El Azote: Accordeonista Camilo Cantu
"The Scourge of Austin" never recorded, but he left his mark
In 1942, a 7-year-old boy accompanied his parents to La Polkita, an open air venue in Del Valle that was basically a concrete slab outlined by Christmas lights. He became transfixed on the accordion player whose flying fingers had the power to get the whole crowd dancing. The kid couldn’t believe the magic Camilo Cantu got out of that box!
Nicknamed “El Azote de Austin,” (“the Scourge from Austin,”) because he’d go to towns and blow everybody away, Cantu was as highly regarded a player as the Big Three 1930s conjunto pioneers- Narciso Martinez, Santiago Jimenez Sr. and Valerio Longoria. But because El Azote never put out a record, retiring in 1963 to work in his accordion repair shop, he didn’t become a legend. But he was a big influence on many to carry on the conjunto tradition.
“I started begging my parents for an accordion on the drive home,” Degollado said about that night in ‘42. He got one at age 10 and by his teenaged years Degollado was leading his own group. Cantu showed him the sordita tuning, which gave the accordion a fuller sound, and was always happy to answer J.D.’s questions because there was nothing he loved more than lighting the torch.
In 1954, “El Montopolis Kid,” as Degollado was billed, was on the road, hitting the Texas towns where the populations doubled during picking season. At a quick-stop grocery in Littlefield, near Lubbock, Degollado noticed an attractive cashier. They made clumsy small talk as he paid for his sodas, and he asked for her mailing address so he could send postcards from the road.
“Antonia,” Degollado kept repeating, as he walked back to the band’s station wagon. Such a pretty name. After a postcard came a love letter and a long-distance romance blossomed. During the sixth year of courtship a wedding date was set.
But Johnny’s first love was the accordion and there were disagreements about how much time he would spend out on the road. An ultimatum made him bolt and the couple broke up in 1960.
Cantu faced a similar demand in 1963, and stayed married. No more long road trips for the Scourge, who worked every day in a repair shop attached to his house on Normandie Avenue, near Ben White. He was still in the music business, but now the people were coming to him and he seemed happy. Degollado wondered if he should’ve done more to save the relationship with his true love.
Once, in San Antonio in the ’70s, Antonia heard a song on the radio called “El Pintor” about a young couple breaking up and regretting it later, and she thought about her Johnny. When the announcer said the song was by Johnny Degollado y su Conjunto, her jaw dropped.
“I kept hoping to meet her again so I could say how sorry I was that things didn’t work out,” Degollado said. He got the chance in 1992, more than three decades after the split, when Toni showed up at one of his shows. “My daughter was coming through Austin on her way to San Antonio, where we lived, and she bought the Austin paper,” said “Toni,” as everyone calls her. “There was a picture of Johnny, and I wondered if that was my Johnny, my first boyfriend Johnny.” She hadn’t seen him in over 30 years. After deciding that it was, the divorced mother of four and her sister Alicia decided to go to Austin, “just to see the show, nothing else. I figured that Johnny was married and I didn’t want to interfere,” said Toni.
Degollado had been married, twice, and was the father of six kids, but he was single in ’92. Against her sister’s wishes, Alicia approached Degollado and asked if he remembered an old girlfriend named Toni. His eyes lit up.
“Well, she’s sitting over there,” Alicia said. The couple talked for two hours that night and married a few months later. One of their first dances as husband and wife was to a Camilo Cantu song Degollado had recorded as his own. An 85-year-old Cantu looked on proudly.
“Mr. Cantu told me that if I hadn’t recorded his songs, no one would ever know they existed,” Degollado said in 2002, when he released La Cajera (“The Cashier”) as a 10th anniversary gift to Toni. “He just passed them on to me and said, ‘They’re your songs now.’”
Taking credit for songs written by another didn’t sit well with conjunto historian and photographer Daniel Schaefer. “When J.D. recorded ‘La Lupita,’ one of Camilo Cantu’s greatest compositions, and I saw the name ‘Johnny Degollado’ listed as the writer, I went to J.D. and said, ‘That’s not right,’” said Schaefer. “But he said that’s the way the old man wanted it.”
