Little Joe, bandleader of Little Joe y Familia, will play at the Alaska State Fair in Anchorage this weekend. As best as anyone in the band can tell they will be the first Tex-Mex act to ever play in Alaska.
“We’re excited about participating,” he said Wednesday. “People have found out about it on our Web site and now we’ve got folks from Houston, Denver, Phoenix, San Diego all going to Alaska to see us. Those must be some heavy-duty fans.”
The show in Alaska comes on the heels of an area Lifetime Achievement Award from Univision last week in Austin and the release of a new album next month.
“Really, I feel like I’m hitting the best time of my life right now,” he said. “I’m a grandfather, a great-grandfather three times over and I’m still playing the kind of music I want to play.”
Little Joe and the band will leave for Alaska early on Saturday and play two shows on Sunday.
“They asked us to stay over on Monday so they can show us around, I guess,” he said, and laughed “I’m sure they will have had enough of us by Tuesday.”
Little Joe said he has been told that a national Lifetime Achievement Award may be in the works.
“It was an unexpected award but I really appreciated it,” he said. “It’s significant at this point in my career.”
Both the Alaska gig and the new album give Little Joe a chance to pay tribute to long-time friends and fellow performers who have passed on recently.
In Alaska he will scatter the ashes of Dee Herrera, a fixture in Texas music circles and a longtime advocate for Latino amputees. Herrera died last March of complications from diabetes.
“Dee introduced me to Willie (Nelson) in 1974 and was a big part of the recordings I made with Willie. He was a dear friend of mine, and of a lot of people,” he said. “Other friends have scattered his ashes all over the place and I haven’t found anywhere to scatter them where someone hasn’t beaten me to it.
“I told a friend I was going to scatter them in New York but somebody already had. I was going to scatter his ashes in Colorado, but someone had scattered them there too. My friend told me not to worry, that I would know the right time and the right place when it came. So I’m taking my friends ashes to Alaska and I will scatter them there.”
The new album, which he just recorded, consists mostly of oldies. In the 1960s and 70s Little Joe pioneered a style of music known popularly as Tejano, or Tex-Mex, a musical melting pot that incorporates disparate styles he was influence by while he was growing up in Temple. He was won two Grammies and received numerous awards and played concerts all over the world.
He records and distributes his records independently these days, which he said suits him just fine.
“I’ve had a label and a producer and all of that, but I’m at the point in my career now where I want to enjoy my work and express what I want to,” he said. “I’ve always done that, but now if I want to record an album like this no one can tell me I can’t. And I’m really happy with the way the tracks turned out.”