This Week in Texas Music History, we meet a fugitive who inspired folk songs in his own lifetime and the launch of an entire field of study after he was gone.
***This Week in Texas Music History is brought to you by Brane Audio***
By Jason Mellard from the Center for Texas Music History at Texas State University.
On June 22, 1901, authorities captured the fugitive Gregorio Cortez along the Rio Grande north of Laredo. This ended one of the most dramatic manhunts in Texas history. Starting ten days earlier in Karnes County, Cortez had traveled over five hundred miles, inspiring one of the most enduring borderlands corridos in the process. Who was he, why was he running, and how did that song come to be?
In mid-June, Sherriff Brack Morris arrived at Cortez’s home and accused him of horse theft. Cortez knew nothing of the matter, and the exchange became tense. Morris drew his gun and shot Gregorio’s brother. Cortez fired back in self-defense, killing the sheriff, and Cortez’s dramatic flight to the border began. The saga entranced Texans of Mexican heritage who cast their own version of events into a folk song to fill in the gaps from official media’s misinformation. The wrongly-accused man stood defending himself, in the lyrics of the song, “With his pistol in his hand.” The song persisted, sustaining the memory of Cortez’s innocence in standing his ground, even if the historical record didn’t catch up for years.
The song’s verses rang out again decades later in the work of folklorist Américo Paredes. Paredes was a musician himself, performing with his first wife Chelo Silva in Brownsville as a young man. He was a writer, too, who spent WWII working for the Army paper Stars and Stripes. On his return, he enrolled at the University of Texas and made Gregorio Cortez the subject of his dissertation. The result was the classic 1958 book With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero that traced the origins of the corrido to get a more balanced sense of the South Texas past. Paredes’s fresh look at Cortez opened up the new field of Mexican American Studies and inspired a 1982 film starring Edward James Olmos.
Paredes’s book, Olmos’s film, and the border ballad at their center all sprung from Cortez’s story. So many singers have recounted his deeds since. On record, Pedro Rocha and Lupe Martinez’s is the classic version of the tune, but the song has been covered by many artists, including Los Alegres de Teran and Ramon Ayala y Los Bravos del Norte.
Sources:
Jose E. Limon. Americo Paredes: Culture and Critique. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012.
Americo Paredes. With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958.
Ramon Saldivar. The Borderlands of Culture: Americo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
