A
handsome and debonair baritone, Mr. Feliciano overcame drug addiction
and became a celebrity in Puerto Rico and in the larger community of
Latin music. He was equally impressive as a sonero — a singer who can
improvise rhymes and melodies over Afro-Caribbean dance rhythms — and a
romantic crooner, delivering suave, smoldering boleros.
During
the 1970s he became a major star of salsa (the name was used by
American marketers as a catchall for various Latin rhythms) when he
recorded for the New York label Fania. His first solo album, “Cheo,”
included songs that became his signatures: “Anacaona” and “Mi Triste Problema.”
“He
was an icon, beloved by the females,” Joe Conzo Sr., a music historian
and a longtime friend of Mr. Feliciano, said in an interview on
Thursday. “His boleros, they had the women swooning.”
Mr. Feliciano spent several years in the late ’50s and early ’60s singing, in both Spanish and English, with the Joe Cuba Sextet,
a popular ensemble that helped introduce Latin music to a mainstream
American audience. He also recorded with top Latin bandleaders
including Eddie Palmieri and Tito Puente, and he was a longtime member
of the Fania All-Stars, the group organized by Fania Records that included virtually all the major figures of salsa’s ’70s heyday.
In
1973, Mr. Feliciano was with the Fania All-Stars when they performed at
Yankee Stadium. A 1975 album of that concert, “Live at Yankee Stadium,”
was inducted into the Library of Congress’s national registry of
recordings that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically
important.”
Cheo
Feliciano was born José Luis Feliciano Vega in Ponce, P.R., on July 3,
1935. His father was a carpenter, and the family was poor but musical.
Young Cheo (a common nickname for José), who received some rudimentary
musical education in a government-sponsored school, was initially a
percussionist and established his first group before he was 10, calling
it El Combo Las Latas — the Can Combo — because they made their
instruments out of tin cans.
“Everything happening around us had to do in some way with music,” Mr. Feliciano said in an interview in 2000 with the website descarga.com. El Combo Las Latas, he added, “was all kids, but at that very early age we understood about percussion, melody and singing.”
When
Cheo was a teenager his family moved to New York City, where he played
congas and would sing when a group needed a vocalist. He met well-known
musicians after he registered as a percussionist at the musician’s
union, and he served as a band boy — a kind of errand boy and valet — to
several of them, including the bandleader Tito Rodríguez, who gave
young Cheo his first chance to perform in public.
In
the 2000 interview, Mr. Feliciano remembered the youthful hubris that
led him to take the stage as a singer for the first time. Someone, he
said, had told Tito Rodríguez that a young man named Cheo could sing a
little bit.
“Tito
knew me as Cheo but he didn’t know they were talking about me,” Mr.
Feliciano recalled. “ ‘What Cheo?’ ‘Cheo, Cheo, your valet, your band
boy.’ He said, ‘Cheo, you sing?’ And I had the nerve to say, ‘I’m the
world’s greatest singer.’ And he laughed. He said, ‘Well, you’re going
to have to prove it now.’ ”
One night shortly thereafter, onstage with his big band at the Palladium in New York, Mr. Rodríguez introduced him to the crowd.
“He gave me the maracas and said: ‘Sing. Show me you’re the greatest,’ ” Mr. Feliciano said. “And I sang.” 
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