Diomedes Díaz

Diomedes Díaz Maestre stood at the commercial summit of Colombian vallenato, the accordion-led folk music of the country's Caribbean north, and is reckoned the genre's foremost singer-songwriter and its best-selling recording artist.^[2] Reference catalogues record him plainly as a Colombian musician whose life ran from 1957 to 2013.^[1] To admirers and fellow performers he was the "King of Vallenato," while the singer Rafael Orozco Maestre supplied the epithet that outlasted him — El Cacique de La Junta, the Chieftain of La Junta — in homage to the township of his birth.^[3]

Origins

Born on 26 May 1957, Díaz was raised on a farm called Carrizal at the edge of La Junta, in the municipality of San Juan del Cesar in the department of La Guajira, where his family lived in poverty and he grew up among eight brothers.^[4] His earliest musical formation came from a locally celebrated uncle, also named Martín Elías, who guided his vocal training and encouraged his first attempts at composition.^[5]

Díaz came to music slowly, his boyhood split between farm work and a succession of menial jobs.^[6] The journalist Alberto Salcedo Ramos recounts that as a child he was stationed as a living scarecrow over the cornfields, passing the hours singing and trading songs with Indigenous neighbors in exchange for coffee.^[7] While he was studying in Villanueva, a friend knocking mangoes from a tree struck him in the right eye with a stone, and he permanently lost the sight in it.^[8] His unsteady, breaking adolescent voice drew the mocking nickname "El chivato" — the little goat — until patient coaching steadied his singing and began earning him invitations to perform at parties.^[9]

Breakthrough as a composer

Recognition arrived only after years on the margins of the trade. Before any hit of his own, Díaz worked as a gardener and then as a messenger at the Radio Guatapurí station, wagering that closeness to its announcers might win airplay for an early composition, "La negra," already cut by other singers.^[10] Issued a bicycle for his errands that he never learned to ride, he fell behind on deliveries and was dismissed after roughly eight months.^[11] He stayed close to the vallenato scene all the same, and his friendship with Rafael Orozco produced "Cariñito de mi vida," which Orozco recorded with the accordionist Emilio Oviedo and which cemented Díaz's standing as a composer.^[12]

Commercial apex

That standing eventually widened into unrivaled commercial reach. Over his career Díaz outsold every other artist in the history of vallenato, with reported sales above twenty million copies and gold, platinum, and diamond certifications that no Colombian act equalled until 2008.^[13] In 2010 he won a Latin Grammy in the Cumbia/Vallenato category.^[14] His devotees took the name "diomedistas," and the singer in turn addressed his massed followers as his "fanaticada."^[15]

Personal life and death

His private affairs drew scrutiny rivaling his music, shadowed by family instability, controversial friendships, recurring struggles with alcohol and drugs, accidents, and financial and legal troubles, culminating in the death under unclear circumstances of Doris Adriana Niño.^[16] He died on 22 December 2013, his passing recorded as a discrete entry in reference databases — itself a measure of his weight in Colombian popular culture.^[17] From a cornfield in La Guajira to record-shattering national fame, contemporary sources assess his arc as the defining vallenato career of its generation.^[2]