Manuel Molina
When Bartolomé Ortega and María Vargas married in a Jerez parish in March 1823, their son was already a year old — a detail flamenco historian Manuel Bohórquez uses to settle an old confusion: Manuel Ortega Vargas took the name "Molina" not as a stage alias but from his grandfather Curro Molina, of Puerto Real. The cattle-and-meat trade made him wealthy enough to sing for pleasure, and to bankroll singers he prized, once arranging, in secret with a local duke, to have the reclusive Frasco el Colorao brought to Jerez just to be heard. Molina's own siguiriya, sung first in a set and still classified as "Manuel Molina 1," outlived him in other men's throats — Manuel Torre's, Antonio Chacón's, Pastora Pavón's. Deaf and destitute by the end, he died of malarial fever in 1879, having never recorded a note; his cante survives only as a name.
Molina prized Frasco el Colorao enough to smuggle him: as flamenco historian Manuel Bohórquez tells it, he "se lo llevaba a Jerez, en confabulación con el Duque de San Lorenzo, para disfrutar de sus cantes" — he'd have the elusive Triana singer brought to Jerez, in league with a duke, just to hear him sing. Bohórquez won't call it teaching outright — "Imposible saberlo," impossible to know — but insists "era un maestro importante para él," that Colorao was an important master for him. The debt shows in the cante itself: musicologists tracing Jerez's oldest siguiriya back to Triana state plainly that Molina's own style "derives from Frasco el Colorao."
listen forNeither man ever sang into a machine — Colorao died in 1888, Molina in 1879, a generation before recorded flamenco existed — so there is no track to press play on for either side of this claim. What survives is the classification itself: musicologists group "Manuel Molina 1" with the archaic Triana and Los Puertos styles, marked by long, unlinked verse lines rather than the shorter phrasing typical of other Jerez singers — the same lengthening that marks Frasco el Colorao's own Triana cante, and the reason scholars trace one directly to the other. The interesting fact about Molina, unrecorded as he is: his cante still has a name.