This Week in Texas Music History, we’ll hear how the “Queen of the Accordion” took charge of her Houston realm. Ventura Alonzo was born on December 30, 1904, in Matamoros, Mexico. When Alonzo was five, her family moved to Brownsville, Texas, where she learned to play piano and accordion. By the 1920s, she was living in Houston and had married a bajo sexto player named Frank Alonzo. In 1938, the couple started the band, Alonzo y Sus Rancheros. Ventura Alonzo not only wrote many of the group’s songs, but she was also the first tejana accordionist to record. In 1956, the Alonzos opened La Terraza, one of the most popular Mexican-American venues in Houston. Ventura Alonzo performed in the house band but also worked as the club’s business manager, negotiating...
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It continues to blow me away. Austin-based songwriter David Ramirez is 29. But his musical career spans more than a decade. Add to that a world-weary intensity and genuine emotion in his voice that reveal so much about his old soul. You just…feel it. Been to hell and back. Loved so deeply, only to have his heart delivered to him in barely-remaining shreds. And it seemed like a joke to try piecing it back together again. Forget the overly-sensitive whiner. This is the ultimate survivor. Ramirez' second full-length, Apologies, contains that very heartfelt intensity he’s known for, but applied toward a somewhat different perspective. He describes this album as one that's less about...
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