The Mexican American music icon recently received the National Heritage Fellowship Award from the National Endowment of the Arts for his groundbreaking and influential sounds.
A man arrested in the killing of a Baltimore tech entrepreneur was suspected of raping a woman days before and was already under surveillance, police sayMorning Rundown: Biden impeachment inquiry's first hearing, Powerball jackpot nears $1 billion, and Kansas City's love story with Taylor SwiftThe mother of a man suspected of killing a Baltimore tech CEO urged him to surrender, fearing police would try to kill him“Little Joe” DeLeón Hernández, seen here performing in Austin,...
The King of Brown Sound was born José María DeLeón Hernández on a thunderous stormy night in a three-walled dirt floor garage where his family lived in Temple, Texas, on Oct. 17, 1940. NBC News caught up with Little Joe over a celebratory breakfast with friends at Chevy’s Mexican Restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, for a look into his life and music and the making of an unlikely and uniquely American international phenomenon. Below is a condensed and edited version of the conversation.
“In 1968 I was offered a contract with Capitol … and just the first paragraph of it said they would control everything and own everything. I had just started my [own] record company, and I wanted to produce the music that I’d produced through the years. There weren’t any outlets for Chicano music that was like my band [or] record labels to record my style of music, so I went independent. I produced my own recordings of my group and produced some 20, 25 bands.
“I had soooo much material even before I started writing my own. I grew up listening to the big band era, the crooners, the swing bands. So in my music you have those overtones. In ‘Por Un Amor’ you hear the rock and roll; in ‘Cuando Salgo A Los Campos’ you hear the country; in ‘Qué Culpa Tengo’ you hear the jazz. ‘Ella’ is a mariachi song, a Mexican ranchera, but I feel it as a blues song, because I grew up with the blues, so that’s the way I delivered it.
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