allowed her to venture into more rock-oriented musical territory, such as that of the band Cassay, an all-female rock outfit. An artist of character and determination, she decided to put together a blues band with rocky touches and confessed that she was caught by a genre that allowed her to express all the music she carried inside, even though at times everything seemed to be against her: “My whole childhood and youth were surrounded by circumstances that insisted on drawing me away from music; the blues bored through the asphalt that imprisoned me and made my true self blossom.”