When Edith Tamayo moved from Sinaloa, Mexico to Copenhagen some time ago, the continental music scene surely gained something valuable.   It’s been a long road though.    Edith Tamayo was born in 1972 in Culiacan Sinaloa, Mexico. Her father, a teacher from the highlands of Jalisco, and her homemaker mother from a peasant family in Sinaloa Badiraguato, both came from families with a strong sense of social and political justice. From the earliest childhood on, Edith heard the stories about the Mexican revolution, along with the innummerable and lively tales and legends of ghosts and lost souls - told to her by the grandmother Carlota who lived her whole life on the small ranch of El Beco, at the foot of the rocky mountains of Peñascote, where during the Revolution, the legend says, thirty mules loaded with silver and gold were thrown into the crevice. Those stories blended perfectly with the folk music Edith grew up with – the typical Sinaloa sound of trumpets, clarinets and tubas, the accordion dance music from the North of Mexico - the polkas and schottisches, and the long, story-telling songs, the so-called "Corridos".

When she was nine, the family moved to the port city of Mazatlan. Feeling lonely, Edith tried her hand in writing her first poems and songs. She would spend her days sitting at the quay of the Paseo Olas Altas, listening to the ocean waves and writing. In the evening, she would read the stuff out loud in front of the mirror. She sang all the time too, even while asleep sometimes.

At 13 she started singing in public and soon was performing at festivals. She won prizes regularly, so the media took notice, and before long she was invited to perform in many tv and radio shows.

The sixteen-year-old Edith came to an audition with the conductor Enrique Patrón de Rueda, the artistic director of a cultural festival in Sinaloa. Impressed by the girl's talent he added her to the festival bill which included stars of Latin music like Celia Cruz and Fernando de la Mora. Soon after she went on a tour across the country, and sang boleros, huapangos and rancheras. Since her background and personal sensibility, even at a very early age, made her aware of more vulnerable social groups, she visited prisons, marginal areas and villages and sang there. At the end of the festival run, an invitation came to sing with Lola Beltrán, in front of more than 10,000 spectators. The senior colleague said that she felt she just had to introduce this new talent and called Edith “a revelation of the festival”. She assured the young singer that success was just a question of time.

 At 17, Tamayo got a scholarship to study music in the School of Fine Arts in Mexico City. It was a revelation of sorts. She remembers vividly the moment she entered the Coyoacan, the quarter where now legendary painters Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera lived - and immediately fell in love with the place: the fullness of its colours met the richness of its history. That was a whole new period of her life – she took her singing studies seriously, while at the same time continued to play gigs, even taking small parts in operas, operettas and plays.