Violeta Parra

Parra walked the Chilean countryside for years with a notebook and a tape recorder, writing down songs that had never been written down, and saved some three thousand of them. She then wrote her own, of which "Gracias a la vida" is sung across the continent.

She also embroidered and painted, and in 1964 became the first Latin American to have a solo exhibition at the Louvre. Her last venture, a great tent for music on the edge of Santiago, failed and emptied. She shot herself there at forty-nine.