Eladio Antonio Romero Santos, known as El Maestro, was a Dominican bachata singer and guitarist. He began recording in the first years of the genre and worked for more than four decades, and he is remembered as much for sustaining merengue played on guitar as for his bachata.

Cenoví

He was born in 1937 in Cenoví, a rural community outside San Francisco de Macorís, in the province of Duarte. He started on maracas in a local trio, learned guitar by watching, and by fifteen was leading a trio of his own as its singer. He entered a festival at the San Francisco radio station La Voz del Progreso and placed third.

The first recordings

His first record, the bachata Tomando en Tu Mesa, appeared in 1966. He began recording at the same time as José Manuel Calderón and Cuco Valoy, in the years when bachata was first being committed to disc.

His guitar playing was plainer than that of other bachata guitarists of the period. It was also strongly rhythmic, built for dancing rather than for display, and that is the quality his records are known for.

Merengue on guitar

La Muñeca, recorded in 1972, was the record that carried his name across the country and abroad. It was a merengue played on guitar, at a point when merengue had moved to the orchestras on one side and to the accordion of perico ripiao on the other.

He went on working in that form for the rest of his career, and his catalogue is one of the main reasons guitar merengue survived as recorded music rather than only as a rural memory.

The country clubs

He played mostly at rural social clubs and at patron-saint festivals rather than in the city venues where bachata was treated as disreputable. That circuit spared him much of the marginalisation that fell on other bachateros of his generation, and it gave him an audience that stayed with him for forty years.

The catalogue

He recorded steadily from 1970 onward, with albums including El Zumbador, La Muñeca, Las Bailadoras, La Madrugadora, La Viuda, La Mujer Policía, El Sabor de Mi Guitarra and Muchacha Dominicana. A 1981 release presented the accordionist Francisco Ulloa alongside the Conjunto San Rafael.

Last years

From 1995 he stopped playing the guitar and appeared only as a singer, fronting his group. He kept performing until November 2000 and died the following April, at sixty-four.