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Artist
Ruben Naranjo
12+ albums
about
RUBEN NARANJO was one of the last of the classic dance combo leaders of Texan conjunto music, a style which is played by groups called conjuntos, on button accordion, guitar, the big 12-string bass guitar known as a bajo sexto and drums, and which is similar to the nortena music played across the border in Mexico. Apart from Mexican influence, conjunto music owed much to Texas's German and Czech immigrant communities and the repertoire features many waltzes and polkas as well as the rollicking border ballads known as corridos. Ruben Naranjo was born in 1945 in Alice, southern Texas, to a truck driver father. Like his eight brothers, Ruben earned a youthful living picking cotton, and some of the earliest songs he learned were corridos sung in the fields to pass the time while working. At home, his mother played harmonica, and his father, though he couldn't play an instrument, bought old guitars to do up and resell. All of the brothers taught themselves to play guitar on the instruments lying around the house. Ruben was the most zealous, and also learnt bajo sexto and, when his father unusually came home with an accordion, that too. In 1960, aged 15, Naranjo began to work as a part-time bajo sexto player with the Conjunto Latino at dances around southern Texas and four years later joined the well-known group Chano Cadena full-time. By now he had mastered all the instruments of a conjunto and was a highly competent lead or backing vocalist. In the early 1960s a vogue for dual
