José Manuel Calderón

About José Manuel Calderón

José Manuel Calderón made the first bachata record. In 1962, months after the fall of the Trujillo dictatorship, he cut Borracho de Amor and Condena, guitar songs of heartbreak that gave a name and a shape to a genre the establishment would spend decades looking down on. He kept recording through the 1960s and 1970s as bachata grew into the music of the Dominican working class, and he lived to see it inscribed by UNESCO and danced worldwide.