Narciso Martinez

Narciso Martínez was born in 1911 in Reynosa, Mexico, and moved to Texas with his family when he was an infant. He learned to play the accordion from the local German and Czech families and began performing at dances with bajo sexto player Santiago Almeida. He was the first widely successful conjunto recording artist, making his debut in 1936 with Bluebird Records. He earned his nickname El Huracán del Valle (The Hurricane of the Valley) for his virtuosic and energetic style of playing. He recorded hundreds of songs in various genres, such as polkas, valses, huapangos, schottisches, and mazurkas. He also composed many of his own tunes and played on the sessions of other musicians. He toured the southwestern United States in the 1950s, playing for Mexican American audiences. He received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1983. He died in 1992 in San Benito, Texas, at the age of 80. He is widely regarded as the father of conjunto music and a pioneer of Texas-Mexican culture.