Frank Cruz, born Francisco Cruz Ozuna in the San Antón barrio of Santo Domingo, is a Dominican singer of merengue and bolero. He is ninety-nine years old and he is still singing.

An amateur contest

He got in through the front door of the era: an amateur singing competition on La Voz Dominicana, the broadcaster that decided who got heard in that country for twenty years. He was twenty, and it put him into Gilberto Muñoz’s conjunto.

In 1955 Antonio Morel hired him for the Teatro Agua y Luz, on a bill with Lucía Félix and Francis Santana. He also spent a stretch with Enrique Bustamante, known as Riquín, playing the dances at the Güibia bathing resort — an open-air place on the Santo Domingo seafront that no longer exists and that everybody who was young then remembers.

Los Magos del Ritmo

In 1963 Félix del Rosario was commissioned to put a band together for the Hotel y Casino Europa. He picked Frank Cruz as his lead singer, with Rafael Antonio Peguero, El Negrito Macabí, beside him. A radio announcer named Ramón Rivera Batista gave the group its name: Los Magos del Ritmo, the magicians of rhythm.

It became one of the most productive partnerships in Dominican music. Thirty-five long-playing records came out of it. Llévatela, Otro Fin de Semana and Tímido are the boleros; Ya Llegó La Navidad, Mal Pelao, La Bailadora and La Gotera de Juana are the merengues, and the Christmas one is still played every December.

What the pairing did was put a bolero singer in front of a merengue band. He has the diction and the restraint of a crooner and the band behind him is a dance orchestra, and the friction between those two things is the sound. He is called el señor bolero and also el calvo de oro, the golden bald man, and both names have followed him for sixty years.

He also turns up on records with Joseíto Mateo and Francis Santana — the generation that built the Dominican popular songbook, all of them in the same rooms.

Recognitions

In 2011 the Banco de Reservas proclaimed him a Reserva Musical. In 2014 the Ministry of Culture recognised him and he was honoured at the merengue festival.

In 2019, for the hundred and sixty-fifth anniversary of the national merengue day, the folklore directorate hung three photographs in the Galería Nacional: the choreographer Josefina Miniño, José Lázaro Sosa, and him. That is the closest thing the country has to putting a musician in a museum while he can still walk in and look at it.

Still here

Very few Dominican musicians of the La Voz Dominicana generation are alive. He has outlived the broadcaster, the theatre, the bathing resort, the hotel, the bandleader and most of the audience.

Dominican music pages post about him with a certain surprise, and the comments underneath say the same thing in different words: people did not realise he was still here. He is, and the voice, by the accounts of those who have heard him recently, is still doing what it did.