Raúl Martínez, who sings as Raulín Rosendo, is a Dominican salsa singer. He came up in merengue, fronting one of the biggest Dominican orchestras of the nineteen-seventies, and made his name a second time in New York in the nineties as a sonero.

Los Hijos del Rey

He was born on 30 August 1957 in Villa Duarte, on the eastern edge of Santo Domingo, and began performing at twelve with a merengue group called El Chivo y su Banda.

In the seventies he became one of the two lead voices of Los Hijos del Rey, the orchestra Wilfrido Vargas had put together. He fronted it alongside Fernando Villalona, with Bonny Cepeda directing from the piano and writing the arrangements, and the records came out on Karen. Marisela, La Mazorca, La Boda de Marisela and La Tetera y la Tijera date from those years. Sergio Vargas would front the same orchestra later.

New York

He moved to New York and worked there with Conjunto Clásico and with Milly, Jocelyn y Los Vecinos. His own records began with Salsa con Amor in 1988 and Salsa, Solamente Salsa in 1991, and by 1993 he was recording in the city with the producer Ricky González, who cut Amor en Secreto and Santo Domingo with him.

El sonero que el pueblo prefiere

The record of that title, from 1995, was the best-selling album of its year and carried Uno Se Cura, which is the song most people name first. It brought him a nomination at the Casandra awards at home and another at the A.C.E. awards in New York.

The albums that followed put him among the most widely heard salsa singers of the decade: Dominicano Para el Mundo, ¡Simplemente! ¡Contrólate!, Llegó la Ley and Donde Me Coja la Noche, one a year from 1996. He has gone on recording since — En Venezuela, De Aquí Pa’ Allá, La Fama Es Peligrosa, Dame Otra Oportunidad and, in 2021, Tranquilo Que Yo Controlo.

The sonero

He is billed as El Sonero del Pueblo. A sonero is judged on what he invents over the montuno rather than on what he brings prepared, and he did that work in both of his genres: first trading verses at the front of a merengue orchestra, then over a salsa rhythm section in New York.