Benny Moré

Bartolomé Maximiliano Moré Gutiérrez was born on 24 August 1919 in Santa Isabel de las Lajas, in the Cienfuegos region of Cuba, the eldest of eighteen children in a poor, rural, Afro-Cuban family. His maternal great-great-grandfather was said to be the son of a king in the Kingdom of Kongo, captured by slave traders, who later became a free man. As a child he made his first guitar himself.

He left Lajas for Havana in 1936, aged 17, and rose to prominence singing on Havana radio stations in the early 1940s. In the late 1940s he went to Mexico, where he met the mambo bandleader Dámaso Pérez Prado and sang guaracha-mambos with him, achieving great success. The name Benny Moré was adopted around this time.

He returned to Cuba in 1952, working with Bebo Valdés and Ernesto Duarte, and helped fellow Cienfuegos musicians Orquesta Aragón break into the competitive Havana scene. In 1953 he formed his own big band, the Banda Gigante, which became one of the leading Cuban big bands of the 1950s.

Moré was a master of the soneo, the art of vocal improvisation in the Cuban son, and mastered the whole range of Cuban music, including son montuno, mambo, bolero, guaracha and cha-cha-chá. He could not read or write music, yet he had the deep respect of the best musicians in the country. He was known as El Bárbaro del Ritmo, the Wizard of Rhythm, and El Sonero Mayor, the greatest of the sonero singers.

When the Cuban Revolution came in 1959, Moré chose to stay in Cuba rather than leave for Miami like many of his peers. He was guest of honour at the first festival of Cuban music in Havana in 1962. Suffering from alcoholism, he died of liver cirrhosis on 19 February 1963, aged 43. A bronze statue stands on the Paseo del Prado in Cienfuegos, and he was inducted into the Latin Grammy Hall of Fame in 2013 and the Latin Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2016.