Bobby Capó

Puerto Rican Singer-Songwriter and Composer

Félix Roberto Manuel Rodríguez Capó (Coamo, January 1, 1921 - New YorkDecember 18, 1989), better known as Bobby Capó, was an internationally known singer and songwriter from Puerto Rico. He usually combined ballads with classical music, Puerto Rican folk elements and even Andalusian music, as to produce many memorable Latino pop songs which featured elaborate, dramatic lyrics. Capó was born in Coamo, one of Puerto Rico's oldest settlements, located in the Island's south quadrant. After earning a strong reputation as a likable, versatile singer, he adopted his stage name (Rodriguez is one of Puerto Rico's most common surnames, and he opted to use his mother's less common one instead) and emigrated to the city of New York, early in the 1940s. He then joined Xavier Cugat's orchestra. From that moment on, he went on to become an idol all over Latin America. Capó was a polifacetic entertainer. Apart from singing, he was also a television host, as well as technical and musical director. However, his somewhat intimate songs are what Capó was -and is- best known for. Capó was a prolific song writer and wrote for many of his contemporaries. Many of the songs he wrote were smash hits in Puerto Rico, and occasionally in the rest of Latin America. One of his self-penned songs was El Negro Bembón ("The Big-Lipped Black Guy") a song not meant to be a derogatory song, since it half-humorously denounced the racial killing of an Afro-Puerto Rican (in a country whose racial relations, while sometimes acrimonious, are slightly more tolerant than the norm elsewhere). The song was a smash hit for Cortijo y su Combo in the mid-1950s. The song, with local circumstances and character name changed, became "El Gitano Antón,", a huge hit for Catalan rumba singer Peret in Spain around the mid 1960s. Another of Capó's songs is "Sin Fe" ("Without Faith"), sometimes known as "Poquita Fe" ("Little Faith"). It became a proper hit in Puerto Rico when recorded by Felipe Rodriguez in the mid-1950s, and a huge international hit for Jose Feliciano in the mid-1960s.