Conjunto Music

Since I live in San Antonio, Texas and I do have a Hispanic background a lot of the music that I heard when I was young was conjunto music. Conjunto music is very popular in the southern part of Texas, and San Antonio is the capital of the conjunto music industry. This last Friday in my humanity class we were shown a video about conjunto music and the history of this style of music. The video gave me some insight to things that I didn’t know before about this style of music. One of the main instruments used in this style of music is the accordion, which is a handheld squeezebox that generates air to flow across reeds inside of the accordion. The accordion comes from Europe and was brought to this land by the European immigrants. The conjunto music before never use to have words and was just the melody played by the people, but the man credited to bring words to this music goes by the name Valerio Longoria. In the video he said, “All I would do is try and see what words would go along with the music I was playing.” Now a day the sound can still be heard around my town on the radio station KEDA, and you can listen to some of the men and women who make this music still popular to this day. Like Flaco Jimenez, Eva Ybarra, Mingo Saldivar and Little Joe & La Familla are just to name a few.