TEXAS ACCORDION: Narciso Martínez / El Senderito / Victor 25-1057 / 1938

Описание: Narciso “Chicho” Martínez was born October 29, 1911, in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico, across the border from McAllen, Texas, in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. His family migrated to Texas when he was still an infant. Growing up, Martínez adapted the tunes he heard the Mexican American farmworkers whistling to his brother's button accordion. He began working dances in the late 1920s using a one-row button accordion, before progressing to a two-row button accordion. He collaborated with Santiago Almeida, who played rhythmic accompaniment for his accordion on the bajo sexto (a 12-string bass guitar). The response of the people at the dances where they played was enthusiastic, and they went to San Antonio to play for a representative of Bluebird Records. They were given a recording contract and their first 78 rpm record, with the songs “La Chicharronera” and “El Tronconal,” was an immediate success. Between 1935 and 1938, Martínez and Almeida made 90 recordings. In the 1940s, Martínez acquired the now-standard three-row model button accordion, concentrating on a right-hand virtuosity that gave the new conjunto style a treble, staccato quality. After World War II, Martínez was one of the first musicians to be recorded by Ideal Records, a small Mexican American label founded by Armando Marroquín and Paco Betancourt in Alice, Texas. In the 1950s, he toured the southwestern United States from Texas to California, playing hundreds of performances while actually earning a living as a farmworker. By the 1960s Martínez had settled back in the Rio Grande Valley in the small town of San Benito, where he continued to play at hundreds of Saturday night dances, weddings, fiestas, and other community celebrations.

[Martínez was honored as a 1983 National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts. The text above is adapted, with a few changes, from the NEA biography.]

The story goes that in 1935 Brownsville furniture dealer, Enrique Valentín, nicknamed Martínez “El Huracán del Valle” (the Hurricane of the [Río Grande] Valley) after a recent powerful cyclone. The appellation was likely due to “his fast and powerful accordion playing” (Frontera Collection); however, others have suggested that it was “for his ability to record multiple songs during a single session” (Arhoolie Foundation), or “in recognition of the great storm his music created” (Narciso Martínez Cultural Arts Center).

Narciso Martínez passed away on June 5, 1992 at the age of 80.

[El Senderito (The Little Trail), Narciso Martínez, Victor 25-1057, recorded 4/4/38, matrix BS 022104-1]
The flip side of this disk is Alice y San Diego:    • TEXAS ACCORDION: Narciso Martínez / Alice ...  
Accordiana Playlist:    • Accordiana