The Big Squeeze
July 3, 2021 6:22 AM   Subscribe

Texas’s Best Young Accordionists Carry on a Conjunto Legacy. Conjunto is a working-class Texas Mexican music, blending traditional Mexican folk music with the polkas, waltzes, and accordions of the Germans who settled in Texas and northern Mexico in the mid-1800's. At TexasMonthly.com, Roberto José Andrade Franco writes about how the 2020 and 2021 class of young accordion players are coping with the interruption of their lives and aspirations, and how they are carrying on both personal and cultural legacies. (The article has several links to music, interviews, and further reading.)
posted by soundguy99 (22 comments total) 22 users marked this as a favorite
 
Thanks for posting. I really wish my mother were alive to see this. It was an article of faith with her that accordions would come back, and she excitedly clipped (pre-internet) any articles that mentioned young musicians playing them. She had been in an accordion band in the 40s. I took accordion lessons in high school while everyone else was learning folk guitar.

This YouTube video
of a street artist in Warsaw playing Vivaldi on accordion is one of my favorite things on the internet.
posted by FencingGal at 6:55 AM on July 3, 2021 [4 favorites]




Thanks for this fabulous story.
posted by spitbull at 7:35 AM on July 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


Great article. If you're looking for an introduction to conjunto music, Arhoolie Records (now owned by Smithsonian Folkways) put out a dozen or so conjunto (and norteño) albums and compilations. They trend older (a lot are from the 50's), but there are some more recent collections in there. I can confirm that Conjunto Accordion Champs is pretty great.
posted by Drab_Parts at 7:38 AM on July 3, 2021 [3 favorites]


This reminds me of Accordion Crimes.
I think the accordion makes its way through Texas, and the cover picture shows a button accordion.
posted by MtDewd at 7:45 AM on July 3, 2021


This is great, as is the link in the comment above to the older conjunto vs Norteño story.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:59 AM on July 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


For anyone else who listens to music via Spotify these days, they have a lot of conjunto playlists. The playlist skewed pretty contemporary though and I didn't have any luck finding a free source to listen to the Arhoolie records Drab_Parts recommended (there's previews on the Folkways website).

I also want to plug a friend's album: Primo y Beebe. Beebe was the best of us in high school and something of a local character in Marfa, TX. He's outdone himself teaming up with Primo Carrasco for this album, really amazing accordion work. You can listen to the full album on Youtube. I'm not expert enough to highlight specifically the conjunto tracks.
posted by Nelson at 8:08 AM on July 3, 2021


This is great. And different enough from music in regions that I know something about that I'm really surprised. Thanks! (I continue to hope that guitar groups are on the way out.)

Also, in case anyone missed it, far down in the article is a link to the Los del Valle history project, which looks really interesting. I know what I'm listening to for the next several days.
posted by eotvos at 8:37 AM on July 3, 2021


I’ve been looking for people dancing to conjunto polkas and only finding stage dances - is it still danced socially? Most of this performance would work on a roomy dance floor, and I’d love to see it danced with traffic negotiation.

(I miss social dancing so much, and it was already staggering under expensive space and being hard to learn by yourself. But polka might revive it, as polka has lit up the world before.)
posted by clew at 8:53 AM on July 3, 2021


is it still danced socially?

38th Annual Conjunto Festival 2019.
posted by Mister Cheese at 9:35 AM on July 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


Great post! Conjunto music is a ton of fun. I've been to a few Los Texmaniacs shows and they're some of my favorite. People just dancing and having a great time.
posted by Arbac at 9:51 AM on July 3, 2021


God damn, getting Texas Monthly as a checkout counter magazine is one of the things I miss about living in Austin. They're so good.
posted by nebulawindphone at 10:59 AM on July 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


One of the greatest gifts MetaFilter has given me is an appreciation for the outstanding Texas Monthly. Several of my all-time favorite posts have been about one excellent Texas Monthly article or another. (And I don't think I've spent more than a few days in Texas in my life.)

This is such great music, and I'm so glad to know more about both the history and the current players.

Thank you so much for posting this, soundguy99!
posted by kristi at 11:26 AM on July 3, 2021 [2 favorites]


Mister Cheese, is what they're dancing a polka to you? Polka is a travelling turning* dance to me, and in the demonstration/stage dances I'm finding. I can't find any non-performance turning polka dancing tagged as conjunto, which is why I was curious.

