Pop: Latin Soul

In today’s pop world, the most distinctive styles are often the most motley. Imagine, for instance, a vocal mixture of Johnny Mathis and Ray Charles with a Latin American flavor and a classical-tinged guitar backing. That musical hybrid is José Feliciano. In recent weeks his single release of Light My Fire and his LP entitled Feliciano! have both spun high on the bestseller charts. He has drawn cheering, sellout crowds to performances at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles and Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. He seems to be in demand everywhere, for television shows, movie sound tracks, personal appearances.

Seeking Identity. But José is sorting the offers carefully. Although he is only 23, he has been a professional for six years, and some of the people who want him now were not there when he needed them. Born in Puerto Rico, the second of eight brothers, he was raised in a Manhattan slum after his father gave up farming to find a job in New York City. Jose learned to play the concertina at six and the guitar at nine. The advent of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s inspired him to try singing, too. At 17, he began plying the coffee-house circuit from Greenwich Village to Chicago’s Old Town, combining folk music with rock, standards and novelties.

José’s problem was that his vocal solos were overshadowed by his own accompaniments. He won applause for the dextrous way that he applied blues and a beat to the delicate lines of traditional Spanish guitar. But his high, quavery tenor, though obviously brimming with feeling, was merely good; it had too much of other singers in it and too little of Feliciano. So Jose spent some lean years in search not only of exposure but also of an identity.

Last year he found both. After triumphing at a festival in Argentina, he made Spanish-language records that boosted him into prominence all across the continent. And the renewed contact with his musical roots enabled him to settle at last into his characteristic, soulful Latin sound.

Fun on a Dime. Today José and his wife Hilda live in a $60,000 home an hour’s drive down the coast from Los Angeles. There they are surrounded by 400 birds, tanks of tropical fish, six dogs and a small chinchilla farm. The new mode of Jose’s life is a little bewildering to members of his family, some of whom even think wistfully of the old days in Manhattan. “In a way it was nice to be poor,” says his 18-year-old brother, George. “We could get so much fun out of a little dime.”

But José has no regrets. “I always wanted the fame,” he says. Besides, his childhood was even more circumscribed than his brothers’. To him, the past recalls the awkwardness of getting lost in the city and having to call his family to help him home, the loneliness of being shut out of ordinary athletics and socializing at school, the painful necessity of relying on benefactors to guide him through life. He has been blind since birth.