José Ramón Cordero, known throughout his career as El Escudo, was one of the founding voices of bachata. His high, plaintive delivery is among the most recognisable the genre has, and his records are among the hardest in it to play, because the arrangements behind them were written by Edilio Paredes. He died on 19 January 2017.

The campo and the capital

He grew up in the countryside near San Francisco de Macorís, and the friend he grew up singing and playing with was Paredes, who lived nearby and later became his compadre. The two of them worked through their own songs and other people’s at country parties. When Paredes left for Santo Domingo, Cordero followed him there.

His first real success came in 1966 with Yo la recuerdo, which the two of them sang as a duo and recorded for the label belonging to Cuco Valoy. He released a run of records with the Casa Alegre label around the same period.

Mexico through a Dominican guitar

What he brought to bachata came partly from somewhere else. Antonio Aguilar and Pedro Infante shaped his singing, and he recorded a great many Mexican songs as bachatas. Sometimes he went further and kept the ranchera in its original two-four or three-four time instead of the four-four the genre normally used, laying bachata’s percussive guitar over it. He drew on Puerto Rican jíbaro music as well, and on baladas such as Condenado a la distancia.

The songs he cut in the seventies with Paredes on lead guitar — Vuela paloma, Entre copa y copa, Las nieves de enero — stayed at the centre of his repertoire for the rest of his life. Amor del bueno, from 1974, became his anthem, and it is also the record by which Paredes is known as a guitarist.

The hardest repertoire in the genre

Because Paredes wrote such demanding arrangements, only the best players could accompany him, and a succession of the country’s finest guitarists passed through his group: Augusto Santos, Frank Méndez, Virgilio de la Cruz and Mártires de León. With Augusto Santos he also formed a singing duo, Los Inimitables, which produced Con golpes de pecho and Negra ¿por qué me dejaste?; Santos played the lead guitar on the 1967 single La causa de mi muerte.

After the electric guitar

Bachata changed when Blas Durán brought the electric guitar into it in 1987. A younger generation went on to an international reach their predecessors had never had, while players who stayed with acoustic instruments, Cordero among them, went on performing largely for audiences at home.

What brought his work back into view in the nineties was other musicians. Mártires de León, by then a master of the modern electric style, recorded the lead guitar on Manantial de amor, which sold strongly.

Vocal director

His ear and his sense of pitch got him work behind the glass as well, as a vocal director for the ENCA and ENFI studios in Santo Domingo. Monchy & Alexandra are the example usually given of what that work produced.

The Bachata Legends

In his last years he set out to revive classic acoustic bachata and take it abroad. With El Chivo Sin Ley, Edilio Paredes and Joan Soriano he formed the band The Bachata Legends, which released an album in 2011 and toured the United States and Europe.