From NPR music, this is All Latino.

I'm Felix Contreras.

Anna Maria Ceres away, so this week we're going to spend time with Tejano music legend Ruben Ramos. When I say legend, I don't use that light, I don't use that lightly.

He has been playing big band Fuel Tejano since 1960.

But get this, his family's connection to music in Texas goes back over 100 years to 1918.

I talked to him about the release of a tribute album that just came out called Los Dias de Calor. And as you'll hear from our conversation,

his life story is basically the history of what we know as Tejano music,

a reflection of the bicultural existence along the border throughout Texas and in the entire southwest.

And as we started talking, he told me about how he started in music

and what life was like for Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in Texas in the 1940s and 50s.

First of all, I was introduced to music out in the cotton fields in the country.

We used to live in the country, between two prisons out there in between Sugarland and Richmond.

And my first introduction to music was my mama playing guitar.

My dad played fiddle.

And the neighbor playing accordion at somebody at Hernandez's house or not our house

because we didn't, we just lived in a shack.

So it had to be somebody else's house where take out all the furniture

out of the living room and my dad and my mama and Basilio in a corner, three chairs,

and people dancing in the circle in the living room.

No I can reserve my sentiments, no I want my first introduction, I was but four or five years old, you know.

But after that we were basically migrant cotton pickers

living off the land, picking cotton,

...