Joaquín Balaguer was a Dominican poet and essayist whose verse was set to music and recorded by many of the country’s best-known singers. He was also president of the republic.

His part in it was narrow and specific: he wrote words, other people wrote the tunes, and a great many artists sang the results.

Lucía

Lucía is the oldest of them and the one that travelled furthest. It is a criolla — the Dominican parlour song of the early twentieth century — with music by Machilo Guzmán, and the national archive registers it plainly: words by Balaguer, music by Guzmán.

It has been recorded across generations and in several forms. Eduardo Brito sang it first, which places it in the repertoire of the finest Dominican voice of its era. Lope Balaguer and Camboy Estévez kept it as a romantic song. Decades later Alex Bueno rearranged it as a merengue, which is a peculiar fate for a parlour piece and the reason most people who know the melody today know it at all.

The poems and their composers

The rest of the corpus belongs to the second half of the century, and it works the way a poet’s work usually reaches music: a composer picks a text and sets it, and different composers pick different ones.

Romanticismo is the best documented. Fernando Villalona recorded it in 1996 for the album Soy Un Hombre Feliz, and the rights metadata on every platform that carries it credits two composers — Balaguer for the words and Pedro Samuel Rodríguez for the music.

Rosa Silvestre went to Anthony Ríos, El Pasado to Omar Franco, and Amor Tardío to Cheo Zorrilla, in a setting by Ricardo Bello. Amor Romántico was recorded by Gina D’Alessandro and Amistad by Lope Balaguer. Melancolía Otoñal and Alma de Mujer were sung by Pedro Samuel Rodríguez, and those two come from named books — the first from Voz Silente, the second from La Venda Transparente.

These are not lyrics written for songs. They are poems, published as poems in collections, that composers went to afterwards and lifted, which is the older relationship between verse and music and a rarer one now.

The music of his verses

The settings were eventually gathered into a record whose title says what it is: the music of his verses. The national archive holds it in its collection of Dominican music.

A body of Dominican romantic song exists whose words came from one writer, and the singers who carried it include some of the largest names the country has produced. The recordings are real, the credits are documented, and the songs are still sung.