The Dominican Blues ..."Santo Domingo Blues"
Guitar-playing singer songwriter Luis Vargas makes his mark in the world of Dominican Bachata music with a style all his own, “not too agitated, but not too blue either�, as he puts it. Luis takes us back to his own humble beginnings in the dusty little town of Santa Maria in the Dominican Republic, where his father still lives.

Santo Domingo Blues does not use a narrator or “experts� but instead relies on musical performances, first person accounts, and character-driven scenes involving Luis and other bachateros, as these musicians are known.

Bachata is genuinely a music of the people and the denizens of the bars and bodegas, the street vendors and the car service drivers, all contribute to the telling of the story. Recalling the American blues, bachata was infamous as the anthem of the hard-drinking, womanizing, down-on-his-luck man, vilified as the entertainment of the brothels and the cabarets, and worshipped by the down-trodden poor as the deepest expression of their feelings.

In lyrics heavy with sexual innuendo, double entendres and outright bawdiness, bachateros address themes of the everyman, singing comically exaggerated tales of ruined romances and unrequited love, of barroom camaraderie and maudlin drunken escapades.
Santo Domingo Blues