He was helped by the elegance of his hand-written manuscripts, which to the naked eye could be mistaken for printed quality.Teaching, adjudicating and freelance conducting supplemented his meagre income as a jobbing composer. Broadcasting was another enterprise to which Noble turned his hand during the latter days of the war.The BBC’s programme World Parade went out on Saturday evenings, recounting each week’s military events. An arrangement of “Sound an Alarm” from Handel’s Judas Maccabeus for male voice choir dates from 1934 and continues to be frequently performed all over the world. In these early days he also wrote for chamber forces, his works including Melodie Poetique for piano, which was published in 1933.Too young to serve in the First World War and too old to be called up for the Second, Noble remained in Blackpool with his wife, Muriel Burton, whom he married in 1933, until she encouraged him to try his luck in London.And so, in 1944, with minimal contacts or leads to help him, Noble bought a single rail ticket to the capital and began touting his scores around music publishers. Earlier days as a chorister helped him understand the needs of the voice, while at the same time presenting the singer with an element of challenge. Nevertheless Noble pere regularly took his son to enjoy performances by the visiting D’Oyly Carte Opera Company and to other musical and theatrical events in the north of England.Self-taught in music, Noble returned in the 1920s to Blackpool Grammar School to teach, and during the 1930s began writing works which were essentially mel-odic in nature.

As a teacher, conductor, arranger and adjudicator, his name cropped up frequently in concert programmes and festival brochures all over Britain.
Born in Blackpool in 1903, the son of a butcher, Noble was educated at the local grammar school and antagonised his father, a keen amateur musician, by refusing to enter the family business. HAROLD NOBLE was a prolific composer whose contribution to the choral repertoire was rarely acknowledged during his lifetime. Like Ralph Vaughan Williams, Noble took a particular interest in folk music, arranging songs such as “The Ballad of Semmerwater”, “Naples Bay” and “The Road of Evening” for voice and piano accompaniment, while his liturgical music includes a Magnificat, Nunc Dimittis and Te Deum. Always in a smart suit and standing straight, immobile but for a tapping foot in front of the microphone, he squeezed out his polkas to crowds of up to 2,000 people. Young and old all came to dance, never stand and watch, because his danceability was what made him El Mero.Ruben Naranjo, singer and accordionist: born Alice, Texas 22 February 1945; twice married (three sons, one daughter); died Alice, Texas 12 October 1998.. The most notable of these was Selena, the glamorous young singer from Corpus Christi whose rapid rise to stardom was cut short with her murder in 1995; since this time conjunto music’s popularity has receded.Naranjo worked steadily and constantly through the changing scene, touring the big indoor dance halls of Texas in his old grey van and trailer – he never acquired the flashily customised coach which became de rigueur among top Mexican conjuntos, although he commanded top fees.

By the end of a decade of hard touring and prolific recording, Naranjo had acquired two more sobriquets: “El Mero” (“The Boss”) and “El Si Senor”, after the shout of “Si Senor!” he used to punctuate his accordion breaks on stage.During the 1980s the Chicana Wave rolled on, with the major record labels getting into the market for what became known as Tejano music and certain new artists achieving national and even international success. Canales also gave the dapper, pencil- moustached Naranjo his first showbiz nickname “El Clark Gable de la Onda Chicana” (the “Onda Chicana”, the “Chicana Wave”, referring to the surge of popularity the music of Mexican-Americans – Chicanos – was experiencing at that time). “I wondered why those songs would be hits for him and not for me,” remarked later his one-time patron Chano Cadena.In 1974 the DJ Johnny Canales (who later became a television presenter) gave Naranjo’s record “La Estrella” (“The Star”) the intensive air play necessary to make it his first hit. The group was immediately successful in the dance halls and soon began to make records and appear on the radio. Naranjo’s playing was simple and slow, in the Alice style pioneered by Cadena, but irresistibly danceable. Naranjo was not noted as a songwriter, but chose well from the conjunto repertoire.

By now he had mastered all the instruments of a conjunto and was a highly competent lead or backing vocalist. In the early 1960s a vogue for dual accordions swept the Texas music scene, and Cadena promoted Naranjo to second lead accordionist.In 1972, Naranjo borrowed money from his mother for a car, built a set of loud speakers and recruited the four other members for his own conjunto, christened Ruben Naranjo y Los Gamblers. Apart from Mexican influence, conjunto music owed much to Texas’s German and Czech immigrant communities and the repertoire features many waltzes and polkas as well as the rollicking border ballads known as corridos.
Ruben Naranjo was born in 1945 in Alice, southern Texas, to a truck driver father. Like his eight brothers, Ruben earned a youthful living picking cotton, and some of the earliest songs he learned were corridos sung in the fields to pass the time while working. At home, his mother played harmonica, and his father, though he couldn’t play an instrument, bought old guitars to do up and resell.