Julito Deschamps was a Dominican bolero singer, pianist, guitarist and composer, and the defining voice of the country’s late-night music. He worked in small rooms for most of his life and refused the things that would have made him famous.

The boîte

A boîte is a small dark room with a piano, a few tables and no stage worth the name. Santo Domingo and Santiago had a circuit of them through the sixties and seventies, and that circuit is where Dominican bolero actually lived — not on the radio, not in the ballrooms, but at close range in front of forty people at two in the morning.

He was the figure of that world. The voice is powerful and complaining at once, the diction exact, and everything about the delivery assumes the listener is close enough to hear him breathe.

The mathematician

Musicians called him el matemático because of how he chose songs. His repertoire is a very deliberate list — Sortilegio, La Gloria Eres Tú, Delirio, ¿Cómo Fue?, Miénteme, Tres Palabras, Pecadora, Te Necesito, Yo Vivo Mi Vida, Amor Perdido — and almost everything he picked up became identified with him.

He came into it as a singer with Papatín Ovalles’s orchestra in 1952, and his first recording did not arrive until 1960: Tu Palabra y La Mía, written by Antonio Morel. What made his name was Será Muy Fácil, by Jesús Torres Tejeda. Llorará Por Mí, Dos Palabras, Negra Soledad, Poquita Fe, Háblame, Olvídate de Mí, Torpeza, Cosas del Alma, Tú Mi Delirio and Como Duele Una Traición followed.

Sólo Para Amarte, Llorarás Por Mí and a record made with the Cuban singer Olga Guillot are among the albums.

The songs that were banned

In 1969 he recorded two Christmas songs, Navidad 69 and Aguinaldo 69. They were the first compositions ever recorded of a writer named Mundito Espinal, and by Espinal’s own reading their lyrics were calls to rise against the government of Joaquín Balaguer.

The Comisión de Espectáculos Públicos y Radiofonía banned them. A third, Dictadura con Apoyo Popular, is named in the accounts as following.

It is worth being exact about whose songs those were, because almost every page that repeats the story says Deschamps was recording his own compositions. He was not. He was the singer a young writer got, and being sung by him was how a composer arrived — which is a description of what he was worth in that decade.

The refusal

He never appeared on television. In a country where a career was built on a variety programme and where every contemporary of his was on screen, he simply did not go, and a Dominican newspaper was still writing about that decision twenty-eight years after his death.

That is why he is remembered the way he is: not through footage, because there is almost none, but through recordings and through people who were in the room. The bohemian who refused the noise is the phrase that keeps getting used about him, and it is accurate about the career as well as the voice.

He died in 1985, at fifty-five. His son recorded too, a generation later and in a form he would not have recognised: Papo, of the merenrap duo Sandy & Papo MC, who also died young.