Flaco Jiménez, Global Tejano Music Ambassador, Dead at 86

Flaco Jiménez, the legendary accordion player who was perhaps the foremost ambassador for regional Tejano music in the 20th century, died at 86 on July 31st. According to a statement, Jiménez died surrounded by his family. “His legacy will live on through his music and all of his fans,” it read.

Throughout his career, Jiménez served as a global emissary of conjunto, the 18th-century regional genre born in Texas that merged traditional Mexican music with the accordion-driven polka music from German immigrants. “What Elvis Presley was to rock, Muddy Waters to blues…Charlie Parker to Jazz,” wrote the Chicago-Tribune in 1992, “Flaco Jiménez is to Tex-Mex (also known as conjunto or norteño) music.”

Jiménez took pride in expanding, tweaking, and presenting the genre he grew steeped in as a child to the worlds and genres far from the San Antonio of his youth. “I would consider myself,” Jiménez once said, “one of the first ones who started sharing cultures.”

Throughout his 70-year career, Jiménez brought his accordion playing to a variety of genres through his collaborations with everyone from Doug Sahm, Linda Ronstadt, Ry Cooder, the Rolling Stones, Buck Owens, and Dwight Yoakam. 

“The versatility of Tex-Mex is what makes it,” Jiménez told the Chicago Tribune. “We play Cajun, we play rock and roll, we play country, we play blues. What comes to our minds to do, to have fun with. I like to share our cultures.” 

Leonardo Jiménez was born on March 11, 1939. Like his professional accordionist father before him, as a child he took on the nickname of “Flaco” (skinny) due to his slight frame. Jiménez grew up immersed in norteño and conjunto music, and in addition to his father, he soon became enamored with accordion players like Valerio Longoria, Narciso Martínez, and Juan Lopez. By the age of 12, Jiménez was playing accordion, the instrument with which he would become synonymous for the remainder of his career. “I like to make my accordion yell and scream and make it happy,” Jiménez said of his trademark instrument. 

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Jiménez began gigging and singing on the local radio with his teenage band Los Caporales with Henry Zimmerle and Joe Ponce. The band name was one Jiménez would revisit throughout his career, eventually repurposing it as a duo with bajo sexto legend Fred Ojeda. “When I record under my style, Flaco Jiménez, it’s flashier, it’s more modern,” Jiménez said in 2012 after reuniting his iteration of Los Caporales with Ojeda. “This is the old style.”

But Jiménez always wanted to transcend the confines of the regional San Antonio scene in which he grew up. “I wanted to cross over,” he told Texas Highways. “And I got lucky.”

Sometime in the late Sixties or early Seventies, Jiménez began playing with Doug Sahm, the frontman of the Texas rock band the Sir Douglas Quintet. The collaboration changed the trajectory of both musicians’ careers, and resulted, many years later, in the forming of the Texas Tornados, the beloved, Grammy-winning Tejano supergroup featuring Jiménez, Sahm, Augie Meyers, and Freddy Fender. 

Jiménez recorded a number of albums throughout the Seventies and Eighties, many of them for San Antonio’s D.L.B. Records as well as the California-based roots label Arhoolie. As his career progressed, Jiménez would go on to collaborate with a who’s who of rock, folk, and country legends, including the Rolling Stones, who recruited Jiménez to play on 1994’s Voodoo Lounge. He also lent his accordion to the Mavericks’ 1995 hit “All You Ever Do Is Bring Me Down,” No. 159 on Rolling Stone‘s list of the 200 Greatest Country Songs of All Time. (Many of the musicians he played with also appeared on Jiménez’s 1992 major label debut, Partners.)
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Throughout his career, Jiménez remained committed to his philosophy of fusion: “You have to play what’s going on in the world,” he said in 1973. “Starting with polka, and a little rock and roll, or a little cumbia, cha-cha-cha…It’s pretty hard just to play polka, polka, polka, polka, or cumbia, cumbia, cumbia. You have to mix it up.”

In later years, Jiménez was proud to serve as a representative of his hometown. “San Antonio is a music city,” he said in 2021. “Like Nashville is to country and New Orleans is to jazz, San Antonio is to conjunto. The whole city has a musical groove.”
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Jiménez slowed down in his later years, but continued to perform and remain active. As recently as 2020, Jiménez reunited with the Mavericks and appeared on their album En Español. Asked the following years whether he prefers to communicate in English or Spanish, Jiménez demurred.

“I’m not good at speeches,” Jiménez said. “People that know me know I let my accordion talk for me.”