Born Ana Blanco Soto, into a family of Flamenco singers in Jerez de la Frontera, Tia Anica sang for pleasure at family celebrations and gatherings of friends until the day her husband died. After that, encouraged by Antonio Mairena, who had noticed her powerful personality, she turned professional in her fifties. At first things were modest: she sang in the ventas, the roadside inns of Andalusia, often with El Borrico, a fellow 'cantaor de venta'. It was Mairena too, who recorded her for the first time, in her sixties, for his great 'Antologia del cante flamenco' issued by Decca in the early 1960s. This reissue features those recordings as well as those made by Caballero Bonald, on which she was accompanied on the guitar first by Manuel Morao and then by the faithful Parrilla de Jerez.