Roots of Conjunto: Ideal Recording Co. recorded legendary artists

SAN BENITO - A musty tang wafts over the stacks of reel-to-reel tapes that captured some of conjunto music's earliest recordings.

"It's like somebody stopped the clock and everything's there," said Rey Avila, founder of the Texas Conjunto Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

For more than 20 years, the tapes laid forgotten in the old building that once housed the Ideal Recording Co., the studio where Paco Betancourt recorded the music of legends like Narciso Martinez and Freddy Fender.

Last year, Betancourt's family donated the company's artifacts to the museum.

"There was no one anywhere that had the interest and desire and passion to have this history maintained, from the birth of conjunto music to Ideal Records," said Lionel Betancourt, whose father died in 1971.

The museum, which plans to expand as part of a $1.4 million city project, will try to recreate the legendary recording studio and record factory, Avila said.

After World War II, Paco Betancourt began recording music for his jukebox business, targeting growing numbers of migrant farm workers as his audience, his son said.

By 1946, Betancourt was working with Armando Marroquin, who recorded the music in his Alice garage.

In downtown San Benito, Betancourt handled sales and distribution from the Rio Grande Music Co., his record store off Sam Houston Boulevard.

Soon, the music born along the Texas-Mexico border was reaching an international audience.

In the mid 1950s, Betancourt, who served as the city's mayor from 1966 to 1968, opened a recording studio in back of his store.

"At one time, Ideal Records was the biggest distributor of Tejano and conjunto music in the United States," Avila said as he toured through stacks of artifacts stored in the city's community building.

There's the tall Ampex Corp. recording machine that captured the music on reel-to-reel tapes.

A long row of glistening nickel-plated "stampers" stands in old cardboard sleeves, more than 20 years after the master recordings pressed their grooves onto vinyl.

Stacks of vintage record jackets, many wrapped in cellophane, chronicle the history of conjunto music's legends. Crisp album covers feature the portraits of stars like Paulino Bernal, Beto Villa, Tony de la Rosa and many more.

Rows of old cardboard boxes hold hundreds of records. Some stock fat stacks of Ideal's classic record labels.

"They're intact," Avila said. "They were ready to be shipped out."

Down the street, three old Finebilt record presses stand in a garage at the city's old fire station.

For Abelardo Garcia, the old machines bring back memories of the plant where he helped turn out as many as 1,500 records a day for distribution in the United States, Mexico and Central America.

"I have dreams of when I worked at the machines," said Garcia, 73, who pressed melted "biscuits" of vinyl on the steam-belching presses for 30 years.

"Sometimes I wake up and I'm still there," he said.

Garcia smiles when he remembers the studio's young sound engineer named Baldemar Huerta, who sang in local cantinas.

Huerta would become Freddy Fender, the Grammy Award-winning singer whose eclectic style led to hits on the pop, country and Tejano charts during a career that spanned a half-century.

"I remember Freddy Fender from there," Garcia said of his old friend who died in 2006. "There's a lot of history."

Some of Fender's earliest recordings now lie among the stacks of artifacts salvaged like lost treasure 20 years after the record company closed its doors in 1988.

"It's a gold mine," Avila said. "This is where it happened. It's the history of San Benito."