The Labels That Brought Puerto Rican Music To The World
Welcome to the latest edition of All the Music of All the World, our weekly series where we aim to share music worth being passionate about. Consider us a guide who can help you get the most out of your Victrola by giving you new music to listen to, or new ways to think about music you already know.
Not to brag, but as you read this, I will be sitting on a beach somewhere west of Aguada, Puerto Rico. It’s a trip my wife and I have been planning for a while—since at least when we both became fans of Bad Bunny—and we’ve mapped out days of eating whole roasted chickens and fresh plantains at beloved food stands all over northwest Puerto Rico. It’s the only way we know how to escape the frozen hellscape that is Minnesota in January: Flying to one of the furthest U.S. beaches from our house.
A few years ago, when Puerto Rico became a prospective stop on our travel itinerary, as a music nut, I spent a bunch of time doing a deep dive on Puerto Rican music. I’ll cover Bad Bunny—the indisputably biggest musician on earth this decade—in a future edition of this column, especially his 2025 album Debi Tirar Mas Fotos, a love letter to the history of Puerto Rican music. But for this edition, I want to highlight two labels that did more to popularize and document Puerto Rican music than any other: Ansonia and Fania.
We’ll start with Ansonia, since it’s the smaller label. The label was formed in 1949 during the meringue craze in New York City in the 1940s. Following World War II, immigration from Puerto Rico boomed as U.S. industrialization needed more workers, and Puerto Rican citizens searched for better opportunities than the then-mostly agrarian society on the island could provide. That lead to labels like Decca hiring A&R men to figure out how to sell music to these new immigrants. One of those A&R men, Ralph Perez, decided to go into business for himself, sensing that the major labels of the time would be focusing on specific branches of Puerto Rican music that would perform commercially, but that there’d be an opportunity to find artists keeping the musical traditions of Puerto Rico—and other Latin communities-- alive, regardless of their ability to cross over.
Over the course of the ‘50s and ‘60s, the label released dozens of records by Cuban, Haitian, and Dominican artists, but their best releases were centered on the music of Puerto Rico. Above there’s an album from Noro Morales that shows the bleeding of other Latin sounds—mainly cha-cha and rumba from Cuba. Below, here’s something almost the complete opposite: An album from El Chuito de Bayamon that sounds like it could have been recorded in the island jungle on the album cover:
A Puerto Rican folk singer of renown by the time he laid down records for Ansonia, you can throw a dart at any El Chuito de Bayamon record and hit something with sounds that immediately transport you to an island paradise. Same goes for Ramito, whose El Cantor de la Montana album series are wall-to-wall fun. Here’s my favorite, Vol. 6.
If you want something more sweeping and romantic, go with German Rosario, whose Ansonia recordings showcase his clarion bell voice.
Ansonia also was the temporary home of Myrta Silva, a famous figure in Latin America for her TV appearances. In the early ‘60s, she made this album for Ansonia that almost is like a Barbara Streisand album: Big, emotional, open-hearted. Hear that album here.
I could go on and on here, but if you want to dig deeper yourself, head to Ansonia’s Bandcamp and go nuts.
While Ansonia’s biggest albums came in the early ‘60s, Fania’s breakthrough happened in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Formed by Dominican performer Johnny Pacheco, who got fed up with how little money the Latin labels in New York were paying him for huge records he had on the radio. He assembled the Fania All-Stars band, and hit the studio, and opened up his label to the surging population of Latin musicians in New York. He ended up creating the Motown for Latin Music.
Above is El Malo, the debut album from Puerto Rican band leader Willie Colon, who became the label’s answer to Stevie Wonder. A teenager when he laid down the album, he’d back up the label’s murderer’s row of singers—Celia Cruz, Hector Lavoe—as a bandleader and songwriter.
Lavoe—who’d go on to be Fania’s biggest breakout act—got his start singing on the first Colon record, recording 14 albums with Willie over the years. But it was on his own records, like the one below, where Lavoe became known as El Cantante, the singing star of salsa.
Lavoe’s life became such a story that Marc Antony starred in a biopic about him. He struggled to adjust to the sudden fame he had in Latin America, and started doing drugs. He was an unfortunate early AIDS and HIV casualty due to IV drug use, ultimately passing away in the early ‘90s.
Another singer with a tragic story on Fania was Ralfi Pagan, whose good looks and soulful voice lead him to being one of the first Latin artists ever to feature on Soul Train. While touring Colombia in the late ‘70s, Pagan was murdered by what is widely to be speculated as a promoter looking to get out of paying him. His fame never reached the heights of his peers due to that murder, but his albums have gotten reissued recently and are worth exploring.
One of Fania’s biggest stalwarts, and the last I’ll cover here, was the percussionist and bandleader Ray Barretto, whose deftness with boogaloo—the style of Latin soul music that rose in the ‘60s—and his congas are evident on every record he made for Fania. My favorite is Acid, an album that attempted to pick up longhair hippies with its title, but which is secretly just a tremendously awesome boogaloo record.
Fania is still open today, under Concord Records, and they’ve been reissuing most of the catalog on vinyl. You can grab a variety of their drops here.
-- Andrew Winistorfer
