MUSICOS DE LA CALLE IN BROWNTOWN...SOME WHO'VE COME AND GONE

Special to El RrunRrun 

 🎶 After we published yesterday's post on musicians performing at local restaurants, we were reminded of the past greats who got their start here. Above is a rare photograph of Narciso "Chicho" Martinez, nicknamed “El Huracán del Valle” (the Hurricane of the Valley) for his fast and powerful accordion playing who is acknowledged as the father of conjunto music. He was the genre’s first successful recording artist and the most popular accordion player of his day. Chicho lived most of his life in La Paloma, Texas, near Brownsville.

In the mid-1930s, he also began his productive association with the remarkable talent of Santiago Almeida (who ended up working for BUS, in Brownsville) and who played the bajo sexto, a 12-string bass guitar. It established the basic instrumentation of the conjunto and allowed for the duo’s trademark innovation – right-side melody on the accordion, left-side bass notes on the bajo sexto. In 1936, a year after Almeida and Martínez started working together, a local merchant by the name of Enrique Valentin (of Valentin's)  heard them and persuaded them to go to San Antonio to meet Eli Oberstein, the recording director for the Bluebird label, an RCA Victor subsidiary. The rest is history.

As Agustin Gurza, of the Strawchwitz Frontera Collection, wrote "Martínez, like many other conjunto pioneers, never earned much money as a musician. He continued to play on weekends, sometimes at so-called “bailes de negocio” (business dances), where men paid to dance with women. On occasion, he’d be hired by old friends or nostalgic fans to play at special occasions such as anniversaries, quinceañeras, birthday parties, or receptions for baptisms and weddings. But increasingly he felt forced to turn to jobs outside of music to earn a living. In the 1960s and ’70s, he worked as a truck driver, a field hand and a caretaker at the Gladys Porter Zoo in Brownsville."

And of course, we all remember Freddy Fender, Baldemar Huerta, who played at weekend dances all across the Rio Grande Valley,  including at the Squeeze Inn on Old 77 Highway. This was way before Freddy hit the big time with his crossover country-conjunto hits like "Before the Last Teardrop Falls, and "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights."

I remember Tony Gray, who later became a writer for the Brownsville Herald and then a legislative assistant to state representative Rene Oliveira, took a photo of these two musicos roaming the cantinas of Market Square. The man's name at left with the accordion was Araguz, and has since passed. The bar behind them, The Silver Sea Club, is also long gone.

El Flaco Jimenez, of San Antonio, also made appearances here at the dances held at the Ft. Brown Civic Center. Abel Salas, a writer/editor with the Crossroads Weekly, took this photo during one of his appearances. Jimenez recorded several albums with the Texas Tornadoes, whose star-studded personnel included some of country music's biggest artists who modernized the Tex-Mex style including Jiménez, Augie Meyers, Doug Sahm, and Freddy Fender.

Much lesser known, but hugely popular are the wandering conjuntos who frequent local cantinas and play old favorites for patrons willing to plunk down a few bucks ($5 a song) to hear old favorites.

You probably never met Manuel Vega, the gent in the black hat sitting at the center of the table in the  photo above. His brothers, Los Hermanos Vega, are serenading him on his birthday at Chris and Queren's Jukebox on Adams Street – formerly named La Movidita – on a past Saturday.

El festejado treated his guests to a sumptuous guisado with frijoles a la charra and a deliciously fluffy Mexican rice. The Vegas Brothers played Las Mañanitas and other favorite songs to celebrate their brother's birthday. Then it was the ladies' turn to dance with him. 

It's something you don't see everyday like you used to in downtown Browntown before the local city movers and shakers started to gentrify the old haunts on Market Square. Pity.

The majority know that they will never become rich playing their music at Brownsville restaurants and bars. But theirs is a labor of love, like Fiddler Jones in Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, who said:

And I never started to plow in my life 

That some one did not stop in the road 

And take me away to a dance or picnic. 

I ended up with forty acres;

 I ended up with a broken fiddle—

 And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories, 

And not a single regret.