Narciso Martínez

Mexican-born musician

• Born: October 29, 1911
• Birthplace: Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico
• Died: June 5, 1992
• Place of death: San Benito, Texas

A first-generation pioneer in the rousing instrumental dance music known as conjunto, Martínez, an accomplished accordionist, introduced this regional style to an international audience through hundreds of pre-World War II recordings that in the Tejano revival of the 1980’s were recognized as classics of the genre.

Early Life

Narciso Martínez (nahr-SEE-soh mahr-TEE-nehz) came from humble roots. He was born in the rural village of Reynosa on the east coast of Mexico along the Rio Grande. His parents, migrant farmworkers, immigrated to the United States the year he was born. Narciso grew up largely in the tiny town of La Paloma, outside Brownsville in south Texas. Because of the peripatetic life of migrant workers, Martínez attended school sporadically, more often working the fields alongside his family. At gatherings of families, however, Martínez listened attentively and was enthralled by the vibrant dance music of small ensembles of instrumentalists, called conjuntos. These ensembles would play lively, often improvised, music that drew on the bold rhythms and brassy melodies of Mexican music, as well as on the European dance rhythms familiar to German, Czech, and Polish immigrants who were also part of the Texas rural culture. Martínez was particularly drawn to the button accordion. Like most aspiring Latino musicians in 1920’s rural Texas, Martínez was self-taught. He watched accomplished adults (in his case, an older brother) and patiently worked his way through the dance repertoire, teaching himself rhythmic pacing and fingering.

By the early 1930’s, now married with children and living in Bishop, Texas, Martínez was determined to make a living as a musician, taking advantage of opportunities to play dance halls and wedding receptions, social clubs, and even fandangos in private homes. In 1935, he met and began playing with Santiago Almeida, a guitarist with a flair for the bajo sexto, a demanding twelve-string Mexican guitar. The two collaborated with a drummer to create the sound combination that would over the next decade come to define conjunto music.

Life’s Work

For the next several years, Martínez earned a regional reputation for both his accomplished playing and his energetic performances; he was known as “El Huracan del Valle,” or the “Rio Grande Valley Hurricane.” Martínez did not read music, but he would hear a melody that he liked and work out the instrumentation on his own. He taught himself a wide repertoire of Mexican folk music, as well as European dances, such as boleros, polkas, waltzes, mazurkas, and tarantellas, whatever his working-class dance hall audience would enjoy. He made little money because his audiences, largely migrant farmworkers at the height of the Depression, had little to give. At the suggestion of a Brownsville store owner who heard him play at a dance hall, Martínez went to San Antonio to seek a recording contract.

Fortuitously, Martínez’s rise to area prominence coincided with the growing interest by major East Coast recording companies in capturing the folk music of the Tex-Mex culture, much as a decade earlier the same companies had “discovered” African American roots music as part of the jazz explosion and in the 1950’s they would “discover” Native American music. In 1936, Martínez made his first recording for RCA/Bluebird, “La Chicharronera,” whose title was a Spanish word meaning “pork burnt to a crackling crisp.” This infectious, rippling instrumental featured Martínez’s fierce staccato playing. The recording sold well, and Martínez became the sound of the conjunto musical style. Over the next decade, he proved ferociously productive, and he and his ensemble would record dozens of songs in a single marathon recording session. These recordings, without elaborate studio dubbing, captured the improvisational energy of live conjunto. His records sold, despite establishment critics who dismissed the accordion-based music as low brow and accordionists as competent minor talents.

Martínez saw little financial remuneration from royalties. He was most often paid by the session, and given his remarkable stamina, a single studio fee of $150 could net the recording company dozens of saleable tracks. Even at the height of his recording career in the mid-1940’s, Martínez received $35 for each completed track. Because Martínez was not confident in his range as a singer, these landmark recordings were largely dance instrumentals, many of them revamped traditional folk melodies set to the irresistible cadences and shimmering rapid-fire melody lines of Martínez’s accordion. These recordings sold well in the American Southwest, where they were given heavy rotation on rural radio stations that also broadcast to northern Mexico, but Martínez’s music also found its way to juke boxes and radio stations in San Francisco, with its burgeoning Hispanic market; Chicago, with its long interest in American folk music; and New York, a ready market for cutting-edge roots music.

During the 1940’s, Martínez toured tirelessly and was a much sought-after studio musician, often providing accompaniment for vocal work. Martínez recorded Cajun-style music under the name Louisiana Pete and polkas under the name Polski Kwartet. However, by the 1950’s, with the advent of rock and roll, commercial interest in conjunto significantly dropped. Recording labels were more interested in vocal-centered Tejano genres. In addition, as newer instrumentalists emerged, Martínez and his generation of musicians, despite essentially inventing conjunto, became increasingly marginalized. Martínez himself continued to play when he could find play-for-pay gigs, often at birthday and anniversary parties. By the early 1970’s, however, despite being past sixty, Martínez turned to manual labor to make a living, initially as a field hand in Florida and then as a truck driver in Ohio. In 1971, he finally found long-term employment on the maintenance crew at the Gladys Porter Zoo, a newly opened botanical park in downtown Brownsville.

With the revival of interest in Tejano music in the 1980’s, most prominently associated with the crossover success late in the decade of the singer Selena, Martínez’s landmark recordings were rediscovered. In 1983, he was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship Award by the National Endowment for the Arts in recognition of his contribution to the nation’s musical heritage. In 1989, an album of new material earned Martínez his first Grammy Award nomination for Best Mexican American Recording. Martínez continued to tour the Southwest until he was diagnosed with leukemia in late 1991. He died on June 5, 1992, in San Benito, Texas. A decade later, he was among the second class of musicians inducted into the National Conjunto Hall of Fame.

Significance

It is tempting to reshape the life of Narcisco Martínez into some cautionary tale about original visionary artists who are often relegated to the margins by a crass consumer culture that cannot appreciate innovative creativity. Although Martínez did lapse into obscurity for a time, he never stopped playing, his signature keyboard work attracting fans to an instrument dismissed as a working-class amusement. Drawn to the energy and vibrancy of the dance hall music of the migrant workers with whom he grew up, Martínez developed the raw elements of that music—the heavy rhythms, the brassy accordion riffs, the guitar counterpoint, and the raucous feel of improvisation—into a distinct musical genre that, in turn, came to define both the emerging Latino culture of the Tex-Mex borderlands and, like blues and jazz, American multiculturalism itself.

Bibliography

Hartman, Gary. The History of Texas Music. College Station: Texas A & M Press, 2008. Comprehensive account of the genres of immigrant music in Texas that represented Mexican and European influences. Includes information about conjunto and Martínez. Illustrated.

Martínez, Narciso. Father of the Texas Mexican Conjunto. El Cerrito, Calif: Arhoolie Records, 1993. This compact disc provides an indispensable introduction to the conjunto sound that Martínez pioneered. A compilation of the best of Martínez’s work, it includes comprehensive discography and helpful liner notes.

Peña, Manuel. The Texas-Mexican Conjunto: History of a Working-Class Music. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985. Considered the seminal work on the genre and its roots by a respected commentator on the genre, himself a 2010 inductee in the Conjunto Hall of Fame.