Danny Rivera

Danny Rivera (born 27 February 1945) is a singer and songwriter born in San Juan whose career spans nearly 50 years. He is well known in Puerto Rico for his political activism. In 2008, Rivera acquired Dominican Republic citizenship. After 12 years of work, Danny Rivera and Nelson González in 2014 finished work putting new life into the classical bolero - in Spanish. Rivera and González Hit the Heart of the Latin American Song Book on Obsesión (release 25 March 2014) Musical career Danny Rivera is often called “the national voice of Puerto Rico", but his passionate singing style is known in the Spanish-speaking world. In Latin America, he has been a familiar face on television since 1968. Over the course of fifty years, Rivera has recorded over seventy albums and is the only Puerto Rican to star at Carnegie Hall in four different decades (1979, 1989, 1999, 2010). He was born of humble origins in one of the deepest Afro-Rican culture zones—Santurce, Puerto Rico, the home of many of the island's most popular musicians and now part of the modern metropolitan area of San Juan. Born on 27 February 1945 in the neighborhood of 23 Abajo, named for one of the stops on a now-defunct trolley line, his first experiences with singing were in the chorus of an evangelical church and in the bars of his neighborhood, and with the barriles (barrel drums) of the street-side bomba that is Puerto Rico’s strongest link to the era of plantation slavery. He made his first professional impression as a big-band singer in 1968, in the Hotel San Juan with César Concepción’s orchestra, the finest of its day. Televised music festivals are important talent showcases in Latin America, and after Rivera was chosen as Revelation of the Year in the 1968 Popularity Festival, he became a familiar face in Puerto Rico through television appearances. With a repertoire that emphasized the bolero and looked to progressive song movements, he was an emblematic figure of the bohemia of the 1970s that based itself at the nightclub in Viejo San Juan called Ocho Puertas (Eight Doors).