Santiago Jiménez, Jr.

Santiago Jimenez Jr., born in 1944, worked throughout his life as a vocalist and accordionist who carried forward the foundational advances his father had made in conjunto’s instrumental language. The style itself, an accordion-driven form of communal music from Mexico and South Texas, stayed firmly grounded in longstanding practices. Unlike his brother Flaco Jimenez, who blended the music with outside currents such as jazz and country, Santiago remained loyal to his father’s approach and limited himself to the spare instrumentation of a two-button accordion backed only by guitar and voice. Across several decades he issued many recordings, among them a 1960 joint project with his brother, assorted singles pressed on local labels, and a run of Spanish-language albums for Rounder and Watermelon from the late 1980s into the 1990s.