Juanito Valderrama

Born on 24 May 1916 in Torredelcampo, Jaén, Spain, Juan Valderrama Blanca grew up amid the rural landscapes of Andalucia, where flamenco surrounded him from an early age. As a teenager he caught the attention of the singer Niña de la Puebla, who brought him to Madrid for performances in 1935. Throughout the Spanish Civil War he entertained troops and began recording, later securing his place within the flamenco community. He wrote roughly three hundred songs, frequently working alongside his longtime guitarist El Niño Ricardo, among them “De Polizón” and “Madre Hermosa.” The piece most closely associated with him, “El Emigrante,” arose from his reflections on the exiled Republicans who left Spain after the conflict; he performed it in the 1960 film of the same name and the song later surfaced in La Guerra De Papá (1977). Beginning in the 1950s he took roles in several motion pictures, among them El Rey De La Carretera (1956), El Emigrante (1960) and El Padre Coplillas (1968), the last of which featured his renditions of “Grandeza Divina,” “Plegaria De Paz,” “Ruiseñores Del Alba” and “Corazón A Corazón.”

Although he remained a steadfast guardian of flamenco’s traditional forms, Valderrama also worked to sustain its appeal among younger listeners. In 1983 he received the Medalla al Mérito en el Trabajo, and over the following two decades his contributions earned widespread recognition across Spain. Tribute events followed at Madrid’s Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas in 1994, the Bienal de Flamenco de Sevilla in 1998, the Festival del Cante de Las Minas de La Unión in 2000 and Granada’s Teatro Alhambra in 2001.

From the mid-1950s he maintained a close partnership with the singer Lolita Caballero, born Dolores Abril, yet could not secure a divorce from his first wife for more than twenty years. Early in 2004 a Madrid concert staged in his honor brought together numerous prominent performers. Shortly afterward he suffered a heart attack and died while recovering, on 12 April 2004 in Espartinas, Seville, Spain.