Dioris Valladares — Isidro Valladares Mejías, born on 14 August 1916 in San Pedro de Macorís — was a Dominican singer, bandleader, composer and arranger known as El Rey del Merengue, one of the musicians who established merengue on the New York Latin music circuit from the 1950s on.

Before merengue

Valladares joined New York’s small Dominican community in 1936 and began his career in 1939, touring the United States with rumba groups. He served in the U.S. Army during the Second World War and picked his career back up after his discharge in 1945, working through the decade in the backing orchestras of Xavier Cugat, Noro Morales, Anselmo Sacasas, José Curbelo, Enric Madriguera and the trumpeter and composer Roger King Mozian.

The Caborrojeña

In 1950 he joined the band of the Puerto Rican guitarist and singer Juanito Sanabria, which held a long residency at the Havana Madrid nightclub on Broadway and played the New York Daily News’s annual Harvest Moon Ball. At the Club Caborrojeña on Upper Broadway, Valladares began singing three merengues with Sanabria’s band; they proved so popular the band had to repeat them several times a night, and the club turned into a gathering place for New York’s Dominicans.

«Conjunto Típico Cibaeño»

Rafael Pérez, the founder of Ansonia Records, had already tried and failed to sell a merengue group on record; hearing of Sanabria’s success at the Caborrojeña, he signed the band for a session, and two of the four sides cut, «La Amaneca» and «La Moña», were hits in New York and Puerto Rico. Pérez then built a seven-piece group named for El Cibao, the region credited with merengue’s origin, naming Valladares lead singer and güiro player and putting the accordionist Ángel Viloria in charge of it as Ángel Viloria y su Conjunto Típico Cibaeño. Its records took off across Latin communities in the United States, the Caribbean and Central and South America, and by 1952 its success had opened the door for other merengue groups; its early-1950s hits were later gathered on three volumes credited to the group.

His own band

The Cibaeño broke up in 1953, when the saxophonist Ramón García and the tamborero Luis Quintero, both Dominican, joined Viloria and Valladares in forming their own bands. Valladares’s held a two-year residency at the Gloria Palace, in the Germantown section of New York, where the audience took in German tourists along with Latin dancers, and his name spread quickly through Latin communities across the United States and became a strong seller in South America. He recorded two volumes as Dioris Valladares y su Conjunto for Ansonia.

Pacheco at the conga

In October 1958 a young Johnny Pacheco was playing congas in Valladares’s orchestra at the Monte Carlo club, on 137th Street and Broadway, when the pianist Charlie Palmieri heard him play flute on the side and asked him to join his own group — the encounter that set Pacheco on the path to founding Fania Records a few years later.

Alegre and the pachanga years

In 1961, at the height of the pachanga craze, Valladares signed with Alegre Records. His debut for the label, «Vete pa’l colegio», carried a title track written by Roger King Mozian with lyrics by the label’s founder and producer, Al Santiago — a Dominican-slang joke roughly meaning “go to hell,” which by Santiago’s own account helped sell the record. «Yo la vi Vol. II» followed in 1963, and Valladares also took part in the historic jam-session recordings of the Alegre All-Stars. He moved to Musicor for «Con pimienta» (1968, reissued on Artol), adding boogaloo material to fit the moment, and appeared on the Cesta All-Stars’ «Live Jam Session» and «Salsa Festival» in the years that followed. «Pa’ bailar na’ ma’» (1977), back on Alegre, reunited him with Santiago, who produced it and wrote and played piano on its closing descarga, «Minor Minor».

Legacy

Valladares semi-retired to Long Island and died in New York on 26 July 2001, at eighty-four. His career runs in an almost unbroken line from a Broadway nightclub crowd demanding the same three merengues twice a night to the Conjunto Típico Cibaeño that carried the genre across the hemisphere, and on to a young conga player he shared a bandstand with before the world knew the name Johnny Pacheco.