Fernando Casado, billed as El Magistrado, is a Dominican singer, broadcaster, actor and music researcher. He built a career on a velvet bolero voice and then spent much of it on something less commercial: putting the criolla, a Dominican song form that had gone quiet, back into the country’s working repertoire.

The voice and the microphone

He was born on 4 March in San José de Ocoa and raised in the capital. He studied singing with the maestro Charles Guild and made his first appearances on live radio, and then did what a young man with that voice did in the fifties: he became an announcer.

He read news on a Spanish-language station in New York and worked through most of the Dominican dial, ending as head of the announcers’ department and programming coordinator at La Voz Dominicana, and later directing two other stations. He then moved to television and kept a programme under his own name across three different channels, one of which he founded.

That double career matters for what came later. A singer who also controls a microphone and a schedule can put a repertoire on the air, and he did.

The criolla

The criolla is the Dominican romantic song of the nineteenth century, the music of trovadores like Raudo Saldaña and Antonio Mesa, and by the middle of the twentieth it was more or less a museum piece. He recorded Cartas y Lágrimas, Aquel Beso, Carmencita and Duvergé, and he kept singing them when nothing about the market rewarded it.

He also worked as a researcher and writer, which is unusual for a performer and is the reason the recovery stuck. He was arguing a case about what Dominican music includes — merengue and bolero, but also the criolla, the son and the palos — and Juan Luis Guerra wrote about that argument at length last year.

The strangest thing in his discography belongs here too: a duet with Eduardo Brito. Brito died in 1946, so it was assembled by technical means rather than sung together, and it is exactly the gesture of a man who thinks the nineteenth-century repertoire is still live material.

Festivals and the rest

He represented the country at the OTI song festival in Spain in 1972 with Siempre Habrá Una Sonrisa En La Luna, and took second place at the same festival in 1977 with Al Nacer Cada Enero. He has sung at Carnegie Hall and appeared on the big Spanish-language variety programmes of the era, in Chile, in Spain and on the Mexican show that filmed an edition in La Romana.

His repertoire runs through the good Dominican songwriting of the period. He recorded Una Primavera Para El Mundo, on a poem by René del Risco Bermúdez, and Por Amor by Rafael Solano.

The Ayuntamiento of the Distrito Nacional named him a distinguished citizen, and he was later chosen for the country’s musical reserve. He is still working, still being interviewed at home, and still making the same argument about the criolla.