For more than four decades, Johnny Canales hosted his eponymous TV show, elevating musicians from around the globe. The bands, songwriters, instrumentalists, and virtuosos that crossed his stage ranged from traditional artists to genre provocateurs. As a constant champion of those looking to cut their teeth in the industry, Johnny relished the variety of sounds—from cumbia to country—that new and veteran acts would bring to his program. But the beloved host, who died earlier this year, is best remembered for showcasing artists who helped define tejano music.
The launch of The Johnny Canales Show in the early 1980s coincided with a creatively fertile moment in Texas. Musicians across the state were adding keyboards to polka tunes, giving them especially danceable beats and infusing them with Tex-Mex sensibilities. The songs of quinceañeras and carne asadas could, with Johnny’s help, transform into commercial juggernauts. He famously gave a young Selena Quintanilla, the future Queen of Tejano, an early boost by featuring her band, Selena y Los Dinos, on his internationally syndicated show.
Appearing next to Johnny onstage became a rite of passage for newcomers. Established stars of the genre also made a point of taking a break from touring and recording to appear on the show to celebrate tejano culture and its longtime advocate. “Even if you were doing well—let’s say you’re making amazing sales, and you really don’t need to go to Johnny—you still go,” says Veronique Medrano, a tejano musician and archivist who once played a show in the Rio Grande Valley where she was introduced by Canales.“It’s almost like a sense of you’re laying down your art. Not only to him, as a purveyor of it [and] to the masses on this program, but just to the culture.”
In tandem with our story about Johnny in the December 2024 issue of Texas Monthly, we’ve compiled a playlist of essential tejano songs. Although by no means an exhaustive look at the genre (we know this list is brief and that tejano’s roots are deeply entrenched with the likes of trailblazing early twentieth-century musicians including Lydia Mendoza and, later, bands like Sunny & the Sunglows), we’ve put together a selection of twelve standout tracks by inventive musicians who had a role in shaping the music and who, at least once, went on The Johnny Canales Show.
As the man himself would say, “Take it away!”
Little Joe y La Familia, “Las Nubes” (1972)
Little Joe Hernández and his band, La Familia, have been a staple of tejano’s ultimate proving ground—bailes, or dances—for over half a century. “Las Nubes,” a song he released in the early seventies, is often considered “the Chicano national anthem,” says Ramón Hernández, a musicologist who founded the Hispanic Music Archives, and who’s been writing about and photographing tejano musicians since the eighties. Little Joe recorded the song, a jaunty riff on a slow conjunto tune, for Ideal Records. Its plaintive, political lyrics have made it a mainstay over the years. “It talks about the struggle,” says Hernández (no relation to Joe), adding that César Chávez embraced the song as an anthem of the farmworkers movement in the seventies. Years later, Joe, in an all-black getup with a red flower pinned to his chest, performed a sweet, poignant rendition of the song with his brother on Canales’s show.
Laura Canales, “Cuatro Caminos” (1990)
The late Laura Canales (no relation to Johnny, though she performed on his show) was an expressive musician known as La Reina de La Onda Tejana or the Queen of the Tejano Wave. Released in 1990, the Kingsville native’s smash cover of “Cuatro Caminos,” a standard written by José Alfredo Jiménez in decades past, took the “slow-paced, cry-in-your-beer lovelorn song” and transformed it into a vivacious tune, Hernández says. But Laura’s version—wherein she surveys several paths ahead of her in life, unsure of which she should choose—is imbued with a feminist strain, according to Medrano. “It’s put to a really great beat, and that’s the part where it’s subtle. You can’t deny that lyrics, a lot of the time, will get lost to a really good arrangement.”
Elsa Garcia, “Ya Te Vi” (1991)
A year after Laura Canales released “Cuatro Caminos,” Houston musician Elsa Garcia unveiled her song “Ya Te Vi.” To Medrano, the tracks are musical sisters that took tejano to another level. “These two songs were huge, huge hits for both of these strong, solo women artists,” she says of Canales and Garcia. “They were directly speaking to the experience of women.” In the propulsive “Ya Te Vi,” Garcia rolls her eyes at a drunk lover who comes back crawling after being unfaithful. Like Canales before her, Garcia’s theme is a nod to feminism “because you are in an environment that mostly wants either a love song, a fun song, or a drinking song,” Medrano says of what’s traditional for the genre. “There’s a sense of strength and onus in both of those songs for the rawness and the realness of a woman’s experience within a relationship,” she adds. But “Ya Te Vi” also happens to be a tune that’ll get people on the dance floor.
La Mafia, “Nuestra Canción” (1991)
One of the most beloved groups of tejano’s eighties and nineties heyday, La Mafia evolved from a “cantina-and-quinceañera circuit to an international megagroup that is to Latin music what other Texas icons, like Willie Nelson and ZZ Top, are to country and rock,” Texas Monthly wrote in a 1998 story. The piece also notes that La Mafia was the first tejano group to notch a million album sales worldwide for their album Estás Tocando Fuego. Decked out in shimmering blue-and-white garb, the band performed “Nuestra Canción,” one of the songs from this smash album, on The Johnny Canales Show to a screaming, stomping audience. It’s an apt display of how Tejano was continuously changing in the early nineties, with artists threading elements like thrumming percussion, keyboards, synthesizers (and, in this case, a ripping keytar) into their music while also doling out plenty of pizzazz.
La Sombra, “La Sancha” (1992)
Tejano musicians’ modern flourishes within the genre’s traditionally polka-drenched rhythms hardly stopped at keyboards. La Sombra’s “La Sancha” exemplifies how artists were continuing to move forward in unique ways, absorbing different genres of music and other influences; toward the end of the song, the band’s lead vocalist begins rapping. Notably, they added traces of hip-hop, letting in the influences of what would become a dominant force in pop culture, Hernández notes. “La Sancha” is a testament to just how experimental tejano was back then.
