06/24/2026
Every December, in millions of homes across the world, the same two languages tumble out of the radio in one unstoppable singalong. Feliz Navidad, prospero ano y felicidad. The man who wrote it was born blind, in the mountain town of Lares, one of eleven sons. His name is Jose Feliciano.
He could not see from the day he was born, the result of congenital glaucoma. His family left Lares for Spanish Harlem in New York, where they lived hand to mouth, and young Jose taught himself to play the guitar by listening, obsessively, for hours and hours, until his hands knew the strings better than most people know their own faces.
What he became is almost hard to believe.
Jose Feliciano turned into one of the most gifted guitarists alive, a virtuoso whose fingers could do things that classically trained players spent decades chasing. He blended Latin feeling with rock, soul, jazz, and flamenco into something nobody had heard before.
In 1968 he recorded a slow, smoldering, completely reinvented version of the rock song Light My Fire, and it became a massive hit that announced him to the world.
Here is a moment most people have forgotten. That same year, he was invited to sing the national anthem at the World Series, and he performed a soulful, personal, guitar version unlike anything heard before. It caused an enormous controversy at the time. But it also opened the door for every artist who came after to sing that anthem with their own soul instead of by the rulebook.
Then in 1970 he wrote Feliz Navidad, a song so simple and so joyful that it became one of the most played and most recorded Christmas songs on the entire planet, year after year, in country after country.
Across his career he won multiple Grammy Awards and influenced generations of musicians, all while navigating a music industry that did not always know what to do with a blind Puerto Rican guitarist who refused to fit in a single box.
That is the wonder of him. Jose Feliciano could not see a single note, and he still showed the world how music was supposed to feel. He carried Lares and Spanish Harlem into every song.
The blind boy from the mountains gave the world a song it will sing forever. This very December, somewhere on earth, a room full of people who have never been to Puerto Rico will be singing his words at the top of their lungs.