The two had an almost father-son relationship, especially after Cantu took on Degollado as an apprentice in his accordion repairing practice, which specialized in retuning new accordions by filing the reeds. “He was as talented working on accordions as he was in playing them,” Degollado said.
Cantu didn’t care about recognition. When he was inducted into the Conjunto Hall of Fame in 1987 at age 80, he sent Degollado to pick up the award. The old man passed away the day before his 91st birthday.
At the funeral in 1998, friends fondly remembered Cantu’s regular gig at Janie’s Place, owned by his first wife, on East Seventh St. in Austin. Cantu didn’t see the need to title his songs, which were all instrumentals. He’d start off with the melody and his bajo sexto player would fall in. But one night a drunk patron requested a certain tune by singing its melody and Cantu couldn’t take the butchering so he named it “La Calle Siete.” He started naming more of his songs- or Degollado did when he recorded them later.
Degollado still has his first squeezebox, a two-row button Hohner accordion his father paid $40 for in 1945. It sits in a display case in the backyard shed where Degollado works repairing accordions and refinishing furniture. “It was important to Mr. Cantu to keep the craft alive,” said Degollado. “If there’s no one to fix the accordions, then people will stop playing them, and without the accordion, there’s no more conjunto.”
Cantu himself had a mentor in Leopoldo Guajardo, Austin’s first great accordeonista, who convinced Cantu to switch from keyboard accordion to a button one in 1930. Guajardo’s son Santiago played guitar in Cantu’s trio for years, with Felipe Rodriguez playing bass notes on the tololoche.
Known as “musica nortena” in Mexico, conjunto has thrived in the region from Monterrey, Nuevo Leon (where Cantu was born in 1907) to San Antonio since the 1930s when Hispanic button accordion players (inspired by polkas and brass band music of Czech and German immigrants) teamed with bajo sexto guitarists to create a new sound. Narciso Martinez, from the Rio Grande Valley, practically abandoned the left-hand chord and bass buttons and instead concentrated on flashy, cat-quick runs on the treble and melody buttons controlled by his right hand. With bajo sexto player Santiago Almeida holding down the bass lines on the landmark 1936 recordings for Bluebird, the Martinez style would be adopted by almost all conjunto accordionists, except the irascible Cantu, who continued to play the buttons on both sides of the accordion and scoffed at those who didn’t.
In 1947, Longoria of San Antonio added trap drums and vocals to this previously all-instrumental music, creating the precursor to contemporary Tejano music. In the ‘50s, Tony De La Rosa from the Corpus Christi area slowed down the Mexican polkas a little and added electric bass under his clean staccato runs. It was the heyday of conjunto and Degollado and bajo sexto player Vicente Alonzo, who performed often on Austin’s KTXN radio, would play all over Austin five or six nights a week. But in the ’60s, conjunto started getting a bad rap as poor people’s music and was rivaled in popularity by a new, more sophisticated, accordion-free style called “orquesta” or “musica decente.” Such still-popular acts as Little Joe y la Familia and Ruben Ramos come from the orquesta Tejana tradition.
“There was definitely a division. Folks who liked the orchestras hated conjunto,” J.D. said. “And if you were a conjunto fan, you didn’t like the orchestras.” But when the newer big bands started playing and recording several Degollado compositions, including “Un Cielo” and “De Ti Estoy Enamorado,” his group was able to cross over somewhat. A prolific songwriter, J.D. has penned more than 100 songs in his career, not counting the ones Cantu taught him.
A recurring subject was his first love, the one he practically left at the altar to hit the conjunto circuit. “Even after we broke up, I kept writing songs about Toni,” J.D. said. “Whenever I’d write a sad song I’d think about how things didn’t work out. If I wanted a happy song, I’d think about us dancing together.”
Conjunto has long been known as “Mexican wedding music,” with love and tradition twirling like young and old hearts that pump the same blood. They’re together like the two-row button accordion and the 12-string bajo sexto that moved the dancers, and a 7-year-old kid who saw his life laid out for him among the Christmas lights.
This is a chapter of “Ghost Notes: Pioneering Spirits of Texas Music” (TCU Press 2020), which also has chapters on Roky Erickson, Arizona Dranes, Amos Milburn, Milton Brown, Blind Willie Johnson, The D.O.C., Joyce Harris, Sonny Curtis, John and Alan Lomax and more.