Víctor José Víctor Rojas, who performed as Víctor Víctor, was a Dominican singer-songwriter and guitarist. He wrote Mesita de Noche, and the album that carried it did more than any other record of its moment to move bachata out of the margins of Dominican music and onto stages abroad.

Los Pepines

He was born in 1948 in Los Pepines, a neighbourhood of Santiago de los Caballeros. He came to music as a percussionist and guitarist rather than as a singer, and at the start of the seventies he was working inside the orchestra of Wilfrido Vargas.

There, in 1972, he recorded El Camino de los Amantes. The Venezuelan singer Felipe Pirela took the song up shortly afterwards and carried it across the continent, which is how his name first travelled: as an author, before anyone outside the country had heard him sing.

Nueva Forma

He belonged to the generation that turned Dominican song political after the dictatorship rather than during it. With Sonia Silvestre he founded Nueva Forma, a group working in the protest song of the seventies, and the two of them were on the bill of the festival Siete Días con el Pueblo in 1974.

He was also among the first Dominican musicians to travel to Cuba while the government forbade it. Álbum Rojo, Chile Vive and Neruda Raíz y Geografía came out of those years, and he kept returning to that material for the rest of his life: Verde y Negro, in 2007, was built entirely from songs about the people who fought for Dominican freedom.

He recorded shared albums with other Dominican musicians of the same conviction, En Son de Felicidad with Francis Santana and Cara o Cruz with José Antonio Rodríguez.

Mesita de Noche

Inspiraciones appeared in 1990 and changed the standing of a whole genre. Bachata had been treated at home as music of the poor and the cantina; the record put it in a different register without softening it, and Mesita de Noche went out across Latin America and Spain. In 1993 the Premios Ondas named him the year’s revelation among Latin artists.

Albums followed through the nineties and two thousands: Tu Corazón, Un Chin de Veneno, Alma de Barrio, Cajita de Música and Pisando Rayas.

The songwriter

Much of his catalogue reached the public in other people’s voices. Milly Quezada and Rubby Pérez recorded him at home, and abroad his songs were taken up by Celia Cruz, Marc Anthony, Dyango and Azúcar Moreno.

Bachata Entre Amigos

In 2006 he made Bachata Entre Amigos, produced by the guitarist Juan Francisco Ordóñez. The record sets songs by Joan Manuel Serrat, Joaquín Sabina, Silvio Rodríguez and Fito Páez as bachatas, sung as duets with their authors, so that several of them heard their own work in the rhythm for the first time.

He died in Santo Domingo on 16 July 2020, at seventy-one.