Radhamés Aracena was a Dominican broadcaster, record producer and businessman. He built the radio station, the studio, the pressing plant and the label that carried bachata out of the bars and into every house in the country, and he did it while the rest of Dominican media was refusing to play the music at all.

A shop on El Conde

He was born in Santiago in 1930 and grew up in the capital, which in those years carried the dictator’s name. At eighteen, still in school, he walked into a radio station and asked the director for a chance at the microphone. He got it, and within a few years he was one of the best-known voices on the dial.

His programme was an hour of music followed by a full hour of advertisements. He charged almost nothing for the airtime and sold it to corner shops and neighbourhood businesses, and the striking thing is that listeners stayed through the ads. That instinct — that ordinary people would sit through anything if it sounded like their own lives — is the whole of his later career in miniature.

In 1955 he opened a record shop in the partitioned front room of a widow’s house near El Conde, the capital’s smart shopping street, with a borrowed record player so customers could listen before buying. He had the local rights to the Mexican label that issued Pedro Infante, and he added more: the catalogue of the bolero singer Lucho Gatica, a Colombian house whose guitar music sold heavily on the island, and eventually RCA and CBS.

Four years later he moved to a real storefront on El Conde itself — and that same year the dictator’s family opened a pressing plant and made importing foreign records illegal, which removed his entire stock at a stroke. He kept the business alive by putting a pinball machine in the shop. He also began recording local bands with a microphone and a tape deck, which is how the rest of it started.

Guarachita on the dial

The dictatorship ended in 1961 and the equipment of a controlled media system came onto the market cheap. He bought a transmitter and a licence, spent a year testing, and in 1964 put Radio Guarachita on 690 AM.

The building had two floors. Upstairs were the studios and a radio theatre that seated a hundred and fifty people for live broadcasts, with the main booth open to anyone who wandered in. Downstairs he sold electronics — mostly parts for mending radios and televisions, which tells you exactly who he expected his listeners to be.

He opened by playing the imported Mexican and Cuban records he stocked in the shop, on the theory that a station should sound polished. Then he looked at who was actually listening: people newly arrived in the city from the countryside, who wanted the local guitar music and did not care that it was badly recorded. He abandoned the polish and gave them what they wanted.

Not the first, but the one that carried

He is often called the first man to put bachata on the radio. He was not, and the best authority for that is Aracena himself, who credited Cuco Valoy as the first disc jockey in the country to play it on air — Valoy did it on another station under a stage name, years before, and a broadcaster known as Charlie-Charlie was doing it too.

What Aracena had was reach. His was a national AM signal at a moment when the wealthy families who controlled the rest of Dominican media had settled into an outright boycott of the music, calling it vulgar and a drag on the country. He ignored them and ended up with something close to a monopoly on the genre’s diffusion, which is a different achievement from being first and a larger one.

The queue on Saturday morning

His first records were cut on gear meant for advertising jingles and they sounded like it. After a session with José Manuel Calderón in 1962 he is said to have been too embarrassed to let the singer hear the playback. He bought better equipment, taught himself to engineer, and then sat in on the mixing of everything the label released and drew the sleeve artwork himself.

Musicians began gathering outside his house on Saturday mornings hoping for a turn at the microphone. The ones who got it include a large share of the names the genre is now built on: José Manuel Calderón, Leonardo Paniagua, Blas Durán, Ramón Cordero and Edilio Paredes. Merengue típico came through the same door — Tatico Henríquez, Guandulito and Fefita la Grande all made records there — and so, later, did Luis Segura.

He built the rest of the chain around the studio: a pressing factory that manufactured for his own two labels and for rival producers as well, on top of the shop and the station. He controlled the recording, the manufacture, the distribution and the airplay of the music he sold, which no competitor could match.

The station that read the mail

Guarachita was also, and this is not a footnote, a postal service. Announcers read out listeners’ letters and telegrams on air around the clock, in a country where almost nobody had a telephone. Somebody arriving in the capital to find a relative whose address they had lost could go to the station and have the family called to meet them there.

People kept the radio on all day in case their name came up. Nothing about that was charity — it was the most effective audience-retention scheme anyone in Dominican radio has ever devised — but it made the station a fixture of ordinary life for a very large number of people, and it is the reason the music that played between the messages went everywhere.

What the musicians were paid

The other half of the record is not flattering. Session players remember the studio, which occupied a floor of his own house, as a hard place to work: Edilio Paredes and Joan Soriano have both described being made to take their shoes off at the door and play twelve-hour shifts barefoot without being fed.

The contracts have been disputed for decades. Fees were small, and the families of dead artists are still claiming royalties they say were never paid. He also had a settled habit of taking other people’s hits: when a record he did not own started selling, he would cut his own version with one of his artists and let the station do the rest. In the eighties he did it repeatedly to Juan Bautista, re-recording song after song with a singer billed as El Solterito del Sur until the copies were better known than the originals.

And yet many of the same musicians say they owe him their careers, and say it without irony. Both things are true at once, and any account that keeps only one of them is describing someone else.

Losing the country

Bachata changed in the nineties. The guitars went electric, the boycott quietly collapsed as the music turned respectable, the diaspora carried it abroad, and foreign labels with real budgets arrived to sign the artists he had spent thirty years developing. Competing with them was a new experience for him.

His answer was to move Guarachita from AM to FM. It sounded better and it cost him everything that mattered: the AM signal had covered the whole republic, and the FM one reached Santo Domingo. The station that had made a national genre became a city station.

He died in December 1999, at sixty-nine, with a stack of unfinished projects. Two of them were ahead of anything else he had done: a record by Joan Soriano and an album of bachatas sung in Haitian Creole. The tapes were lost. Both were eventually made again by other people, the Creole record only fifteen years later.