Musician Hernandez Knows the Value of Family : Concert: Little Joe y la Familia brings its stylistically varied approach to the Coach House tonight.

ORANGE —  Music has been very much a family affair for Little Joe Hernandez.

He was a shy kid in Temple, Tex., when his cousin coaxed him to join his first band at 15. When Hernandez began to record a few years later, he scored his first success with “Corrido del West,” a sweet Spanish song written by his father.

He credits a younger brother, Jesse, with having prodded him first to pursue music full-time, and then to push for broader renown. Plying a bilingual, stylistically varied approach that incorporates country music, ‘50s-influenced R & B balladry and traditional Mexican sources, Hernandez emerged as one of the leading figures in Mexican-American music.

Given that background, he has ample reason to call his band Little Joe y la Familia--the Spanish version of a name made famous by another long-running hero of Texas music, Willie Nelson & Family.

Don’t assume too much, though. Little Joe says the “familia” he had in mind when he adopted the name in 1970 referred to more than his blood relations, and it wasn’t meant to refer to Nelson at all.

“I didn’t know who Willie was at that point,” said Hernandez--although he has since formed a close association with the country star, sharing concert bills, joining Nelson’s Farm Aid efforts, and recruiting Nelson to sing two duets with him on a 1990 album, “Tu Amigo.”

As for the concept of band as family, Hernandez says he was thinking in broad terms, broader even than his own large clan, into which Little Joe was born 52 years ago, the seventh of 15 children.

“I called it la Familia because I became aware of all this Latinismo”--Latino pride--during sojourns in San Francisco, the trim, soft-spoken, white-bearded singer said as he sat Wednesday in a local diner, clad in jogging gear and a Dallas Cowboys hat, and sipping from a cup of hot tea with honey.

Hernandez is in Southern California for a Spanish radio conference this weekend, as well as a series of concert engagements that included a show at El Mariachi Restaurant in Orange on Wednesday, and another tonight at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano.

With that busy schedule ahead, Little Joe said, he was on a 48-hour fast without solids, “because I find that fasting helps me sharpen up a bit.” It’s a practice he says he picked up a few years ago when he fasted in support of a boycott of table grapes organized by Cesar Chavez.

In the Bay Area during the late ‘60s, Hernandez encountered the music of Carlos Santana and the political work of Chavez. “I saw how hip it was to be and speak Spanish. Every time I heard a Spanish surname (gain prominence) it was, ‘One for us!’ We’d had no identity, no visibility.”

Hernandez’s previous band name, Little Joe & the Latinaires, had expressed an ethnic identity, but “La Familia” was a Spanish name, and one that reflected solidarity and belonging as well as simple identity.

During the 1970s, Hernandez spoke to issues of Hispanic pride on albums including “Para la Gente,” (“For the People”). He also addressed communal concerns in such tracks as “Dios Mio, Dios Mio” (“My God, My God”), a late-’70s poem set to piano accompaniment that protested police violence against Chicano youths in Texas.

Hernandez’s musical identity, however, ranges far beyond ethnic bounds.

Growing up, he heard an abundance of traditional Mexican music in his home, where his father and an uncle liked to compose and play their own music. But since the Hernandez clan lived in a nearly all-black neighborhood, he absorbed plenty of blues and R & B. And, this being Texas, country music was all over the airwaves.

Beyond that, Hernandez had some big-band jazz fans among his elder siblings. He says the swing records they brought home eventually inspired the horn arrangements that are a prominent feature of his music.

Albums such as “16 de Septiembre,” a Grammy winner last year as best Mexican-American recording, have shown Little Joe’s full range, with tracks that jump from conjunto music with Mexican folk sources, to songs based in Western swing, to the sort of rolling R & B songs that have been a specialty of his fellow Tex-Mex artist, Freddy Fender.

Hernandez says he has been advised to go pure country, as Fender did in the ‘70s when he scored an impressive series of hits. He is willing to slant some albums more toward a country “crossover” style featuring English and bilingual lyrics (such as the one that included his duets with Nelson). But he balances those with releases that emphasize traditional Mexican influences.

