How Johnny Canales Created an Enduring Culture Around Tejano Music

Growing up along the Gulf Coast in La Porte, east of Houston, I could predictably rely on Johnny Canales’s presence in my childhood home. After mass on Sunday mornings, while my mom made chorizo or prepared barbacoa, my siblings and I changed out of our church clothes and turned on the TV in time for The Johnny Canales Show. We ate and watched together while the charismatic host, dressed in one of his flashy fringe jackets, introduced a new episode of a musical variety show that changed the lives of both the performers on stage and the members of its vast audience in studio and at home.

To many non-Hispanic Texans, the name Johnny Canales may not ring a bell. But to Tejanos, it evokes the music of icons like Ramón Ayala, Elsa García, Intocable, Emilio Navaira, Selena, and Los Tigres del Norte. From 1983 until 2005, he played a role akin to Dick Clark, introducing and promoting musicians from across the Chicano, Mexicano, and Tejano spectrum. Broadcasting his hour-long, weekly show most often from Corpus Christi, he gave a platform to countless artists, launching the careers of beloved stars.

Canales, who died at 77, his family announced Thursday morning, affected the lives of his viewers, too, conjuring pride and a culture around music, binding together Mexicans and Texans, old and young, English and Spanish speakers.

“He was more than just a beloved husband, father, TV host, musician, and entertainer; he was a beacon of hope and joy for countless people,” the family said in a statement posted to Facebook. “His infectious charisma and dedication to promoting Latino music and culture left a large mark on the world. Johnny’s spirit will continue to live on through the countless lives he touched and the legacy he built.”

Born Juan José Canales in General Treviño, Nuevo León, in northeastern Mexico, Johnny was raised in Robstown, near Corpus Christi. After serving in the U.S. Army during the 1960s, he returned to the area, where he began deejaying and playing music with his band, Johnny Canales y su Orquesta. Their song “La Capirucha” was later one of the tunes featured at the beginning and end of episodes of his eponymous show. Hearing it now spurs a flood of memories and emotions from my childhood, reinforcing an appreciation for the man who wove tejano music into the fabric of my upbringing and helped me belong at home and far beyond La Porte.

My parents both spoke fluent Spanish but never taught it to their children. That meant I was designated a “no sabo” kid. The label, a distinction used to make fun of nonfluent Latino youngsters like me, purposefully misuses the Spanish phrase for “I don’t know” (the correct way is “No sé”). Despite my parents never teaching me their original language, I was surrounded by and enjoyed tejano music with its colloquial Spanish lyrics. It blasted through my parents’ house via KQQK in Houston most weekend nights and was the soundtrack to every visit to my Grandma Sauceda’s home in San Benito, a few miles southeast of Harlingen, where I visited extended family, and at the quinces held at the KC Hall nearby. And thanks to Canales, it was on TV every Sunday morning.

By bringing tejano in from the cultural periphery, Canales elevated the soundtrack of my childhood. He gave songs that documented the plight of working class Tejanos a stage, and the context to become an internationally recognized genre that could stand out within the melting pot of American music.

Canales also made approachable the songs my parents loved, even though I was a “no sabo” kid. By shifting between Spanish and English on his show, he gave Spanglish respectability—and dropped enough context clues for me to get to know tejano artists and understand their stories. 

Just from clicking through YouTube to view old recordings of The Johnny Canales Show, it’s easy to see that its magic touched others as well. The nostalgic way I talk about Canales is similar to comments from fans, who also seem to feel like defining memories from their childhood can be unlocked by revisiting clips of the show.

Although it ran in some form for two decades, the show’s heyday lasted from the late eighties to mid-nineties. Tejano music was a booming genre during that time, exported nationwide with Canales’s help. In a promo from 1992, he brags about reaching fans everywhere, from New York to Miami, Brownsville, Washington, across Mexico, and Central and South America. It’s a show, he adds, for “toda la raza.”

In many ways, Johnny’s show was a cultural anchor for a growing population of Tejanos and Mexican Americans. We’d turn on the TV Sunday mornings, and Johnny would lead the tejano music revival. From the throngs of fans in audiences at traveling broadcasts, it felt like tejano music and culture might take over the world.

Looking back at old clips of the show, it’s hard not to laugh at the costumes and styles of many of the performers. The makeup was intense, the hair was big, and the gritos were high-pitched. Bands like La Fiebre and La Sombra paired their looks with “show band” moves that my family and I get a kick out of watching all these years later.

Musicians fortunate enough to make it to Corpus Christi, or one of the other locations The Johnny Canales Show was occasionally broadcast from, must have felt determined to play the best show of their lives. That stage was the single most effective launching point for Tejano careers.

Johnny is credited with featuring one of Selena’s earliest TV appearances, when she was just 13. Selena y Los Dinos returned to Johnny’s stage over the years, but my personal favorite is her performance of “Ven Conmigo,” when she and the band wore cow-print costumes.

At its height, The Johnny Canales Show was broadcast on Univision three times a week and every Sunday and viewed across the U.S. and Latin America, a remarkable feat for a show that started in the Rio Grande Valley and in syndication on KRIS in Corpus Christi as a locally produced Coastal Bend take on American Bandstand.

Over the years, fans of tejano music have had plenty to mourn—Selena’s murder, singer-songwriter Emilio Navaira’s untimely death, and the arrest of Mazz lead singer Joe Lopez. In some ways, the loss of Johnny Canales will be felt most strongly. He is more responsible than anyone for what tejano is today, and what it has meant for generations of fans, in Texas and far beyond. His enthusiasm, optimism, and love for the music never waned before, during, and after his show’s run. The foundation he created ensures that Tejano culture will endure without him—even if it’s only in recordings and our collective memory that we’ll hear the uplifting words he used to introduce the next act: “You got it. Take it away!”