Johnny Pacheco—Pioneer of Black Caribbean Music—Passes Away
Courtesy of Fania Records
By Kristie Soares
Salsa music lost its founder last week—flutist, composer, band leader, and producer Johnny Pacheco passed away at 85 years old. In an early salsa landscape dominated by Puerto Rican and Cuban musicians, Dominican Johnny Pacheco must be considered one of the genre’s originators.
Pacheco co-founded salsa’s biggest record label, Fania Records, in 1964. Fania would go on to release the most popular salsa music during its heyday in the 1970s, including the iconic Celia & Johnny (1974). The cover of Celia & Johnny, which features Cruz and Pacheco clasping hands, is an indication of the multi-album partnership that would develop between the two in the decades to come.
Advertisement
Celia & Johnny, Vaya Records, Fania Subsidiary, 1974
Celia & Johnny would produce some of salsa’s most memorable songs, such as the iconic “Quimbara”. A 1974 video shows Cruz and Pacheco performing “Quimbara” together in Kinshasa. The two flew to Zaire with several other musicians, including James Brown and BB King, as part of a publicity campaign for the famed “Rumble in the Jungle” between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.
Although the performance in Africa was largely a commercial venture, it would become a foundational moment in salsa’s emergence as an Afro-diasporic music form. The video depicts Celia Cruz, a Black Cuban woman, singing alongside a band directed by Pacheco, a mixed-race Dominican. The image of the two artists of color, playing Afro-Cuban and Afro-Puerto Rican rhythms to an all-Black audience, would be later memorialized in the film Celia Cruz and the Fania All Stars in Africa.
Pacheco’s success in launching salsa into the mainstream fulfilled a vision dreamt nearly 150 years earlier. Caribbean thinkers such as Ramón Emeterio Betances proposed an Antillean Confederation in the mid-19th century. This nation—which was to be made up of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic—would stand in opposition to European colonialism.
Advertisement
Although the Antillean Confederation never came to be, Pacheco’s salsa movement represented its spirit—as music scholar Raúl Fernández argues. Despite its profit-driven motive, Fania was a record company run by Caribbean people, making Caribbean music. This, for Pacheco, was key. In his words, salsa is “not a rhythm, or a melody, or even a style. Salsa was—and still is—a Caribbean musical movement.”
As we celebrate Pacheco’s legacy in the days to come, may we remember him not only as a talented musician and shrewd business man, but also as a pioneer of a specifically Black Caribbean style of music—salsa.