The Orchestral Merengue: Johnny Ventura, Wilfrido Vargas and the Golden Era (1960–1990)

That transformation occurred in the sixties and seventies, and its two main protagonists were two men who fiercely competed against each other — a rivalry that divided the Dominican Republic into two fan bases — and who together built the golden era of orchestrated merengue.

Johnny Ventura: the Elvis of Merengue

Juan de Dios Ventura SorianoJohnny Ventura, nicknamed "El Caballo Mayor" — was born in Santo Domingo on March 8, 1940. He was the first to achieve widespread fame outside the Dominican Republic, and the artist who modernized merengue to transform it from folk music into an international sensation.

Ventura transformed merengue by adding complex brass arrangements and even elements of rock and roll, which became a useful canvas for Ventura's elaborate stage choreography and musical arrangements.

His orchestra — the Combo Show de Johnny Ventura — was considered one of the most significant groups in the musical history of the Caribbean nation. Ventura's novelty was incorporating humor into the lyrics of his songs, giving the genre an innovative touch. His big hits — "Patacón Pisao", "Pitaste", "Merenguero hasta la Tumbadora", "¿Pitaste?", "Un Poquito para Atrás por Favor" — mixed the danceable energy of merengue with lyrics that made people laugh, a territory the genre had not explored so effectively.

Ventura was called the "Elvis of merengue" by some in the music industry. The comparison was not only for his stage charisma — although that was immense — but for the cultural role he played: being the artist who took a genre considered lower class and turned it into something the whole world wanted to hear.

He was also the first to regularly bring Dominican merengue to international stages, traveling throughout Latin America and the United States in the sixties and seventies when few Hispanic Caribbean artists did so.

His musical career coincided with a renewed interest in Afro-Caribbean music, largely thanks to the New York label Fania Records, which revived interest in the work of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic in the late sixties and during the seventies. The legendary Celia Cruz recorded several songs with the movement that Ventura represented.

He won six Latin Grammys, including a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006. He later ventured into politics: he was deputy mayor of Santo Domingo from 1994 to 1998, and mayor from 1998 to 2002.

He died on July 28, 2021, in Santiago de los Caballeros, at the age of 81. President Luis Abinader declared three days of national mourning. The First Lady wrote: "Johnny Ventura, El Caballo Mayor, has physically left us, but his legacy and joy will always be with us."

Wilfrido Vargas: the man who sped up merengue

Wilfrido Vargas — born in Altamira, Puerto Plata, in the Dominican Republic — began his musical studies at the Municipal Music Academy at the age of ten. He has been a trumpeter, vocalist, arranger, composer, and producer.

He started his career with the band "Wilfrido Vargas y sus Beduinos" recording his first album in 1974. His proposal was different from Ventura's: where Ventura mixed tradition and humor, Vargas sped up the tempo — creating a faster, more electric, more contemporary merengue.

The rivalry between the two artists was legendary: Dominicans were divided between "wilfridistas" and "johnnyventuristas". One of the most remembered rumors of the time says that the rivalry was so intense that a whole media show was created between the two artists.

During the eighties, he had international commercial success with songs like "El Barbarazo", "El Jardinero", "La Medicina", and "El Loco y La Luna" (nominated for a Grammy in 1989).

"El Africano" — — was his most internationally known hit: the merengue that played at every party in Latin America in the eighties, irresistible in its energy and completely politically incorrect in its lyrics, but no one could stop dancing to it.

"Abusadora" and "A Mover la Colita" completed a catalog of ballroom merengues that defined the sound of Latin American parties in the eighties and nineties.

Vargas was also known as a talent developer: many of the most important merengue singers of the eighties and nineties passed through his orchestra before embarking on solo careers.

Los Hermanos Rosario: the next generation

The Hermanos Rosario — a family from Santiago de los Caballeros — continued the tradition of the merengue orchestra in the eighties with a more hard rock, more electric, more aggressive sound than that of Ventura and Vargas.

Their merengues — "La Dueña del Swing", "Aquí la gente se cuida", "Voy pa' llá" — are the merengue orchestra in its most electrified version, the Dominican response to the rock that their contemporaries were listening to in other countries.

Sergio Vargas: the romantic

Sergio Vargas — not related to Wilfrido — was the merengue artist who found his own territory in romantic merengue: love songs with the structure of merengue but the sensitivity of bolero, which captivated the audience that wanted to dance and at the same time feel that the dance had emotional content.

Merengue in New York: the diaspora

As important as merengue on the island was merengue in New York — where the Dominican community of the Washington Heights neighborhood turned Inwood and Upper Manhattan into a second home for the genre.

The Dominican orchestras that played in New York's dance halls in the seventies and eighties built a circuit parallel to that of Santo Domingo which, in many aspects, was more innovative: in direct contact with American jazz, salsa, and R&B, New York merengue absorbed influences that the island would have adopted late or never.

Editorial note: Johnny Ventura was the first Dominican to achieve widespread fame outside the Dominican Republic with merengue. Wilfrido Vargas was the one who accelerated the rhythm until it became something completely contemporary. Juan Luis Guerra was the one who made it poetry. Three men, three decades, three different ways of loving the same genre — and each of them convinced that their way was the right one. That diversity of visions within the same genre is exactly what produces musical richness: not homogeneity but the creative tension between artists who share the territory but inhabit it in radically different ways.

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