Julio Jaramillo

Before that, however, there were years of searching and mistakes. At sixteen, after his father died in an accident and his mother expelled him from school for disciplinary issues, he earned a living as a fine shoe maker and later as a furniture polisher. But at night, when his workday ended, he sneaked into the clubs of La Lagartera or Maracaibo to sing for spare change. There, he met Hugo Reyes, who became his closest friend, and Rosalino Quintero, the arranger who would later play guitar and requinto on many of his recordings. It was also during those years that he recorded his first duets, like Pobre mi madre querida—a yaraví with a habanera rhythm—with Fresia Saavedra, and began rubbing shoulders with composers like Carlos Rubira Infante, who taught him to better tune his voice. There was no master plan: just the persistence of someone who knew that, sooner or later, the world would listen.

In 1955, at just twenty years old and already a father of two, he embarked on his first tour through the interior of Ecuador and reached as far as Cali, in Colombia. It wasn’t a luxurious trip: he slept in cheap boarding houses and sang wherever he was allowed, but it was the first step toward something bigger. By then, his voice was no longer that of a boy sneaking into bars: it was that of an artist beginning to leave his mark. In América and El Triunfo, radio stations sought him out to fill their programs. And though his personal life was a whirlwind—with loves, recognized and unrecognized children, and a family growing without order—on stage, everything seemed to fit. He recorded Fatalidad in 1956, and suddenly, he went from being just another name on the radio to a phenomenon crossing borders. It didn’t matter if the audience was from Venezuela, Mexico, or Colombia: when Jaramillo started to sing, everyone fell silent.