Leonardo “Flaco” Jiménez, the singer, songwriter, and master accordionist, has died. Across a career spanning over 70 years, which included collaborations with Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and many others, Jiménez helped to popularize the Mexican music birthed in his native South Texas alternatively called conjunto, norteño, or Tejano, though Jiménez often preferred to label it Tex-Mex. No cause of death was given in the Facebook post from Jimenéz’s family announcing his death. He was 86 years old.
Born in San Antonio, Texas, Jiménez came from a lineage of accordionists, including his grandfather, Patricio, and father, Santiago Jiménez Sr. A pioneer of conjunto who injected his sound with accordion melodies inspired by the German and Czech polkas and waltzes he heard at dance halls in South and Central Texas, Santiago did not need to teach his son how to play the instrument; instead, the younger Jiménez learned the instrument himself at age seven simply from hearing his father play. “I was self-taught,” Jiménez explained to NPR in 2014. “You know, I used to watch my dad play at home and feeling the instrument—not just playing it, but feeling it, you know.” He quickly earned the nickname “Flaco,” or “Skinny,” the same moniker that his father used when he began playing music.
Jiménez’s unmatched exuberance and skill on the accordion made him a fast-rising star in his native Texas. He was a regular in the dirt-floor dance hall scenes of cities and towns in the 1960s across the state, and he eventually paired up with Douglas Sahm, the founding member of the Sir Douglas Quintet and a key artistic collaborator; the pair would go on to found the Texas Tornados, a conjunto supergroup that recorded seven albums. In 1973, Sahm recruited Jiménez to contribute to his Doug Sahm and Band album, where he brushed shoulders with luminaries like Bob Dylan and Dr. John, paving the way for Jiménez’s own breakthrough. “Doug told me ‘you’re not supposed to play just that simple, traditional conjunto music,’” he said in a 2000 interview. “There are so many players who stayed in the same crater like my papa did. Doug showed me there were other worlds out there.”
Over the following decades, Jiménez brought his expressive accordion playing to collaborations with the Rolling Stones, Linda Rondstadt, Dwight Yoakam, and Ry Cooder, among many others. He released over 25 studio albums of his own and received six Grammy Awards in his lifetime, including trophies for Best Country Instrumental Album, in 1996, and the inaugural Best Tejano Music Performance, for 1998’s Said and Done. “I started making conjunto more progressive because of the versatility that I believe in,” Jiménez said in an interview for PBS’ American Roots. “I think it’s good to change it a little.”
Jiménez was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Grammys in 2015 following his final album, 2014’s Flaco Jiménez y Tomas Ortíz de los Alegres de Terán. “You must remember that when my papa played, there weren’t record companies out there willing to expose conjunto music,“ he once said. “They considered it low class, cantina music, Mexican hillbilly music.… It was just among Mexicanos. I would consider myself one of the first ones who started sharing cultures.”
