Edilio Paredes is a Dominican guitarist and arranger, and the musician who did most to give bachata a guitar style of its own. He recorded the lead guitar on well over a thousand tracks across three decades, and it was his arrangements that separated bachata from the bolero it grew out of. In 2023 Rolling Stone placed him at number 244 on its list of the 250 greatest guitarists of all time.

The tres on the counter

He was born on 10 September 1945 in La Galana, a small country settlement near San Francisco de Macorís, in the province of Duarte, and was the first person in his family to sing or play anything. He first touched an instrument at four: the owner of the local shop kept a tres on the counter, and Paredes had to stand on his toes to reach it. He picked out three merengues that were going around at the time. Then he broke a string, the owner lost his temper, and the four-year-old swore off music for good.

He went back on that at eight, and formed a group with his brother Nelson and with Ramón Cordero, a childhood friend who would become a major figure in the music himself. The guitar and the first instruction came from an uncle of Cordero’s; beyond that Paredes taught himself. They played parties around the area, working through the songs of Odilio González, Julio Jaramillo and Blanca Iris Villafañe, and what he wanted was to play like the Puerto Rican Yomo Toro.

Casa Alegre

At thirteen he left for Santo Domingo and took a job at Casa Alegre, the music shop belonging to Cuco Valoy, who also ran a record label. He began recording there, cutting sides with Bernardo Ortiz, Rafael Encarnación and Mélida Pérez, and within a short time he had displaced the older players as the most sought-after guitarist for what was then called bolero campesino — the music that would later be called bachata.

Radio Guarachita

He moved on to recording for Radhamés Aracena, who owned Radio Guarachita. It was the only national station that played guitar music, and everything it played had been recorded on one of the labels Aracena himself owned, so almost every bachatero in the country passed through at some point.

Paredes was the station’s principal requinto — its lead guitarist — which means that nearly all of those singers worked with him. The exceptions were the handful who played their own lead guitar, Luis Segura among them.

The güira and the arrangement

Bachata changed a great deal across those years. In the early sixties it was barely distinguishable from the bolero before it; by the middle of the seventies it had become rhythmic and danceable, the güira had displaced the maracas, and elements of son and merengue had entered the guitar lines. Paredes was part of that shift, and since he was the one writing the arrangements, it largely went through his hands.

His name is tied most closely to Ramón Cordero, but he did substantial work with Marino Pérez, Bolívar Peralta, Leonardo Paniagua and José Manuel Calderón as well, and released a good deal of his own material alongside it.

The touring years

He has gone on working as a player and bandleader, touring with the groups Super Uba and Puerto Plata, and taking part in the Bachata Roja tours alongside Leonardo Paniagua and Joan Soriano, which carried the older acoustic style to audiences outside the country.

The musicianship stayed in the family: his brother Nelson played with him from the beginning, and his three sons — David, Samuel and Nano — are all working musicians.