Ibrahim Ferrer, 78; Found Fame in Buena Vista Social Club

Ibrahim Ferrer, the humble, soft-spoken Cuban singer who achieved long-delayed international fame only after he was recruited for the Grammy-winning Buena Vista Social Club, has died. He was 78.

Ferrer died Saturday in Havana, the Montuno production company announced. No cause of death was given, but Ferrer had suffered from emphysema.

Caridad Diaz, Ferrer’s wife of 33 years, told Agence France-Presse that Ferrer, who just completed a monthlong tour of Europe, had checked into the hospital for treatment of gastroenteritis.

Disappointed at singing in obscurity all his life, Ferrer originally declined to join the group, which earned a Grammy for its 1997 self-named “Buena Vista Social Club” album. But the organizers, American guitarist and producer Ry Cooder and Cuban bandleader Juan de Marcos Gonzalez, were persuasive.

“He was sitting in the lounge of the recording studio in Havana and had the kind of look of a southern blues player,” Cooder told The Times on Sunday. “We put up a mike -- he hadn’t been singing and was making a living shining shoes and selling lottery tickets. Out comes this purity, a vocal sound of another world....

“He had the high tenor voice of a bolero [a romantic ballad singer] -- a dreamy, caressing voice,” Cooder said. “He didn’t just sing boleros, he was the embodiment of a bolero singer.”

Cooder and De Marcos soon had Ferrer singing most of the songs in the 1997 Afro-Cuban All Stars’ debut album, “A Toda Cuba le Gusta.” The Grammy-winning recording quickly followed, selling 6 million copies with the modest Ferrer on its cover.

“We caught him walking down the street toward the studio ... all dressed up, and that picture became the cover of the album,” Cooder said Sunday. “He was uncontaminated by any self-seeking or intention to make a career. He just wanted to sing for the purity of the experience.”

In 1999, German filmmaker Wim Wenders featured Ferrer and his colleagues in the highly popular Oscar-nominated documentary “The Buena Vista Social Club,” chronicling the history of Cuban music from the 1940s to the present. The film was liberally sprinkled with images of Ferrer, and the soundtrack showcased his plaintive, expressive falsetto voice. The same year, Ferrer released his solo debut album, “Buena Vista Social Club Presents Ibrahim Ferrer,” which sold 1.5 million copies.

At 73, the sprightly Ferrer earned the best new artist award at the first Latin Grammys in 2000.

“I had no idea that anybody of this age could be the best new anything,” he later told the Dallas Morning News.

His second solo album, “Buenos Hermanos,” was released in 2003 and earned a Latin Grammy that year and a Grammy the following year for best traditional tropical Latin album.

The avuncular singer and improviser, known for his ever-present Kangol cap and for his gray mustache, became the poster boy for the renewed interest in son, the pre-revolutionary Cuban music melding African and Spanish sounds and rhythms that later formed the basis for salsa. Ferrer was among the genre’s top improvisational singers, known as soneros.

“He could improvise like a jazz vocalist,” Cooder said Sunday, “and could take anything and sing about it.”

After Ferrer’s belated international fame finally sent him on the world tour circuit he had craved in his youth, he told The Times in 1999: “I pinch myself all the time.... This has given me the will to live. I’m living the dream of my youth in the body of an old man.”

When he brought his Orquesta Ibrahim Ferrer to UCLA’s Royce Hall in 2003, Times critic Augustin Gurza wrote that “the softer boleros highlighted Ferrer’s remarkably moving -- and still improving -- vocals, made simultaneously fragile and forceful, silky and raspy by age.”

Although appreciation for his artistry arrived late, Ferrer had been singing virtually all his life.

“My mother was pregnant with me at a dance, and when the music began, she started having contractions,” he told Newsweek in 2003. “I think I was even singing inside the belly of my mother.”

Ferrer was born Feb. 20, 1927, in the eastern Cuban city of Santiago, the crucible of son. His ancestry included French, African, Spanish and Chinese great-grandparents.

He wanted to be a doctor, but that hope ended with the death of his mother when he was 12. He had to go to work to support himself, initially selling popcorn on the streets.

At 13, with his cousin Jose Coba, he formed his first band, Los Jovenes del Son (The Young Men of Sound) and began earning money performing at parties.

He worked with several big bands during the 1940s and 1950s, including the Beny More Orchestra and most notably Pacho Alonso’s group Maravilla de Beltran, later renamed Los Bocucos.

Ferrer recorded the 1955 hit single “El Platanar de Bartolo” (Bartolo’s Banana Field) with Santiago’s Orquesta Chepin-Choven. But, uncredited on the international release, he would have to wait more than 40 years for the world outside Cuba to discover him.

Ferrer’s belated recognition prompted the re-release of several of his early recordings, for which he had never been given credit.

He toured Europe with Alonso’s group in 1962 and continued to work in his own country, mostly as a backup singer.

But Havana’s music scene declined during the early years of Fidel Castro’s government, and Ferrer had to supplement his meager musician’s pay with jobs as a carpenter, painter and dockworker.

“I sold peanuts and shined shoes to earn a living,” he once said, “but I was always singing. I really, really like singing.”

Ferrer retired from Los Bocucos in 1991, later noting in his Nonesuch Records website biography, “I felt ... disappointed by my life in music.”

Six years later, however, he zoomed upward, in Cooder’s words, from “shining shoes ... to Carnegie Hall and up -- complete eclipse to tremendous stardom.”

Information on survivors other than Ferrer’s wife was not available.

Two fellow Buena Vista Social Club members, singer Compay Segundo and pianist Ruben Gonzalez, died in 2003.

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Times staff writer Jon Thurber contributed to this report.