Rico López, born Benigno Ricardo López in Sabana de la Mar, was a Dominican singer and composer who worked equally in merengue and in salsa. He is one of the best voices of his generation and one of the least written about.

Bottles, peanuts, shoes

He was born poor, and he paid for his own secondary schooling in the capital by working the street around his classes: bottles, peanuts, shoes, depending on the hour and the day. The voice came out of that work rather than alongside it. A vendor sells by singing, and the pregón is a form with its own rules about where a phrase has to land.

That is not a colourful detail. The pregón is a real vocal form with its own phrasing and its own reasons for landing on certain syllables, and a singer who learned it on the street arrives at a bandstand already knowing how to carry over noise.

A scholarship trained him as a carpenter and he built his own guitar, which is what he serenaded his classmates with. At twenty-five he enrolled in the police academy — not to become a policeman but to get into the National Police Band, where he learned the güira and sang merengue at large dances.

Standing in for Johnny Ventura

He left the police in 1966 for Bienvenido Bustamante’s Santa Cecilia Orchestra, then Rodolfo Manzano’s. Two years later Johnny Ventura could no longer lead his Combo Show and López took his place at the front of it.

He recorded El Gago there, which was a hit, and went to New York as the band’s lead singer for a six-month residency at the Havana San Juan Hotel ballroom. Coming home he became a regular television face.

Seven years with Solano

In 1971 Rafael Solano invited him into his orchestra and he stayed seven years, sharing the vocals with Vinicio Franco and writing several of the hits. What he became known for was the fast material — guaguancó, guaracha, son montuno — which in a Dominican orchestra of that period meant he was the one carrying the Cuban side of the book.

Canto de Remos

In 1977 Armando Beltré, one of Solano’s trumpet players, arranged a record for him and backed him with an eleven-piece Conjunto Especial: three trumpets, two saxophones, piano, tres, and percussion enough to match anything being cut in New York that year. They recorded it at Estudio Fabiola in Santo Domingo and Ansonia released it as Canto de Remos.

López wrote half the album. No Te Puedo Olvidar is the piece to hear — a guaguancó with a lovelorn lyric, sung with a melancholy that the tempo does nothing to soften. Vinicio Franco is on the coro.

It is an obscure record and it should not be. The salsa on it is hidden between the merengues, which is probably why collectors have gone past it for fifty years.

His own orchestra

An album of merengues followed for Ansonia with his own band, Los Mensajeros, and then a distribution deal as Rico López y su Orquesta with Kubaney, Solano’s label, for three more records, mostly merengue.

He died in 1991, at fifty-one. Two Ansonia albums and a run of Kubaney LPs are what is left, and almost nobody has looked at them since.