"Maestros de Santo Domingo", a compilation about the musics of Santo-Domingo, a lot of bachata, a bit of meringue; a lot of guitar, a bit of accordion. It has Edilio Paredes, guitar maestro, the founding father of Bachata next to Leonardo Paniagua, José Manuel Calderón, Ramón Cordero, and more.

@Joan Soriano on Myspace : "El Duque " Born in the rural countryside of Monte Plata near Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic in 1972, gifted singer/guitarist Joan Soriano has recently captured the attention of two American documentary filmmakers and a broad audience of World Music enthusiasts.

@Spinner : "The attitude toward this style, this guitar music -- Trujillo was generally repressive," de Menil says. "He did create a culture of demeaning the people that were from the countryside, less sophisticated, this self-hatred. Since Trujillo's time, that took off into a much more formal kind of prejudice against guitar music, which continues to today. .."

@IASO Records : : From infancy, Edilio has always been a prodigiously talented musician. He is a native of the small country town of La Galana, near San Francisco de Macoris, and was the first person in his family to sing or play an instrument (although his brother and his three sons have since become well known musicians in their own right).

@Leonardo Paniagua on Wikipedia : Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Leonardo Paniagua's bachata albums were the best-selling. With his soft voice and romantic style, he appealed beyond bachata's usual working-class audience. Paniagua was one of the first artists to form a movement of romantic-bachateros, artists who helped the genre emerge into mainstream music.

@About.com : The first recognized bachata singles (“Barracho de Amor” and “Que Sera De Mi”) were recorded by Jose Calderon in 1961 although it was a decade before the word became commonly attached to a musical genre. In the 1960s, merengue continued to reign supreme in the Dominican Republic and ‘bachateros’ had no reliable outlet in higher social circles nor in the media.

@Afropop Worldwide : Luis Vargas : "First they called me the "Jefe Supremo de la Bachata" [Supreme Boss of Bachata]. A friend of mine who was a radio disk jockey baptized me with that one. His name is Sdalvador Díaz Alejo. In that area of the northeast border line [with Haiti] I was the only bachatero. There were no others. That's when they called me the "Jefe Supremo." Later when I moved to Santiago de los Caballeros, they baptized me the "Rey Supremo de la Bachata" [the Supreme King of Bachata]."

@Answwers.com : Dominican singer El Chaval -- often referred to as El Chaval de la Bachata -- was an active recording artist for over a decade before breaking into the Latin music mainstream in 2007. Born Linar Espinal on April 12, 1978, in Juncalito Jánico, Dominican Republic, he moved with his family to the city of Santiago in 1985.

@iFest : In the early 1980s, Ramon Cordero, Ysidro Cabrera ‘El Chivo Sin Ley’ and Edilio Paredes collaborated to create a performance series called “Lunes de Amargue” (Amargue translates loosely as the bitter-sweet feeling of unrealized love). The series was so successful that copycat ‘Noches de amargue’ surfaced and bachata began to be referred to as “Musica de amargue”, a term still used today.

to be continued… probably