¡Bienvenidos! My name is Jan Treviño. I'm 42, I was born and raised in Hidalgo County, down in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, and I've never lived anywhere else and don't plan to. Monday to Friday I work at a citrus packing house, and from October to May that means grapefruit, grapefruit and more grapefruit. On weekends I play bajo sexto and sing second voice with Eddie Solis y Su Conjunto, four of us, at dances, weddings, quinceañeras, and once, a funeral, which is a story for another day.

And I write corridos. Not many people do anymore, not the old way. On the radio now the corridos are mostly about outlaws and big trucks, and I like some of them fine, but the corrido my grandfather sang was the newspaper. It told you who was born and who came home and who got cheated and who was brave. Nobody in this Valley is ever going to be on the evening news from Houston. So I write them down instead.

My daughter set up this page for me. She is fifteen and types faster than I can play.

>> READ MY CORRIDOS <<
four songs, in Spanish with English beside them

HOW A CORRIDO WORKS

A corrido is a story you can dance to. It has four parts, and the old ones almost always kept them:

1. El saludo. The greeting. The singer asks the people for their attention, and their permission, before he starts. You don't just walk into somebody's house and start talking.

2. La fecha y el lugar. The date and the place. When it happened, and where, so nobody can say it didn't.

3. La historia. The story itself, told straight, the way a man would tell it at the kitchen table.

4. La despedida. The farewell. In the last verse the singer says goodbye, says what the story means if it means something, and leaves.

The verses are four lines each, and each line has eight syllables, more or less, the way people talk. The second and fourth lines rhyme. If you can count to eight and you can tell the truth, you can write a corrido. That's what my grandfather told me, and I've found it's half right. The counting is the easy part.

We play them in two-four, like a polka, or in three-four, like a waltz, which the old people call valseado. Mine are mostly two-four. Eddie says that's because I'm impatient.

WHAT'S A BAJO SEXTO?

It looks like a big guitar, but it has twelve strings, in six pairs, and it's tuned low. In a conjunto the accordion sings the melody and the bajo sexto is the floor everybody stands on. It plays the bass notes and the chords at the same time. When it's done right, you don't notice it. When it's missing, the whole band falls through.

Mine was made in Mexico and bought secondhand in 1975 with my first summer's pay from the packing shed. It's been refretted twice and it's on its third case.

MIS HÉROES

Narciso Martínez, El Huracán del Valle. He was ours, a Valley man, and with Santiago Almeida playing bajo sexto beside him he made the records in the 1930s that everybody who ever picked up an accordion down here learned from. He played the button accordion fast and clean and let the bajo carry the bass, and that's the sound of conjunto to this day. My father saw him play at a dance when he was a boy and never forgot it. Don Narciso passed in 1992. Every bajo sexto player in the Valley owes Santiago Almeida a cold drink.

Flaco Jiménez, from San Antonio, son of the accordion player Santiago Jiménez. He took the accordion everywhere: rock and roll, country, the Texas Tornados. He has won Grammy awards and played with people my daughter has heard of. But when he plays a plain polka, you can still hear his father in it. I saw him in 1987 at an outdoor dance and stood ten feet from the stage the whole night and didn't dance once. My wife has not let me forget that.

EL CONJUNTO

Eddie Solis, accordion. Our leader. Fifty-eight years old and he still plays like he's late for something.
Jan Treviño, bajo sexto and second voice. That's me.
Gilbert Ramon, bass. The quiet one. Drives the van.
Joe Sanchez, drums. The youngest, and he will tell you he's the best looking, and he's not wrong.

WHERE TO FIND US THIS FALL

Cover is usually five dollars. Ladies free before ten at El Mezquite.