Julio Sosa: El Varón del Tango

By the 1950s the golden age of tango had passed its peak — but one singer still drew the crowds of a popular idol. Julio Sosa, "El Varón del Tango," the Man of Tango, was the last great star of the tango voice.^[1]

From Las Piedras to Buenos Aires

Julio María Sosa Venturini was born on 2 February 1926 in Las Piedras, a town in the Canelones department near Montevideo, Uruguay.^[1] His family was poor — his father a field worker, his mother a washerwoman — and in his youth he took whatever informal jobs he could find.^[1] Like Carlos Gardel before him, he came from the Río de la Plata's shared tango world, where Uruguay and Argentina are one musical country.^[2]

In 1949 he crossed to Buenos Aires, the capital of tango, and found fame with the Orquesta típica of Enrique Mario Francini and Armando Pontier.^[1]

The Man of Tango

Sosa rose with the Orquesta Francini-Pontier, and in 1955 he reunited with the bandoneonist Armando Pontier, with whom he recorded a series of best-selling albums for RCA Victor and Columbia — records that made him one of the most important tango singers in the genre's history.^[1] His commanding masculine presence and reserved strength earned him the nickname "El Varón del Tango."^[1] He also became known for his recitation of lunfardo verse, above all the poem "Cambalache", which he turned into a phenomenon. That literary streak ran deep: the singer was himself a published poet, issuing the collection Dos horas antes del alba ("Two Hours Before the Dawn") in 1960, so that his art reached the page as well as the stage.^[1] His 1961 move from RCA Victor to Columbia coincided with a change in the band, the bandoneonist Leopoldo Federico joining Pontier to shape the texture of Sosa's final recordings.^[1]

A legend sealed in tragedy

At the very height of his popularity, Sosa was gravely injured in a car crash on 25 November 1964 in Buenos Aires; despite emergency surgery he died the following day, 26 November 1964, at just thirty-eight.^[1] His sudden death stunned the Río de la Plata and fixed him forever in tango's pantheon as a star taken too soon.

Why he matters

Julio Sosa matters because he kept the tango-canción alive as popular music in an age when rock and other sounds were rising, sustaining the song tradition that tango's vocalists had carried since the era of Gardel.^[2] His virile, dramatic voice gave the genre a final great idol, and his recordings with Pontier remain touchstones of the form. Alongside the deep-voiced Edmundo Rivero and the phrasing master Roberto Goyeneche, "El Varón del Tango" stands among the great singers of tango's later age — the last to command the adoration of a true popular idol.