Oscar Hernandez is Someone To Look Out For

Oscar Hernandez is a Pharr accordionist that is often overlooked when talking about the giants in accordion music. I think he's someone that more people should be familiar with, he's one of the greatest musicians of this region.

His name is spelled two different ways, sometimes it's spelled "Oskar" and other times it's spelled "Oscar". Not sure what is the actual correct spelling but I'm going to refer to him as "Oscar" in this piece. When he was a kid, he already had his own band here in the Valley.

His first band that got him a lot of attention was Oscar Hernandez y Los Profesionales. He also performed with Oscar Hernandez y Los Alegres del Valle.

There had been a rumor that the reason Paulino Bernal hired him to be in El Conjunto Bernal was because he saw him as an accordion threat or as someone better than him on the squeezebox, during that early 1960's era. I asked Bernal about it once.

Bernal begins, "I said, 'Well I started hearing him, he was a tough musician playing great accordion [music] and if you can't beat him, join him," he laughed and then continued, "We did incredible things with those accordions."

Manuel Peña talked about Hernandez's addition to El Conjunto Bernal in his amazing book "The Texas-Mexican Conjunto: History of a Working-Class Music":

"[Paulino] Bernal broke ranks with his peers by not only adding a second accordionist to the group (in the person of the young but highly regarded Oscar Hernandez) but at the same time following Hernandez's lead in switching to the unheard of chromatic, or five-row, button accordion. With this addition El Conjunto Bernal's break with past practice was accomplished in one stroke. The contrast between the old and the new Bernal was nothing short of radical, especially when viewed in the light of the musical climate of the time. The new combination made possible a wide range of sororities, as the Bernal-Hernandez tandem combined to record such polkas as "Idalia", with its intricate execution and fast chromatic passages."

In his post-Conjunto Bernal days, he played with Oscar Hernandez and the Tuff Band, which included the recently departed Jessy Serrata as the singer. One of the cool songs they did together was "Desde Ayer", a progressive-sounding Tejano-conjunto cover of The Beatles' "Yesterday". The group as a whole had a very post-modern conjunto sound to it that was very unique at the time. They really built off what Conjunto Bernal had done in the 1960's and took it to another direction.

In the 1990's Hernandez would release a rare solo CD titled "Playing With Myself". It was arguably the most experimental and jazzy sounding conjunto album I've ever heard. One of the great gems of conjunto music, and can't be compared to anything else out there.

So if you ever want to treat yourself to an accordionist that hasn't gotten the attention he truly deserves, check out the music of Oscar Hernandez of Pharr, Texas. He's up there with the giants like Esteban Jordan, Eva Ybarra, and Paulino Bernal when it comes to accordion music.

Note: Oscar Hernandez has declined to be interviewed several times over the past five years. People interested in wanting to know more about him can learn about him at the Border Studies Archive, where an old interview of him exists there.