Mario César de Jesús Báez, born in San Pedro de Macorís on 18 August 1924 and died in Mexico City on 25 July 2008, was a Dominican songwriter and music publisher who, writing simply as Mario de Jesús, became one of the most recorded bolero composers of the twentieth century — so identified with Mexico that many Mexicans assumed he was one of their own.

From journalism to Peer International

He began as an entertainment columnist for the newspaper La Nación and the magazine Revista Salón Fígaro in the Dominican Republic before moving to New York in the late 1940s to write for Revista Teatral. Hired by the publisher Peer International in 1950, he had his first hit two years later with «No toques ese disco», recorded by Bienvenido Granda with La Sonora Matancera.

A catalogue recorded across a continent

He relocated to Mexico in 1959 and was later naturalized there, building a catalogue of some 300 songs recorded by an extraordinary range of singers: Javier Solís, Vicente Fernández, Luis Miguel, Plácido Domingo, Julio Iglesias, Los Panchos, Pedro Infante, Celia Cruz, Lucho Gatica and his fellow Dominican Charytin, among many others. His songs included «Y…», «Se me olvidó tu nombre» and «Voy a perder la cabeza por tu amor», a signature hit for José Luis Rodríguez «El Puma». He also founded two publishing houses, Editorial Musical Latinoamericana (1968) and Editora Leo Musical (1975), to represent his own and other composers’ work.

A career of honors

His awards spanned four decades and several countries, from the Ángel Viloria trophy in New York in 1950 to Venezuela’s Guaicaipuro de Oro in 1980 and an ASCAP award in 1995 for «Ni con la vida te pago», recorded by Vicente Fernández. In 2007 the Dominican Republic named him a Knight of the Order of Merit of Duarte, Sánchez y Mella.

Legacy

Mario de Jesús died in the country that had adopted him as a composer, but his catalogue — still recorded by new generations of singers — remains as Dominican as the artist who signed it.