Hinojosa, Tish

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Tish Hinojosa

Singer, songwriter

Singer and songwriter Tish Hinojosa does not so much cross musical borders as ignore them. Her music combines sounds and styles from American folk music, Nashville’s country-western, traditional Mexican genres, and Tejano conjunto music, or Mexican American music from Texas. She writes everything from love songs to protest songs, ballads to dance tunes. Her exciting and interesting genre-bending style has also delayed her success somewhat, for recording companies like neat classifications, which Hinojosa’s music defies. She started singing professionally in the 1970s and began recording albums in the 1980s, but only started receiving regular national attention in the 1990s.

The youngest of 13 children born to immigrant parents, Hinojosa listened to many different kinds of sounds during her childhood. Her older brothers and sisters listened to folk and popular music of the 1960s—by artists like Joan Baez and Judy Collins. Her parents listened to the radio stations playing Mexican music. “I love the music of the traditional aspect of our community,” she told Hispanic magazine. “Conjunto music, the ballads, and the romantic singer/songwriter songs—the older music from Mexico that my parents like a lot— made a very positive impression.”

Hinojosa herself began singing while in high school after her mother bought her a guitar. She explained to the Dallas Morning News: “It was just the $20 guitar you get down [in Mexico] at the Mercado. But I was really, really proud, and I still have that guitar.”

In music, Hinojosa found something all her own. “Finally,” she declared to the Dallas Morning News, “I [had] found something I could do myself. I wasn’t just tagging along with my sisters somewhere.” She also discovered that she had a special gift. She was singing one day at school with her friends, she told the newspaper, “and I started singing one song. They all just sat there kind of quietly, and they said: ‘You know that you can sing?’” She did not read musical notation, but taught herself songs by ear from records. Her sister Linda Gonzalez described the process to the Dallas Morning News: “She’d sit in her room and play a record over and over again until she could pick the notes out. She never took guitar lessons.”

After graduating from high school, Hinojosa started performing around town, recording popular tunes in Spanish for a leading Tejano label, and singing jingles in Spanish for radio commercials. After a few years without moving ahead in her career, she moved first to New Mexico and then to Nashville, seeking new music and new opportunities. She traveled around the country

For the Record…

Born Letitia Hinojosa, December 6, 1955, in San Antonio, TX; daughter of Felipe and Maria Hinojosa. Married Craig Barker, 1982; children: Adam, Maria Christina (Nina).

Began performing locally and on local radio, 1973; sang for Mel Tillis Production Company, Nashville, TN, 1983-85; recorded first album, Taos to Tennessee, 1987; performed at Texas Governor Ann Richard’s inauguration, 1991; performed at U.S. President Bill Clinton’s inauguration, 1993. Television appearances include CBS This Morning, 1993; radio appearances include Prairie Home Companion and All Things Considered, 1994;

Awards: First Prize for New Folk Songwriter, Kearville Folk Festival, 1979; Folk Album of the Year, National Association of Independent Record Distributors, 1992, for Culture Swing.

Addresses: Management —Manazo Music Management, P. O. Box 3304, Austin, TX 78764.

to perform at colleges and coffee houses; she began learning the country-western hits of singers like Emmylou Harris and Roseanne Cash; and she landed a job singing demo tapes for the Mel Tillis Publishing Company. After two years in Nashville without signing a record deal, she moved back home to San Antonio to regroup. In the following years, she began to sing more of her own songs, and in 1987, released a privately-recorded collection entitled Taos to Tennessee.

During these years, Hinojosa had trouble landing a major recording label because of her eclectic sound. No one could quite categorize her music. She sang folk music, country-western songs, and conjunto songs; many of her own compositions synthesized traits from all these styles. To critics outside Nashville she was too country, to others inside Nashville, she was not country enough.

That Hinojosa didn’t fit any mold gave the record companies a good excuse to ignore her for a few years. “There’s so much talk now about artists who have fallen between the cracks,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “So many of the singer-songwriters just don’t fit into niches in Nashville or in pop music anymore. I guess I’m one of those. But I feel like I’m in good company, because I like a lot of people that are in the same crack that I’m in.”

Hinojosa’s record Taos to Tennessee sold well locally, received some notice, and started turning her career around. Two years later, she recorded her first major-label album, Homeland, for A&M records. The album contains the sounds and songs typical for Hinojosa—a combination of country-western, folk, and conjunto, presented in both Spanish and English.

While Homeland garnered rave reviews, Hinojosa relationship with A&M did not last. Only a week before the company was due to release her second album there was a management shake-up, and they dropped her from their register. “It was one of those hard, fast lessons about what major record labels are about,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s one of those confusing things. I’m not sure if and who to blame, and why there’s people there that I never heard from again and while I was there they acted like they were real good friends. It was kind of a strange little thing.”

The end of Hinojosa’s association with A&M had a positive side, however, for she recorded the material for the her second album all over again, but this time in Austin rather than in Hollywood. Hinojosa was extremely pleased with the results. “What we got is a lot more personal record,” she explained to the Los Angeles Times. It’s a lot more of me, a lot more of Texas. The sound is a lot more real, my sound.… In L.A. it was a lot less time spent on a lot more frills. And what we did in Texas, a lot more heart went into it, a lot more time and thought.” Culture Swing was finally released in 1992 by the independent folk-oriented label Rounder Records. The New York Times praised the work, calling its typical combination of Spanish and English, folk, country, and conjunto sounds a “panoramic musical landscape.”

Hinojosa’s fortune seemed to change again after the production of Culture Swing. She began writing new material with a new sound. “I was going in all kinds of directions,” she explained in Hispanic magazine. “Its real personal, but on a different level than Culture Swing. ” This new sound caught the ear of the Warner Brothers label. “Originally, the new album was to have been my second for Rounder Records, the label that released Culture Swing,” she continued in Hispanic. “But the flavor of the recording took a different direction. It still had some Spanish language in it and a bit of Spanish sensitivity, but lyrically and musically, it stretched out further. I don’t wantto call it pop, because that’s too general a term, but a major label sensed its potential and signed me to a long-term contract.”

In the winter of 1994, Warner Brothers released Destiny’s Gate. After Destiny’s Gate, Hinojosa began working on several other projects, including a bilingual children’s album. Despite the conflicts and problems her unique musical style has engendered for her, Hinojosa has no plans to change her musical approach. As she stated in a 1994 Manazo Music press kit, “When you resist pop formulas for your own artistic vision, the twists are sometimes confusing, but now I’m seeing the wonderful results of not straying from a true road.”