King of the Accordion
For forty years Ramòn Ayala's music has captured the experience and the soul of the hard life in the Rio Grande borderlands.
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Given Ayala's popularity, I had imagined that he lived in a secluded, unmarked palace somewhere outside town. Instead, I come across an empty lot where a black semi stretches out like a lazy panther. "Ramón Ayala y Los Bravos del Norte," it declares boldly, and there too, the six brave mustached cowboys stand in a semicircle, beaming. Next door, just across the street from city hall and the public library, I find his house. It is a two-story, peach-colored stucco home with an orange Spanish-tile roof. The driveway resembles a luxury-car dealership: On display are a purple BMW, a white Jaguar, a maroon extended-cab Ford F250 (King Ranch edition), and a sleek, undoubtedly expensive sports car hiding under a white plastic cover, its shiny rims peeking out.
With or without Cornelio, Ayala didn't do too badly for himself. I find him standing outside, fitted into black polyester pants and a plaid shirt, sucking on a red lollipop, his curly rattail snaking down between his shoulder blades. He watches as two of his workers dismantle a large nativity scene that appears in front of his home every holiday season. Each year, Ayala throws a huge Christmas bash and hands out five thousand bicycles and thousands of other toys to needy kids. There is a day-long concert outside his house with a lineup of tejano and norteño stars. For the occasion, his home is draped decadently in Christmas lights and features a life-size waving snowman and Santa Claus in the front yard.
For a man of such fame who sings about the complicated tribulations of love and betrayal, he is exceedingly plainspoken and simple. He has four children and has been happily married for 35 years. When I walk up to him, he stares at me with a faint look of acknowledgment, as if I were just another neighbor stopping by.
What I am most puzzled by is this: Even without Cornelio Reyna's masterful songwriting and reputed charm, why was Ramón Ayala—why does he continue to be, at age 58, when most artists would be sitting quietly in retirement, reminiscing about their glory years—such a wild success? As far as technical merit goes, he's hardly the best accordion player Texas has known. "There are a lot of people who argue that there are better accordionists than Ramón Ayala," says Pedraza, a walking norteño music encyclopedia. "Musically speaking, it could be that there are. The problem is that they haven't created their own style. That's the key." One example is Rio Grande Valley native Esteban "Steve" Jordan, who is often called the Jimi Hendrix of the accordion. Jordan is a virtuoso who adapted difficult jazz and blues piano scales for the accordion, making the clunky German instrument sound stunningly complex and sophisticated. Yet what Jordan provides as an artist is arguably more of a musical showcase than a brand that people can hear and recognize instantly—something that holds over time.
Ayala offers just that. The musical tweaks he and Reyna made to norteño in the sixties were small but revolutionary. They added introductions on the accordion and the bajo sexto, making each song distinctive. Instead of having the accordion repeat the same scales and rhythms throughout a tune, as was the norm with norteño music, they varied the scales and used the bajo sexto to provide decorative runs. They also sang more-elaborate and precise harmonies. The vast majority of typical norteño groups today use Ayala and Reyna's style as their musical base and sing at least a few of their songs. And when tejano, a highly modernized and synthesized offshoot of conjunto, took a turn in the mid-nineties and revisited its accordion "roots," it was Ayala's sound that many of its artists emulated.
He also was unique in keeping his house in order. This is virtually unheard of in the unsophisticated tejano and norteño music industries, where artists get cheated by poor contracts, managers specialize in mismanaging, and there's rarely enough money to buy a tour bus. While he does not invest in flashy marketing campaigns or sexy music videos like Los Tigres del Norte, the norteño kingpins of northwestern Mexico and California, Ayala has a full team of professionals who work for him. Servando Cano, the former bank cashier who once helped him and Reyna land the employee-party gigs in the sixties, has built a powerful artist management business that is headquartered in Monterrey and has offices in McAllen, Houston, and in the Mexican cities of Aguascalientes, Hermosillo, and Mexico City. Ayala's 32-member crew includes his own mechanic, photographer, and publicist. He puts on a minimum of three shows a week year-round.