Emilio Navaira, “Bailando Contigo” (1993)
Emilio Navaira, later simply known as Emilio, went solo after working with fellow tejano musicians in the band David Lee Garza y Los Musicales. Hernández, who got to know Emilio well, says that when he first took the young musician to The Johnny Canales Show, “he was still so shy, he stood behind Johnny Canales and me for a group picture.” The bashful artist gradually built up his showmanship and became a superstar who released hit after hit, including the staple “Bailando Contigo”—a ditty about dancing the day and night away with a loved one—which he released before later successfully crossing over into country radio.
Selena, “No Me Queda Más” (1994)
Even as she became a major star throughout the early to mid-1990s, Selena stopped by The Johnny Canales Show over the years to cut it up with the affable host, as well as to showcase new songs and deep cuts alike. Selena was known for her inventive spins on tejano, which brimmed with her love of pop music, disco, and other sounds she heard on the radio growing up in South Texas. But one of her songs released in 1994, the slow-burning ballad “No Me Queda Más,” is unusual because it harkens back to a genre steeped in tradition: mariachi. “Mariachi is something we grew up with, but tejano artists are not going to have a hit if they do mariachi,” says Hernández. “That’s music played at weddings and quinceañeras and by their parents.” But not everyone was Selena. When songwriter Ricky Vela, the keyboardist in her band, Los Dinos, wrote the aching “No Me Queda Más” for her, it immediately caught fire. She performed it with heartbreaking aplomb during her final appearance on The Johnny Canales Show in 1994, a year before her death. “All of a sudden, here you have a Tejano with a mariachi hit,” Hernández says. “Not that many people could pull it off, but she did.”
Bobby Pulido, “Desvelado” (1995)
During tejano’s mid-1990s heyday, rumor had it that the Rio Grande Valley–raised Bobby Pulido wrote this heart-wrenching hip-shaker “Desvelado,” which translates to “Sleepless,” about Selena. But, as it turns out, Pulido’s songwriter was just really into the 1993 rom-com Sleepless in Seattle, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. According to Medrano, the film’s sentimental story inspired the song, which appeared on Pulido’s debut album and marked “the transition of tejano into a new beat, a new sound,” adds Hernández. This one remains a classic at bailes and other gatherings where tejano music blasts from the stereo.
Jennifer Peña, “Ven a Mi” (1996)
After Selena’s death, a young woman named Jennifer Peña—also from Selena’s hometown of Corpus Christi—performed at a tribute honoring the late singer. Abraham Quintanilla, Jr., Selena’s father and manager, spotted something in the then-eleven-year-old Peña and signed her to a record deal. One of her debut songs, “Ven a Mi,” became an especially impactful presence within tejano and to fans of the genre, says Medrano, who remembers when Peña’s popularity was rising in those days, with performances on programs like The Johnny Canales Show. In a way, Peña represented a new generation coming of age within the tejano community. “You’re seeing this person grow up in front of you, and, in essence, is a second Selena,” Medrano says. “And because of the fact that it was just so close from the passing of one, now all of us young kids are growing up with a surrogate into tejano music and watching them grow up.”
Elida Reyna y Avante, “Luna Llena” (1998)
In the late 1990s, some industry players had “divested from the tejano music world,” Medrano says. But musicians, of course, were still making tejano tunes. Elida Reyna, a young woman from San Antonio, proved that a solo female artist could still sell at a high rate in that era with “Luna Llena.” Drawing from Spanish pop swells happening at the time, her powerhouse song had a modern sound that pushed the genre’s legacy forward. Reyna, who went on to sweep the Tejano Music Awards shortly afterward, showcased the song on Johnny’s show, garnering an important “stamp of approval” from the host and proving herself as a major new talent. “She was then truly solidified as the next generation leading the way for tejano music,” Medrano says. “ ‘Luna Llena,’ ” she adds, “just changed everything. Musically, it was great, but it’s also answering the age-old question of ‘why did [tejano] die?’ Well, it didn’t.”
A. B. Quintanilla III y Los Kumbia Kings, “Azúcar” (1999)
After Selena’s death, her brother A. B. Quintanilla—who played with her in Los Dinos, wrote some of the group’s biggest hits and appeared on The Johnny Canales Show multiple times—started up the collective Kumbia Kings. At the time, declining investment in the industry collided with the emergence of digital music and platforms like Napster. Yet the Kumbia Kings are a testament to how tejano could not only survive during that paradigm shift. With the release of “Azúcar,” an electrifying song with a cumbia kick, the Kings marked yet another evolution for tejano. By blending genres, they were an important barometer of where the genre was heading; it’s not uncommon for tejano songs these days to include elements of cumbia and electronic music. “They met the moment of modern production to their pop and rock Spanish counterparts,” Medrano says of Kumbia Kings, “even EDM.”
Stefani Montiel, “¿Quién Quiere Shots?” (2015)
By the 2010s, tejano artists didn’t need to rely on radio play. They could post songs online and make waves through social media exposure. Medrano, who had a viral hit in 2016 with “La Pulga,” remembers when Stefani Montiel, a former child star from New Mexico, dropped “¿Quién Quiere Shots?” (“Who wants shots?”) the year before, marking another turning point for tejano. This party anthem didn’t “sound like the typical nineties tejano,” Medrano recalls. Montiel wasn’t from Texas, either—and these days, there are more artists than ever who don’t necessarily hail from the Lone Star State. But songs like “¿Quién Quiere Shots?” met the moment and set the stage for where tejano lives today: You can still hear it on certain radio stations, but also platforms like TikTok and YouTube—and, as always, in-person gatherings like carne asadas, bailes, and quinceañeras.
