MANY of the songs, and there were at least 1,500 of them, were syrupy and sentimental. Some were more sobbed than sung. Juan Gabriel was not David Bowie. But in the Spanish-speaking world he was even bigger, and his death touched off similar mass mourning. Mexico’s greatest modern pop singer touched the hearts of tens of millions, including millions living north of the Rio Grande. His meaning was deeper and more subversive than some of his songs might suggest.

Part of his appeal lay in his own history. Alberto Aguilera knew all about the solitude and loss of love of which Juan Gabriel, his stage persona, sang. The youngest of ten children, his parents were farm workers in the western state of Michoacán. When he was four, his father was confined in a mental hospital. His mother moved the family to Ciudad Juárez, on the border with the United States. Unable to cope, she placed Alberto in an orphanage. The separation traumatised him. As he grew rich, in his quiet way of pointing out the injustices in Mexican society, he bought her the house in Juárez she had once cleaned for a living; when she died, she became the “Amor Eterno”of one of his biggest hits. He gave money, too, to children’s homes.

He began to write songs at 13, while selling burritos on the streets of Juárez. He sang in the town’s bars, then all over the country. In Mexico City he was jailed for 18 months, mistakenly he said, over a stolen guitar. He never stopped playing, and as soon as he got out he became his new self, Juan Gabriel: determined, but still broke. Not for nothing was his first hit, in 1971, called “No tengo dinero”(“I have no money, nor anything to give, the only thing I have is love, to love with”). This catchy pop number announced his lifelong knack of addressing the cares of ordinary Mexicans.

For almost half a century he provided Mexico with a soundtrack as the country changed. His songs were played at weddings, funerals and quinceañeras, the coming-out parties of 15-year-old girls. Someone worked out that, at any given minute, on a radio somewhere in Latin America one of his songs would be playing. He sold more than 100m albums worldwide and gave 15,000 performances, revelling tirelessly in the glitter of the stage. Many concerts lasted hours, and featured audience singalongs and massed mariachi bands. (The last, two days before he died, was for 17,000 people in Los Angeles.) Endlessly versatile, he dabbled in rock and wrote, as well as tear-jerking ballads, traditional folk rancheras and slow, romantic boleros. He thus became an inheritor of the golden age of Mexican popular music from the 1930s to the 1960s, when the rancheras of José Alfredo Jiménez and Agustín Lara rang out across Latin America and in Spain.

The ranchera tradition was all about Mexican machismo. It sang of domineering men, treacherous women and the manly solace of tequila. One of Juan Gabriel’s achievements was to soften and feminise the ranchera. In “Se me olvidó otra vez” (“I’d forgotten once again”), the jilted lover waits in sad futility “in the same town and with the same people, so that when you come back you won’t find anything out of place”. But reunion is impossible: “I’d forgotten once again that it was only me who loved you.” This unusual sensitivity led him to write countless songs for, and frequently perform with, female singers.

The softening of the ranchera was also signalled by his visible homosexuality, with his tight white trousers, sequinned shirts, makeup and mannered gestures. As deeply reserved offstage as he was flamboyant on it, he would never admit to it. When asked by an interviewer whether he was gay, he replied: “What can be seen isn’t asked about, my son”—a very Mexican way of saying yes, he was.

Perhaps because of his unsettled youth, he was a man of the system. He appeared often on Televisa, Mexico’s quasi-official broadcaster, and publicly supported the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party. But his loyalties were more personal than political, and he demanded respect. He fell out with Televisa when they claimed exclusive rights to air his shows. He knew he was bigger than they were.

A man without heirs

He left five sons, at least two of them adopted, none certainly his; they loved him as a father and, for him, that was enough. His musical legacy was similarly uncertain. Young Latin Americans are as likely to listen to salsa, rock or Colombian cumbia; for them, Juan Gabriel’s music was what their mothers hummed along to as they did the housework. In one way he harked back to a more innocent Mexico, without violence and drug cartels. But in another he heralded a more tolerant country, where homosexuality is becoming grudgingly accepted. He also represented a North American fusion; though an ardent cultural nationalist (his last tour was called “MeXXIco es todo”), in recent years he lived across the border in Santa Monica.

“The Mexican macho—the male—is a hermetic being, closed up in himself,” wrote Octavio Paz, the country’s great 20th-century poet. He ascribed to his fellow countrymen “a painful, defensive unwillingness to share our intimate feelings”, and went on: “The Mexican succumbs very easily to sentimental effusions, and therefore he shuns them.” Juan Gabriel helped Mexicans sing them out.