Angela Alvarez, a Cuban-born singer and songwriter who, at age 95, became the oldest performer to win the Latin Grammy Award for best new artist, died on Friday in Baton Rouge, La., where she had settled after immigrating to the United States in the early 1960s. She was 97.
Her death was confirmed by her grandson Carlos Jose Alvarez.
Mr. Alvarez, a film composer, produced his grandmother’s first and only album, “Angela Alvarez,” released in 2021. Its 15 tracks echo the sounds of a Havana nightclub in the 1930s or ’40s — a jazzy fusion of Caribbean, African and European rhythms.
Sitting with her grandson at the Latin Grammy Awards ceremony in 2022, Mrs. Alvarez was stunned when she heard her name. (The vote was actually a tie: She shared the award with the Mexican singer and songwriter Silvana Estrada, 70 years her junior.)
“I looked at him, and I said, ‘Carlos, that’s me!’” she told the Baton Rouge lifestyle magazine inRegister. “I couldn’t believe it.”
She became a media star, with English- and Spanish-language publications chronicling her long and improbable journey to the awards stage after raising four children and working as a house cleaner.
“Although life is difficult, there is always a way out, and with faith and love you can achieve it, I promise you,” Mrs. Alvarez said as she accepted the award. “It’s never too late.”
Angela Elvira Portilla Hechavarría was born on June 13, 1927, in Camagüey, Cuba, to Florencio Portilla, a pharmacist who later owned several factories, and Angela Portilla Hechavarría.
When Angela was growing up, her parents encouraged her to play the piano.
“I had two aunts that played the piano and taught me how to sing,” she told Billboard magazine in 2022. “Whenever there was a family gathering, I was the artist; they made dresses for me, and I always liked to perform.”
As a teenager, she listened to the Glenn Miller Orchestra on the radio and sang along, in her broken English, to the band’s hit song “Chattanooga Choo Choo.”
She told her father that she wanted to become a singer. He demurred.
“You sing for the family,” Mrs. Alvarez recalled him saying, “but not for the world.”
She did not attend college, opting instead to help take care of her father, who was ill. She married Orlando Alvarez Alvarez in 1947, and they started a family.
With fears that Fidel Castro’s Communist government might separate children from their families, Mrs. Alvarez and her husband sent their children to the United States in 1962 as part of Operation Pedro Pan, a U.S.-backed humanitarian program that placed children in foster care.
The couple stayed behind in Cuba while their children lived at an orphanage in Colorado. Mrs. Alvarez reunited with them a few years later, followed by her husband, and the family eventually settled in Baton Rouge.
All the while, Mrs. Alvarez continued to write songs.
“Always I have pencil and paper, and when I have inspiration or remember something, I can’t stop it,” she told inRegister. “It comes very easy. When I’m finished, I sing it, and that’s the song.”
At family gatherings, her music was a kind of soundtrack.
“She was always playing the guitar and singing to us,” Mr. Alvarez, her grandson, said in an interview. “We just thought this was like a normal thing, that everyone had a grandmother that kind of did this.”
One day in 2009, her grandson brought a microphone to her home and asked her to sing, hoping to preserve the songs for the family. He thought she’d sing about 10 songs, but it turned out that she had several notebooks filled with lyrics.
“These songs had become a diary of her life,” Mr. Alvarez said. “She sang me all of the songs and told me what they were about. I was just kind of emotionally blown away by the whole thing.”
He later worked with some of his contacts in the music business to help produce her album.
“Today, we write music to make it sound like it’s from a certain era,” Mr. Alvarez said. “She started writing these songs when she was 12 years old. These songs were from her era, written in the harmonic, melodic vocabulary of the world that she grew up in. This was who she was meant to be.”
Mrs. Alvarez’s husband died in 1977. In addition to her grandson Carlos, she is survived by their children, Jose, Orlando and Gerardo Alvarez; eight other grandchildren; and 15 great-grandchildren. A daughter, Maria de Los Angeles Alvarez, died in 1999.
The story of Mrs. Alvarez’s life was chronicled in “Miss Angela,” a 2021 documentary narrated by the Cuban-born actor Andy Garcia, who was also one of the producers. It begins with Mrs. Alvarez preparing to take the stage for a concert at the Avalon Theater in Los Angeles.
Mr. Garcia introduces her.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he says, “please join me in finally making a teenage girl’s dreams come true and welcome the star of tonight’s show, singing her own songs, the extraordinarily talented and the sublimely beautiful Mrs. Angela Alvarez.”
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