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Born on August 19, 1954, in Kingsville, TX; died on April 16, 2005, in Corpus Christi, TX; married and divorced three times. Education: Graduated from high school in Kingsville, TX; Texas A&M University at Kingsville, degree in psychology and speech therapy, 1997; worked toward master's degree at Texas A&M Kingsville.

Before slain female superstar Selena brought tejano music to international prominence, there was Laura Canales. Known during her 1980s heyday as La reina de la onda tejana (The Queen of the Tejano Wave), Canales blazed a path for women in the border-crossing fusion music of Mexican-American Texans. "She was the lady who broke the gender barrier," Tejano Roots Hall of Fame chief executive Javier Villanueva was quoted as saying in the Washington Post. "At the time, it was taboo for female artists to front bands or perform in public. But here came Laura, and she just took the Tejano world by storm." In an interview quoted in the Austin American-Statesman, Canales herself said that she and her band "put femininity in a male-dominated genre."

Though preced

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by Jason Mellard / Center for Texas Music History at Texas State

On August 19, 1954, Tejano singer Laura Canales was born in Kingsville. She began singing in the early 1970s with prominent area groups such as El Conjunto Bernal before launching her own recording career with the single “Midnight Blue” in 1975. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Canales became a leading singer in the genre and won female vocalist of the year multiple times from the Tejano Music Awards. She was honored for her contributions in the field, too, by the likes of Governor Mark White and San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros, who called her the “First Lady of Song in South Texas.”

Canales championed the traditional conjunto sound, always maintaining an accordion player in her bands and performing conjunto sets, even as she remained open to the sonic innovations that the synthesizer and other instruments brought to the genre. By the late 1980s and into the Tejano boom of the 1990s, several new artists, such as Selena Quintanilla and Shelly Lares, built upon the foundation Canales had laid. By th

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Laura Canales

American Tejano musician (1954–2005)

Musical artist

Laura Canales (August 19, 1954 – April 16, 2005) was an American Tejano musician and an original inductee in the Tejano Roots Hall of Fame. Canales was born in Kingsville, Texas.

Early years

Laura Canales was raised in Kingsville, Texas. She attended Henrietta M. King High School in Kingsville. After graduation, her father, Perfecto, encouraged her to continue her pursuit of a tejano music career. She made her recording debut in 1973 with Los Unicos while simultaneously singing with renowned Texas conjunto and norteño group Conjunto Bernal.

In the mid-1970s, Canales was a founding member of tejano band Snowball & Company, which also went by the name, Felicidad. The band released several full-length albums and singles under both group names on San Antonio label, Fireball Records, including a cover of the song Midnight Blue, the first regional hit of Canales' career. Snowball choose the recording engineer & producer Paul Westbrook since he was recording and producing most of the h