Tony Berroa, born Basilio Berroa in the batey Magdalena in La Romana province, is a Dominican bachata singer and songwriter. He is billed as El Solterito del Este and known in the trade as El Macho, and he is one of the singers who told the country bachata was going to win before it had.

Second guitar

He wanted to be a baseball player, like most Dominican boys, and the music took over slowly. His father backed him and paid for his first two recordings, Te Quiero a Mi Manera and Por la Cola de un Motor.

Before any of that he was second guitar in the band of Marino Pérez. Playing the second guitar behind a figure of that size is the standard apprenticeship in this music: you learn the repertoire, the phrasing and the discipline of not being the one out front.

La Bachata Tumbó Todo

His first album came out in 1992, credited to El Solterito del Este y Los Reyes del Este. It carried El Que No Baila Bachata Ta’ Quedao — a title that reads as a boast and was closer to a forecast.

La Bachata Tumbó Todo followed in 1995 and put him among the most-heard singers of the moment, at the height of Luis Vargas, Juan Bautista, Anthony Santos and Raulín Rodríguez. The title says the same thing as the 1992 single, only louder: bachata knocked everything over.

He was right on both counts, and he was saying it at a time when the Dominican upper class still treated the music as an embarrassment.

A solterito del este living in the Cibao

He came to Santiago de los Caballeros in the eighties on a contract for three parties and never left. Nearly four decades later he still lives there, and most of his career has been made from the Cibao rather than from the east he is named after.

Amargado Por Ella, Amor Millonario, De Hora en Hora, El Amor Que Siento Por Ti, El Caballo Blanco and Cuidemos los Niños are among the songs that kept him working. Pero Te Vas a Arrepentir arrived in 2022, thirty years after the first record.