Exploring American Folk Music

by Kip Lornell

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  MUSICAL EXAMPLE

  This dance song is performed by a member of one of San Antonio’s strongest musical families. His older brother (Flaco), his father (Santiago Jimenez), and grandfather (Patricio) all played accordion and Jimenez, Sr.’s recording career began in the late 1930s. Santiago Jimenez, Jr., continues to perform for crowds of Chicanos and Chicanas who dance to waltzes, polkas, huapangos, and shottisches at small clubs and bars in and around his hometown. “I’m Going to Leave You in San Antonio” tells of a man whose two-timing girlfriend is about to run off with another man.

  Title “Ay ti dejo en San Antonio”

  Performer Santiago Jimenez, Jr.

  Instruments Santiago Jimenez, Jr., lead vocals and accordion; Tobby Torres, vocal and bass; Jessie Castillo, bajo sexto; Cookie Martinez, drums

  Length 3:10

  Musical Characteristics

  1. The song is in a major tonality.

  2. The tempo is both steady and moderate.

  3. Its rhythm is jaunty and straightforward with just a hint of syncopation.

  4. Jimenez’s lead vocal is supplemented by the harmony of Tobby Torres.

  Say ranchero, jugador y navegante

  Ya me voy para nunca mas volver

  Me dejastes sen dinero y sin rolante

  por el mundo te me echastes a corror.

  I’m a rancher, a gambler, and a rambler.

  I’m leaving and never coming back.

  You left me without money and without wheels.

  You threw me off to run around the world.

  This selection comes from Smithsonian Folkways 40047.

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  Conjunto musicians Ben Tavena King and Frank Corrales (circa 1975). Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution.

  Conjunto is almost certainly the best-known form of Tex-Mex music. This music is also known as “musica norteno” (music of the north), which reflects its origins in northern Mexico. By the late 1930s this style of music had established itself as the most prominent form of folk music along the border and is one of the most familiar outside of its hearth areas. These small ensembles feature a small diatonic button accordion, acoustic bass, and an oversized twelve-string guitar called a bajo sexto. Its inclusion of the German diatonic button accordion, which is also an integral part of older Cajun and zydeco music, underscores the impact of German culture in Texas. But it is also possible that this influence was reinforced from the south in the form of German immigrants from Monterrey, Mexico, who introduced “acordeons” to northwestern Mexicans in the 1880s. The fact that the accordion has become so closely associated with this music suggests the wider creolization of European culture in Mexico and Central America that occurred in the late nineteenth century.

  Early in the twentieth century Mexican Americans residing in southern Texas often hired conjunto musicians to play for fandangos, which were often disparagingly referred to by local Anglos as lower-class entertainment. And surely this was working-class music and it was performed at venues disdained by the upper classes and by Latino blue-collar workers. In short, conjunto represented much of what the ruling class found disreputable and of which they strongly disapproved; nonetheless, conjunto thrived in Texas and just to the south of the border as well.

  Norteno accordion playing probably began as a solitary pursuit with the other instruments being added, perhaps as the demand for conjunto music for dancing increased. As its popularity increased, conjunto musicians gradually replaced the wind instruments and violins with the now ubiquitous bajo sexto. During the 1920s through the 1940s the two-row button accordion was favored by the majority of musicians, most notably Santiago Jimenez of San Antonio and Narciso Martinez, who lived in the lower Rio Grande Valley. They were the first stars of conjunto and the equivalents of fiddler Gid Tanner in north Georgia or Blind Boy Fuller, the North Carolina blues man. Each was a folk artist whose pioneering recordings and, in some cases, radio broadcasts had a wide and lasting impact within their discrete geographical, cultural, and racial communities. By the 1940s Jimenez, Martinez, and their peers had largely usurped the prominence previously reserved for the guitarreros (ballad-singing guitar players) when they added vocalists—usually the accordion or bajo sexto player—to their ensembles.

  One of the many changes that followed the close of World War II was the musician’s shift to the two-row button accordions. This more versatile instrument worked well as a lead instrument as the bajo sexto and bass took over conjunto’s rhythmic and harmonic functions. The drums were also added to many conjunto ensembles at about this time, resulting in the four-piece band that is so familiar today. The rhythmic drive of conjunto also altered the way in which many of the younger accordion players approached their instruments. Instead of the relatively smooth style favored by men who came of age in the 1930s, these younger proponents favored a more staccato attack.

  Conjunto bands also began to amplify their instruments in the late 1940s and virtuosos such as Flaco Jimenez (Santiago’s son) and Tony de la Rosa (who received a 1998 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts) began touring more extensively, reaching a wider audience. By the 1960s both men along with a handful of others were playing for fellow Chicanos who had migrated north and east in search of better and more opportunities. Though still concentrated along the border, conjunto can now be heard wherever Mexican Americans live.