But style and strategy alone do not explain the longevity of Ayala's career or the spirit with which his admirers receive his music. What the King seems to have communicated through lyrics and his singular way of pulsing the accordion is an overpowering sense of emotion and experience. Although his songs are about love, tacitly they speak more broadly about the hard life, about a quieter form of social suffering. It is the little guy's love song; his losses are thicker, more acutely painful. And yet he persists. He grins in poverty's face. Ayala's decades-long presence, the vibrancy of his accordion, the company of other fans who sing along with equal intensity—all of this is reason for the listener to remain proud, to be hopeful. In a culture that doesn't encourage males to express their emotions, Ramón Ayala is one big coping mechanism.
IT'S SATURDAY NIGHT, Ramón AYALA NIGHT, at the OK Corral South, a supermarket-size norteño club located behind a shopping mall in the southeast part of Houston. norteño reigns in this area where Latinos dominate. The OK Corral has three busy locations with live acts each weekend. Ayala gets nabbed only two or three times a year, and he packs the house like no other band.
OK Corral South attracts both norteño fans, made up predominantly of Mexican immigrants, and tejano followers, who tend to be Mexican American. Ayala is the perfect magnet for this mix. General wisdom among club managers is that tejano fans refuse to pay high cover charges but will splurge on booze, while norteños will pay whatever it takes to hear a band from back home but drink and act more conservatively. Tonight the cover is a hefty $25, the beer a whopping $5. But the cowboys are all lined up. This is the payoff for sixty-hour workweeks, a chance to dance with callused hands. A skinny young kid stands big-eyed before the mean-looking bouncer, wearing dark jeans and a perfectly pressed shirt, swimming in his cowboy hat. He doesn't have his ID, he says. The bouncer eyes him suspiciously.
I suppose I could have gotten a backstage pass if I'd tried, checked out what the accordion king does before he goes onstage. But tonight I wanted to understand his audience more than I wanted to understand him. Which is to say that I wanted to understand myself: It was Ramón Ayala's music that lit up family weddings I attended as a child when we crossed the border into northern Mexico—and twenty years and several lifestyles later, it is still Ayala, and it still feels good.
The wind blows, and nothing consoles me; without you my life ends, and you're not even aware. I've been feeling heartbroken the past few weeks, so Ayala fits my mood as I wait for his appearance. The club is dark inside and teeming with life, the ratio of men to women at least two to one. I don't care what people tell me, since I love you, I adore you. A mystery voice rumbles Ayala's appellations: "!El rey del acordeón! !El más grande de la música norteña! !El triunfador de siempre!" And then, with a flash of light, there he is, Ramón Ayala himself, the King of the Accordion, the Biggest Thing in norteño Music, Always the Champion, with his fringed jacket and his signature rhinestone-studded Gabbanelli accordion in red, white, and—green. We may be in Houston, we may speak English, but the imagery is all Mexico. Yank out my heart if it's a sin to adore you. The band's announcer greets the people from Monterrey, Reynosa, Matamoros. Following his cue, they shout back. Ayala launches into his most requested song, "Tragos de Amargo Licor," a depressing ballad about a lovesick man who drowns himself in liquor as he waits hopelessly for his departed lover to return. On the dance floor, the women hang from the men's necks and begin to sway left, right; left, right.
If I became a millionaire, I'd buy up all the poverty. If I became a millionaire, I'd order all the sadness to be locked up. In trunks of gold and silver, I'd bury all of the jealousy and resentments, so that I could cure myself of all my pains. I take in everything around me: the colored lights, the shiny instruments, the Wranglers, the shy glances from would-be dancers, the waitresses in miniskirts, the busy bartenders, the Ramón Ayala key chains, the Ramón Ayala license plates, the cowboy hats, the skinny kid who got in after all, the laughter, the singing, the music—always the music. Forty years later, it's still Ayala. He hears us. He understands. And this night, anyway, we know we'll be okay.
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