Chavela Vargas the raunchy singer who broke taboos

Chavela Vargas, the singer, who has died aged 93, was renowned throughout the Spanish-speaking world almost as much for her macho, pistol-packing lifestyle as for her melodramatic interpretations of Mexican folk music.

Her career began in the late 1940s, when she performed highly-emotional "ranchera" torch songs, accompanying herself on guitar, in small Acapulco bars of questionable repute. A friend of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and other Mexican artists and intellectuals, Chavela Vargas shocked Roman Catholic Mexico by appearing on stage dressed as a man, toting a gun or brandishing a bullwhip, and drawing on a fat cigar or swigging from a bottle of hooch.

At a time when homosexuality was taboo, Chavela Vargas refused to change the pronouns in love songs about women as decorum required, and long before it became permissible to express erotic love for one's own sex, she embraced it in her songs. The libretto of Macorina, a song she recorded in 1956, includes the words: "Your breasts like pineapple flesh,/your mouth like a sweet blessing,/of ripe guanabana juice/just like your fine waist..."

Despite the disapproval of the more conservative elements of Mexican society (in the 1950s, when she performed on Mexican television, she was shown from the waist up so that her trousers could not be seen), Chavela Vargas became hugely popular in the Spanish-speaking world - "the Edith Piaf of Latin music", as she was once described. From the 1950s to the 1970s she recorded dozens of albums, often in collaboration with such leading Mexican composers as Jose Alfredo Jimenez, featuring passionate songs of heartbreak guaranteed to leave listeners weeping into their tequilas.

In the 1970s Chavela Vargas's raunchier numbers were adopted as anthems by the fledgling Mexican lesbian and gay movement, but by this time her hard-drinking lifestyle was beginning to catch up with her. She sometimes had to be helped offstage after failing to find the microphone.

For more than a decade from the late 1970s she largely disappeared from public view as she struggled to overcome her addiction. She resurfaced in Mexican nightclubs in the early 1990s, her voice coarser and lower than it had been, with a fractured flow that she described as her "broken voice", but making up in raw emotion and drama for what it had once possessed in power and beauty.

With a rediscovery fuelled by the Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar, who included her music in some of his films, Chavela Vargas went on to give sell-out concerts in several European and American capitals. In 2002 she appeared in Frida, Julie Taymor's film about Frida Kahlo. In the role of Death, her short white hair and strong features in close-up, Chavela Vargas sang the classic Mexican ballad La Llorona (The Weeping Woman) with a desolate dramatic intensity which one critic attributed to the "fact" that she had been one of Frida Kahlo's lovers.

Yet the precise nature of her relationship with the painter was never entirely clear. Though her liaisons with women were known throughout her life, Chavela Vargas did not publicly come out as a lesbian until she published her autobiography, Y si quieres saber de mi pasado (If You Want to Know About My Past), in 2000. Before then she steadfastly refused to confirm or deny rumours about her sexuality, dismissing the modern propensity to advertise one's sexual orientation as "cheap exhibitionism".

Meanwhile, although she admitted that she was "a great love" of Frida Kahlo (the two women were close enough for Chavela Vargas to be present at Kahlo's deathbed), she was reticent about their relationship. In 2009 the Los Angeles Times reported that a diary purportedly belonging to Frida Kahlo described the painter's intense, but unrequited, love for the singer.

Though often described as Mexican, Isabel Vargas Lizano was born on April 17 1919 in the town of San Joaquin de Flores in Costa Rica, moving to Mexico as a teenager after her parents divorced. She recalled an unhappy childhood: "My parents... never loved me, and when they divorced I stayed with my uncles - may they burn in hell!"

She began her career as a teenager, singing on the streets for money, before winning bookings at nightclubs. By the 1950s she had become a fixture on Mexico City's bohemian club scene and in the holiday resort of Acapulco, where she became popular with Hollywood stars. In 1957 she performed at the wedding of Elizabeth Taylor to the film producer Michael Todd.

In her autobiography, Chavela Vargas recalled that she first met Frida Kahlo, along with Kahlo's husband, the muralist and painter Diego Rivera, at a party at the couple's house. The two artists invited Chavela Vargas to stay with them, and she ended up living in their house for several years. "I learned a lot from Frida, and I saw her suffer," Chavela Vargas told the Spanish newspaper El Pais. "I learned to live, and also about death." Yet she could be cynical about love, once describing it as something that exists only for a short time "while your liver and your gallbladder are working".

Age and her efforts (ultimately successful) to save her own liver prompted some changes in Chavela Vargas's public performances, and in later years she cut a majestic figure on stage, unfolding a voluminous poncho like a pair of wings. But she still packed a gun - a Magnum - using it to scare off stray animals that sometimes took liberties with the flowers in her garden.

When she made her debut at the Carnegie Hall at the age of 83, Chavela Vargas finished her performance with Hacia La Vida, a song about struggles and disappointments and a determination to choose life over death. A critic described her as singing the word muerte (death) "as if she were challenging it to a fist fight".

She continued to perform until last year when, at the age of 92, she released a new album of the poems of Federico Garcia Lorca and received standing ovations while performing on stage in a wheelchair.

Chavela Vargas, born April 17 1919, died August 5 2012.