  Corridos

  Like all ballads, corridos tell a story. They are often about dramatic events, and the greatest and lengthiest cycle of corridos are set along the border of Texas and Mexico over an eighty-year period between about 1850 and 1930. Many of these recount the long-standing struggle for civil rights and social justice and are clear precursors for the Chicano movement. Fulfilling the role provided by spirituals during the black American civil rights movement, corridos served the Chicano movement during its emerging years. For example, corridos were composed for Cesar Chavez to celebrate his heroic efforts to help organize farmworkers in California and to boycott grapes during the late 1960s and into the 1970s.

  “Gregorio Cortez” is a fine and well-known example of a border ballad. According to Americo Paredes, the song is based on a true event that occurred on June 12, 1901. It relates the tragic story of Texas sheriff Morris’s death at the hand of Gregorio Cortez, who himself was avenging the death of his brother, whom Morris had recently killed. The song itself focuses on the hero’s escape and ultimate capture and underscores the type of events that so many Mexican Americans faced in their daily lives. This, and other border ballads, suggest the importance of group solidarity in the face of oppression.

  After 1930 the number and importance of border ballads diminished and their topics expanded. During World War II, for example, corridos about war heroes and conflicts emerged. Following the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, corridos about President Kennedy flooded the marketplace. John F. Kennedy, with his progressive politics and his Catholic upbringing, was a particular favorite among Mexican Americans. These verses from the corrido “In Honor of Kennedy,” which was written by Gatton Once Castellans, are typical of the genre:

  I’m going to sing for you, ladies and gentlemen,

  Only in this way can I express

  This grief of affliction

  My great sorrow and heavy heart

  The year of sixty-three

  On the twenty-second of November,

  In the City of Dallas

  They killed the President.

  Three very well-aimed bullets

  The assassin fired,

  Two hit the President,

  The other hit the Governor.

  And it was almost noon

  When this happened,

  When the great President’s

  Life was taken.

  May God have him in His glory

  As an example of reason,

  And counsel his famil
y

  To have much faith and resignation.

  Here I end my song, good people,

  The tragedy that I wrote,

  With the grief of affliction,

  In honor of Kennedy.

  And, not surprisingly, the authors of corridos have kept up with current events. As narcotics trafficking has increased along the border, there have been a rash of corridos about drug dealers. The ballads about Pablo Acosta, a benevolent drug lord whose trade straddled the border around Ojinaga and Chihuahua, Mexico, and Presidio, Texas, provide a fine example of this phenomenon. Likewise the increasing traffic in smuggling immigrants across the border into the United States has resulted in corridos about “mules” (the men and women who, for a fee, guide people across the border and past the border patrol) and the number of people who die in the attempt to cross over. Another cycle of songs about the political and social conflicts related to the struggle for the rights of Indians surfaced in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas during the middle 1990s.

  The role of women in writing and disseminating corridos (and associated musics) remains limited. Lydia Mendoza provides the exception to this generalization. Mendoza was a pioneer and a hero to many older residents of the Mexican American community from Texas through California. Her recording career began in 1928 as a twelve-year-old girl singing with her family in an impromptu San Antonio hotel room recording studio and has continued into the 1990s. She emerged as the first Spanish-speaking female folk performer to gain a wide audience through her recordings and performances in the Americas. During her long and distinguished career, Lydia Mendoza has performed at countless venues: for her peers in small taverns and road houses in south Texas, for President Jimmy Carter at the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in 1978, and for adoring crowds in South America.

  Mendoza’s gender makes her unusual for a guitarrero and singer of corridos, but her early background is hardly unique. Her family as far back as her grandmother played music and she had relatives on both sides of the Texas/Mexican border. Born in 1916, Mendoza came into a family that eventually grew to eight brothers and sisters. In a long interview Lydia Mendoza recalls the circumstances of her youth:

  I believe I’ve had a vocation for music almost from the time I was born. I remember clearly that I began to feel drawn towards music when I was four. You must realize that my mother played guitar, and at home after dinner, after she and my dad had rested up, she would pick up the guitar and begin to play and sing . . . I liked music so much that even then I wanted to play guitar, and I told my mother that I wanted to play like her, and she told me that when my hands got big enough she’d teach me—and that’s the way it happened . . . When I was about eight or nine, I could play perfectly well.

  I was the prime mover of music in the household. I liked it, so I wanted my brothers and sisters to play, too . . . And I guess they liked it, because they all learned to play instruments, and we got a group together. Mother played the guitar, I played violin, one of my sisters the mandolin, a brother played the triangle, and father played tambourine. So we got up a musical group, and then we dedicated our lives to music on a full-time basis. We started off all over the lower Rio Grande Valley, and later on we got as far as Detroit, Michigan, always with our music. We lived one year in the Lower Rio Grande Valley—McAllen, Weslaco, Edinburg, and Kingsville. We would stay a while in one little town . . . (and) play in restaurants and barbershops. Dad would go in and ask permission to play—mostly on Saturdays, when there would be lots of people—and then if folks were there we’d sit down and sing, and people would give us tips. (Lydia Mendoza, Ethnic Recordings, 1982, 119–20)

  Mendoza later settled in San Antonio, Texas, where she married and specialized in guitar playing. She became popular through her radio appearances and her early recordings for the Bluebird Record Company (1934–1940). She later recorded a variety of material for RCA Victor, Peerless, Colonial, Imperial, and other smaller labels, but is best known for her corridos. Whatever form it takes, her brand of music has always held special appeal for working-class residents not only along the Texas/Mexico border but wherever Mexican Americans have settled in the United States.

