He was also a long-time friend of Gabriel García Márquez, who included him in his stories and once told him that his own masterpiece novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, was just a 350-page Vallenato.

Escalona was an atypical music composer: he does not play any instruments or sing so his songs can in some ways be difficult to analyze.

His songs constitute a legacy of a past generation of Colombians in his memory, a pictorial collage, full of grace, that narrates stories, customs and gossips from his region.

He was born on May 26, 1926, to Colonel Clemente Escalona Labarces, veteran of Thousand Days War and Margarita Martinez Celedon in Patillal.

Apparently he also tried to break into the illegal coffee trade by bringing contraband from Aruba with a friend named "Pipe" Socarras.

On April 14, 1951, he finally married Marina Arzuaga Mejía, also known as "La Maye", who would give him six of his presently suspected thirty-six children.

By the 1960s, when former President of Colombia Alfonso López Michelsen became governor of the newly created Department of Cesar, Lopez was invited to live in Hernando Molina's house.