Manuel Corona left the cigar factories of Havana for full-time bohemian trova life around 1905 and became, alongside Sindo Garay and Alberto Villalón, one of the form's defining songwriters — a guitarist who plucked every string with a single right-hand finger yet still got a famously clean, full tone out of it. He wrote hundreds of songs dedicated to women, most enduringly "Longina" and "Mercedes," and recorded prolifically enough in the late 1910s that he's often credited with getting more of his own trova compositions onto disc than any of his peers.