* Meaning both bodies rotating around a common center of gravity, not individual arm-turns like the pretzel.
posted by clew at 4:38 PM on July 3, 2021


clew, I missed polka specifically rather than conjunto in general... I can dig around youtube some more. There are norteña examples. I'm curious about this too, mostly having performed polka from south of the border as part of a ballet folklórico group and socially mostly cumbia.
posted by Mister Cheese at 5:28 PM on July 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


Huh! That’s not my polka either! That’s some kind of one-step with sections of pivots. Basic polka step as I know it is skipping, even when used for something different.

Also I expect Polka travels, sometimes very fast, so a dance floor with polka going on has at least one 'lane' on the outside that people should be wary of lingering or going backwards in.
posted by clew at 1:37 PM on July 4, 2021


I'm not an expert in footwork terminology, but I figured you were talking about that skipping step... wikipedia calls it "short half-steps." I'm familiar with it from the northern region folklórico repertoire, but personally I've only seen norteña danced with the one step style from the second link I posted. I watched a few more conjunto festival videos and couldn't find the half-step sort of dancing, but I admittedly don't have the time to watch them all. I guess it's not something that can be easily found on Youtube, so you'd have to go to watch the dancing in the Tejano community (I'm from more recent Mexican immigrants). Looking at ballet folklórico might be a bit misleading too judging by that article that Ideefixe posted, Get Your Norteño out of My Conjunto. Tejano conjunto and Mexican norteña music are related but distinct branches.

It's an interesting question though. How Mexico Learned To Polka, and NPR interview, implies that accordion music wasn't exactly directly transmitted from German and Czech communities. Same with this article, Conjunto: The Best Kind of Cultural Collision, so maybe the footwork mutated too. Or maybe some other influence changed what was popular. I'm a bit saddened as a native Texan in California that I'm not currently part of any community that might get this answered.

Seems like Texans of Czech heritage do dance polka with a traditional polka from this video of the Texas Legacy Czech Band.
posted by Mister Cheese at 2:55 PM on July 5, 2021 [1 favorite]


I’ve been looking at Mexican wedding videos and seeing some delightful Grand Marches - the dance everyone can do! -and social rotary waltz, but no rotary polka yet. HUH.
posted by clew at 3:11 PM on July 5, 2021


Seems like Texans of Czech heritage do dance polka with a traditional polka from this video of the Texas Legacy Czech Band.

Yeah, Czech and German Texans definitely do polka, in a way that I recognized immediately from the Upper Midwestern White-People Polka I grew up around. Like, I'm sure there are still regional differences that I'd recognize if I participated, but it's nowhere near as dramatic a difference as between either of them and conjunto.
posted by nebulawindphone at 6:50 PM on July 5, 2021 [1 favorite]


Oh damn my ex wife’s new partner is Steve Jordan’s son, he’s been schooling me in the history of Conjunto for a few years now.
posted by noiseanoise at 8:53 PM on July 5, 2021


It’s really really critical to separate out German accordion playing from the music that expresses the struggles of migrant indigenous mexican farm workers.
posted by noiseanoise at 8:56 PM on July 5, 2021


I was listening to Conjunto Accordion Champs again last night (so good, thanks Drab_Parts!) and was struck by how the instrumental music sounds exactly like something I'd hear in a Bavarian beer hall. That doesn't surprise me, I'm well familiar with the German / Mexican crossover in music and beer.

What does surprise me is the vocals sound nothing at all like any German music I've ever heard. And I don't mean the language. I mean the plaintive sound, the slow ballads, the ending of every phrase on down notes. I don't know music well enough to explain what the vocals sound like except it sounds like every kind of "Mexican country music" I've heard in restaurants and on the radio my whole life. Maybe if I stretched I'd say it sounds like a Spanish ballad? Not sure.

Anyway it struck me how conjunto is this fusion of vocal and instrumental music from two very different traditions. And now I'm wondering whether I have that right and if so how that came to be. Also how to better characterize the vocal contribution.
posted by Nelson at 7:35 AM on July 6, 2021 [2 favorites]


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