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Music|Flaco Jiménez, Grammy-Winning Master of the Tex-Mex Accordion, Dies at 86
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/01/arts/music/flaco-jimenez-dead.html
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Fusing traditional Tejano sounds with blues, rock and country, he recorded with Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and Ry Cooder.
Aug. 1, 2025, 6:58 p.m. ET
Flaco Jiménez, a Grammy-winning singer, songwriter and accordion virtuoso who was widely regarded as the king of Tex-Mex music, recording material that ranged far beyond his roots with acts like Dwight Yoakam, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, has died. He was 86.
His death was announced on Thursday by his family in a Facebook post, which did not say where or when he had died or provide the cause. He had been hospitalized with an unspecified illness and released in January.
The son and grandson of accordionists, Mr. Jiménez played a style often characterized as norteño, Tejano or conjunto — though he preferred the term Tex-Mex because it captured the variety of influences that flowed through his music.
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“I would consider our music as like a bouquet of roses in rainbow colors, you know?” he told The Worcester Telegram and Gazette in Massachusetts in 1990. “Just imagine a bouquet of roses with one color. It would be boring, man.”
Mr. Jiménez won six Grammys, five of them on his own and one, in 1999, with Los Super Seven, a rotating collective of Tex-Mex and country artists, including Joe Ely, Freddy Fender and Doug Sahm. In 2015, he won a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
