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The phones begin ringing even before Yolanda Jacobo opens her radio microphone.

And once she does, the phones don't stop for the next two hours as Jacobo waxes nostalgic over the old Mexican songs she presents every Sunday at 10 a.m. on her radio show on KEVT, La Raza 1030-AM.

Jacobo, known to her fans as Yoly, is keeper of the classic Mexican music flame on local radio.

It's been like this for 10 years, since Jacobo, who is not paid, began broadcasting her Spanish-language program, Caminos de Ayer, or Yesterday's Roads, filled with the lilting melodies she heard as a child.

"We all learned to appreciate this music because we heard it in our homes," said Jacobo, 59, who grew up in San Lorenzo, a small town near Magdalena, Sonora, little more than two hours south of Tucson.

While Mexican and other Latino music is widely heard on Tucson's seven Spanish-language AM and FM radio stations, Mexican songs from the 1930s to 1950s are rarely heard. To Jacobo, the older music is more romantic, lyrical and poetic than today's beefed-up norteño or hip-hop-fueled reggaeton. She finds most Mexican popular music lacking in both grace and style.

The music she loves flows from an era when nascent Mexican radio and films made regional Mexican artists internationally known. The music followed the diaspora of Mexican immigrants into the United States, acclimating to life but still clinging to their musical icons — people like Pedro Infante, Lucha Reyes and Los Tres Diamantes.

Jacobo's listeners, largely an older audience, request their favorite canciones. They are lush, sentimental love songs crooned by singers such as Pedro Vargas, Maria Luisa Landin, and trios Los Dandys and Los Tres Ases.

Before each song, Jacobo offers callers' dedications to a spouse or friend. Many listeners are frequent callers whom Jacobo knows not by their names, but by the sound of their voices.

The music brings back joyful memories or soothes their melancholy souls.

"There is one caller, a man, who calls every Sunday. He lost his wife several years ago and remains alone and sad," Jacobo said.

Jacobo also reads brief biographies of the singers and recites poetry. Her voice is soft and melodic, much like her music.

Some Tucsonans know Jacobo through her family's two Mexican and Latin record stores, Yoly's Music Shop, on the South Side. She and her husband, Lucio, opened their first store 25 years ago.

The stores carry the old tunes, but they are outsold by contemporary Mexican music.

Jacobo's daughter, Loreley Jacobo, manages the stores and her son, Francisco Javier "Paco" Jacobo, is a former Tucson disc jockey who is the program director for Radio Campesina, the eight-station network of the United Farm Workers Union.

Years before becoming a successful businesswoman, Jacobo cleaned homes in Yuma as a teenage immigrant.

Her love of the music comes from her father who, with his hand- cranked phonograph, was a DJ at celebrations in Magdalena. She also draws inspiration from her mother, who often sang in the house.

Jacobo's memory of her mother filled last Sunday's program. She dedicated the program to Rosa Salgado Carrillo, who had died five years ago to the date.

That's the kind of program it is — homespun, simple, uncluttered with idle chatter.

KEVT is Jacobo's third radio station, and it's only fitting.

When it went on the air in 1953 as Tucson's first, full-time, Spanish-language radio station, it played the same music Jacobo cherishes today.