Las Ardillitas De Lalo Guerrero — El Telefono Carpintero

A children's novelty recording from the sped-up chipmunk-voiced catalog of Lalo Guerrero is broadly charting today, tracked across 164 country and platform charts — nearly double its recent weekly average. The song is the work of an artist whose reach extends well past kiddie fare: Guerrero, born in Tucson in 1916, wrote "La Canción Mexicana" and had four songs featured in Luis Valdez's 1978 stage-and-film hit Zoot Suit, per the UCSB Library. "El Teléfono Carpintero" — a comic bit about an unwanted ringing phone likened to a carpenter's saw — belongs to Las Ardillitas, the chipmunk-style characters he voiced himself starting in the 1960s. Its durability rests on that gag structure and on generations of Mexican and Mexican-American households raised on the recordings. The surge across so many charts at once is worth tracking through the week.