  The music of corridos has always been fairly simple. In the middle nineteenth century these songs were often performed a cappella but by late in the century guitars were often used to provide accompaniment. Today they are usually performed in triple meter (typically 3/4 or 6/8) with conjunto band–style accompaniment—guitar, accordion, and bajo sexto—and are most often focused on the three primary chords (I, IV, and V).

  Mariachi

  Daniel Sheehy (an ethnomusiciogist who curates the Smithsonian Folkways collection) writes that mariachi “may mean a single musician, a kind of musical group, or a style of music. In addition to the music itself, three dimensions of mariachi musical life—cultural, musical, and social—are key to understanding it fully. Since the 1930’s, the mariachi ensemble and its music have been an emblem of Mexican identity, a cultural icon to anchor a Mexican culture in transition” (Lornell and Rassmusen, eds., 1997, 132).

  Malachi musicians at the 1975 Festival of American Folklife. Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution.

  Although it is popular throughout Mexico, mariachi is also quite fashionable among Mexican Americans residing in southern Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and California. Not surprisingly, mariachi can be heard in other parts of the country with large Chicano populations. This music can also be heard in places, such as restaurants, movies, and Disneyland, where Mexican culture is represented to a larger mainstream. Mariachi can be found south of Mexico as well. I heard many mariachi (and a few conjunto) orchestras as well as several musica ranchera (country music) ensembles at a half dozen of the local restaurants during a 1994 weeklong stay in San José, Costa Rica. In these instances mariachi serves as a symbol of Mexican culture and represents the intersection of popular and folk traditions.

  In its more down-home settings—both in Mexico and the United States—this music is heard in many contexts, most of which revolve around family or community events such as birthdays, cookouts, wedding anniversaries, and neighborhood festivals. Because so many of them are performers for hire, mariachi musicians also perform for audiences at cafés and restaurants or occasionally on street corners—for anyone who will meet their fees. Some mariachi ensembles hold long-standing gigs (often at restaurants and sometimes for many years on a weekly or even a nightly basis) but many of them perform on an ad hoc basis.

  Mariachi music is quite distinctive and stands in strong contrast to other forms of folk music found in the Mexican American community. Mariachi is folk-based music, and in the past the term has had three separate but related meanings: an individual performer, a musical ensemble, or a style of music. Today mariachi almost always refers to an ensemble of between five and ten players that combines fiddles, trumpets, and guitars with two stringed instruments, the vihuela and guitarron, which are less familiar to most citizens of the United States. The violins and trumpets serve as the lead instruments, providing the melody and taking the occasional solo, while the rhythm is driven by the guitar and vihuela and the guitarron takes the role of the bass instrument. The instrumentalists typically also sing and most of the songs are performed in Spanish.

  Contemporary mariachi music has its roots in Mexico in the 1930s, making it roughly the same age as bluegrass. Much of the pre-nineteenth-century Mexican folk music was generically referred to as mestizo (a Spanish term for creolized styles) that was usually played on violin, some form of guitar, and harp with vocal accompaniment. Nonetheless, its roots go back to at least the middle of the nineteenth century in the northwestern state of Jalisco, when the first references to mariachi appeared. The earliest uses of this word suggest not only music but also the blue-collar musical culture associated with it. The early development of mariachi, which occurred close to the Mexican border near Califor
nia, was not well known outside of this section of the country.

  Mariachi remained a regional style of music until the first decade of the twentieth century. At this point the guitarron and trumpet had all but replaced the harp and began to be widely used by most mariachi ensembles. This is also when mariachi began to move from its hearth area and diffuse, first to the center of political and economic power (Mexico City) and slowly to the rest of the country and into the borderlands of the United States. This diffusion was propelled less by the mass media (the first recordings of mariachi appeared on cylinders around 1908) but by the Mexican Revolution that lasted from 1910 to 1917. The revolution shifted the official cultural bias from Europe to the Mexican vernacular, including not only mestizo culture but also the accomplishments of its native inhabitants (a group, like their northern counterparts, that for many years had been largely ostracized from official Mexican culture). This form of nationalism helped to launch the popularity of this music throughout the country and, more slowly, into the United States. Mariachi was used to promote political events during the 1920s and 1930s and its popularity was underscored by the in-migration of so many rural residents (many of them from the northwestern states) to Mexico City.