This Week in Texas Music History the “Monarch of the Accordion” Pedro Ayala is born.
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By Jason Mellard from the Center for Texas Music History at Texas State University.
On June 29, 1911, conjunto accordionist Pedro Ayala was born in central Nuevo Leon, Mexico. His family moved to South Texas when Pedro was eight. They worked in the fields by day and by night played as a family band. Pedro’s first instrument in that ensemble was a homemade tambora drum, and his father, brothers, and sisters took up the guitar, fiddle, flute, and accordion. As a teenager, Ayala gravitated to this last instrument, the first steps in a career that earned him the nickname “Monarch of the Accordion.”
Ayala began performing professionally in the 1930s in the Lower Rio Grande Valley and recorded for the first time in 1947 with the polkas “La Burrita” and “La Pajarera” for Mira, a precursor of the Falcon Records label. He continued laboring as a migrant farm worker, following the crops from Texas north to Michigan and Ohio, performing at dances for his fellow workers in their downtime along the way. Versatility was one of Ayala’s hallmarks as a performer, with a wide repertoire of polkas, boleros, redovas, waltzes, and his favorite form, the tango.
Like many conjunto accordionists of his generation, Ayala held the Italian playing style in high regard, though still fully aware of the accordion’s multicultural tangle. He remarked on the nature of his influences that “Germans build accordions, Italians play them, and Mexicans play them best.”
Ayala’s performing and recording career reached new heights in the 1950s and 1960s, both as a solo artist and in the bands of such orquesta masters as Beto Villa and Isidro Lopez. In 1988, the National Endowment for the Arts honored Pedro Ayala as a National Heritage Fellow. He passed two years later, in 1990, his legacy as accordion king firmly secured.
Sources:
Manuel Peña, Musica Tejana: The Cultural Economy of Artistic Transformation. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1999.
Clayton Shorkey in Laurie E. Jasinski, Gary Hartman, Casey Monahan, and Ann T. Smith, eds. The Handbook of Texas Music. Second Edition. Denton, TX: Texas State Historical Association, 2012.
