Donald's Encyclopedia of Popular Music

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KIEHNE, Shawn

(b.c.1976, Los Lunas NM) A norteño singer-songwriter of German descent, known as 'El Gringo'. His name is pronounced 'KEEN-ee'. The American son of a middle-class rancher, he learned to love Mexican music while working with Mexicans on the range; he is married to a Mexican woman and has two bilingual children, and has no accent in Mexican Spanish: fans ask him, 'Are you really a gringo?'

Working summers on the family-owned ranch near El Paso while in high school, he began learned the language and got a crash course in Mexican popular culture (soap operas and game shows), and was invited to Saturday night dances on the other side of the river. Then he spent a college semester in Culiacán, Sinaloa, where he met his wife, and soaked up more Mexican music. In 2003, after leading local country bands in New Mexico, he began to write in Spanish, and the reception was immediate and positive in a jealous genre. Pepe Garza, program director at La Que Buena, a top Los Angeles Mexico station, said 'You have to have the right credentials to play Mexican music. It has very complicated emotions and politics, and it's not easy for someone who didn't grow up with that to be able to fit in.'

At first he was going to call himself Shawnito, the nickname he had got on the ranch, but his Mexican brother-in-law told him that he should be the Eminem of Mexican music. 'Call yourself El Gringo. People will see it on the marquee and say, "We have to go see what this guy is up to."'  In 2005 he won second place in Univision's El Gigante de Mañana contest (the top USA Spanish-language network's answer to American Idol) and made a debut album called Algo Secuedió, self-financed with his earnings from a day job. Including a duet with regional Mexican star Jenni Rivera, it sold 3000 copies; taken up by Univision, it has sold ten times that. Of the 12 songs Kiehne wrote five, including his versions of Rodney Crowell's 'Making Memories Of Us' and Toby Keith's 'I Love This Bar'. On Don Francisco Presenta, a Univision talk show, he sang  'El Corrido del Gringo', in the venerable Mexican genre of the narrative ballad, making it clear that he knows and understands the problems of Mexican laborers, and was accepted as the real deal by the studio audience.  

In 2008 he was opening for Intocable, a popular regional band that mixes norteño, rock and country; he plays solo in small bars as far away as Minneapolis and Davenport, Iowa. There are Mexicans all over the country nowadays, doing jobs that Americans don't want to do, and Kiehne is intimately aware of their problems and emotions. The ranch hands he worked with in Texas will accept employment anywhere they can get it, and that isn't going to stop, no matter what Lou Dobbs thinks.  (Quotes from an article in the New York Times by Josh Kun)