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Lorena is the self-titled debut album of the Spanish singer Lorena. It was released on 27 March 2007 in Spain, two months after winning fifth series of Spanish Operación Triunfo in 2006. It is an album of personal covers of greatest hits of international artists that also includes two new songs.

The album entered and peaked at number 4 of the Spanish Top 100 Albums. Two singles were released from the album: "Sin Medida" in March 2007 and "Otro Amor Vendrá" in July 2007. To date (September 2007) the album has sold more than 40.000 copies.

Track listing

"Lorena" is an antebellum song with Northern origins. The lyrics were written in 1856 by Rev. Henry D. L. Webster, after a broken engagement. He wrote a long poem about his fiancée but changed her name to "Lorena", an adaptation of "Lenore" from Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven." Henry Webster's friend Joseph Philbrick Webster wrote the music, and the song was first published in Chicago in 1857. It became a favorite of soldiers of both sides during the American Civil War. Members of the Western Writers of America chose it as one of the Top 100 Western songs of all time.

History

During the American Civil War, soldiers on both sides of the conflict thought of their wives and girlfriends back home when they heard the song "Lorena". One Confederate officer even attributed the South's defeat to the song. He reasoned that upon hearing the mournful ballad the soldiers grew so homesick that they lost their effectiveness as a fighting force.

"Lorena" was based on the lyricist's love for a Zanesville, Ohio girl named Ella Blocksom (who later married William Wartenbee Johnson, Ohio Supreme Court justice from 1879 to 1886).

Afrikaners are a Southern African ethnic group descended from predominantly Dutch settlers first arriving in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They traditionally dominated South Africa's agriculture and politics prior to 1994. Some of the more common Afrikaner surnames include Botha, Pretorius and van der Merwe.

Afrikaans, South Africa's third most widely spoken home language, is the mother tongue of Afrikaners and most Cape Coloureds. It evolved from the Dutch vernacular of South Holland, incorporating words brought from Indonesia and Madagascar by slaves. Afrikaners make up approximately 5.2% of the total South African population based on the number of white South Africans who speak Afrikaans as a first language in the South African National Census of 2011.