Rafael Encarnación, also billed as Rafelito, was a Dominican singer and songwriter and one of the founding voices of bachata. His professional career lasted about six months. He left ten boleros behind and was twenty years old when he died.

Salón Mozart

He was born in Santo Domingo in 1944, in the San Carlos barrio, and he was self-taught — no musician in the family, no formal study, a boy who simply started writing songs in his teens and turned out to be good at it.

In mid-1963 he got into Salón Mozart, a recording studio in the capital, and on 24 September that year his first single reached the shops: Muero Contigo on one side, Pena de Hombre on the other. Both went into radio rotation at once, which almost never happens, and Castigo de Amor, Loco Anhelo and Sin Rencores followed them onto the lists.

The timing is worth getting right. This was a full year before Radio Guarachita went on the air, so the station that would later carry this music across the country played no part in making him. His records travelled on ordinary radio, at a moment when nobody had yet decided what to call what he was doing.

Ten boleros

What he recorded were boleros, sung to a guitar, and they belong to the same first wave as José Manuel Calderón, who had cut the earliest Dominican records in this style the year before.

There is a point about him that careful chroniclers make and casual ones miss. He is named among the first significant bachateros, but the florid lead-guitar playing that later became the sound of the genre is simply not on his recordings. The style had not arrived yet. He is a founder of a music whose defining texture he never heard, which is an odd thing to be and is almost never said.

What is on the records instead is the voice, and that is what people kept. Muero Contigo has been recorded again by singers of several later generations and in several genres, and it is still the song of his that gets asked for.

La hora del moro

A week before the end he appeared on television for the first and only time, singing Muero Contigo and Pena de Hombre on the programme Rafael Solano presented on Rahintel. He is generally credited as the first bachatero to sing on a Dominican television programme, which mattered because the music was then considered unfit for it.

He had plans that week. A Venezuelan label had just signed him and he was preparing to travel to Caracas to record, and he had arranged to enter the national university to read dentistry, which he intended to combine with singing.

The tapes he never heard

On the morning of Monday 23 March 1964 he set out for Salón Mozart to collect the tapes of his two newest recordings, ¡Ay, Qué Amor! and Logré Olvidarte. He never arrived and never heard them. He died the following afternoon, at twenty.

Two years later the Cuban label Kubaney gathered the singles that had been issued separately and released them as an album of homage, with the Trío Ideal accompanying. It holds the whole surviving catalogue: ¡Ay, Qué Amor!, Calma Mi Llanto, Castigo de Amor, Esclavo de Tu Amor, Falsedad, Loco Anhelo, Logré Olvidarte, Muero Contigo, No Lo Niegues, Pena de Hombre and Sin Rencores. Every lyric on it is his except one. The record closes with a song written and sung by his brother Julio César, who made his own debut that way.

Six months of work is not much to be judged on. It has been enough for sixty years.