Live, he isn’t about to narrow his approach.

“The show is built around variety. Everyone just hangs around wondering what’s next. The key is to play whatever you do with the right feeling. If you’re going to do blues, it should feel like blues. Ranchera (Mexican folk) music--the feeling should be there. I’ve been able to do that because of my background, because I was exposed to all of that at a very young age. I grew up with black, white and brown.”

An abundance of musical influences was about all that was abundant in Hernandez’s upbringing.

“My family was living in a three-wall car garage with a dirt floor. That’s where I was born. Then there was a flood, and my parents had to pull out of there. They moved across to the east side of town, which was totally black. We had a two-room house, and there were so many of us that we had a tent out back. But that was a great improvement from a three-wall garage.”

Hernandez and other family members picked cotton, while his father, Salvador (Jimmy) Hernandez, worked for the Santa Fe Railroad, did various other jobs, and sold marijuana on the side, “to make ends meet.”

When Hernandez was 14, his father got busted and served 28 months in prison. The oldest child still living at home, he dropped out of school and took on the responsibilities of a head of the household.

Around that time, he began playing guitar in the Latinaires, a band led by his saxophone-playing cousin, David Coronado.

“I was a real shy little kid, and I didn’t want to do it. But I liked the idea of playing music. It took a lot of convincing me that I would sing. But once I got paid for doing this, I said, ‘No (kidding)! They pay for this?”

Hernandez was 15 when he debuted in 1955 at a high-school graduation dance in Cameron, Tex. He took home $5. With the family hurting financially, “an extra two or three dollars meant a lot.”

After that, “I played a lot of little nightclubs. One night it would be an all-black club, other nights an all-white country-and-Western club, then the Chicano thing. I was doing three different gigs in three different places,” earning cash, and honing his ability to play in different styles.

In 1959, Hernandez took over the band leadership after his cousin left, and the Latinaires began mixing all their influences together instead of alternating styles from night to night. His younger brother, Jesse, joined on bass.

In 1960 they cut their first sides for a San Antonio label, Corona Records. In 1962, Jesse Hernandez declared that he was no longer willing to work a day job and play music by night--his way of forcing his bandleader brother to quit his factory job and jump into music full time. Little Joe and the Latinaires began traveling through Texas, building a following.

“Jesse was pushing me. He foresaw this (success), I guess, and he wanted this for me more so than I did myself. He was always a driving force.”

Among the lessons Jesse Hernandez taught his brother was that musical ability transcends ethnicity. At one point, Little Joe recalled, the band lost its drummer. Bobby Butler, a black drummer who’d moved from St. Louis to Temple, had been hanging around the band and was interested in filling the vacant drum slot.

“I said, ‘Hey, Bobby Butler’s a black guy.’ Jesse said, ‘Bobby Butler’s a drummer.’ I didn’t foresee him being a good Chicano-style drummer, but he was so into the music.” Butler played with the band on and off for more than a decade, and Hernandez credits the drummer with introducing him to the music of Jose Alfredo Jimenez, “who became my idol--probably Mexico’s best songwriter ever.”

In 1964, Jesse Hernandez turned up tipsy on his brother’s doorstep, the night before a planned trip to Dallas to record.

“He’d been drinking, and I chewed him out. He’d been in an accident the week before and cut his ear. I scolded him: ‘You didn’t learn nothing from your accident. You keep drinking and driving and you’ll get killed.’ ” It was the last thing Hernandez got to say to his brother, who died in a car wreck later that night (Hernandez says that his brother was a passenger, not the driver).

“I made a vow right after we buried him that I was going to make it. I said, ‘I’ll make it to the top,’ because he was always pushing, insisting and driving me.”

Hernandez says he recently was going through his personal archives (which are being turned into a museum in Temple) and he saw photos both of Jesse and of his 1992 Grammy trophy. It dawned on him that he had, in a sense, discharged that graveside vow “to make it to the top.”

“It’s the top award, and I felt a sense of relief. The Grammy meant more than world recognition. It was a fulfillment. It took me 28 years, and I kept my promise.”

Instead of coasting, though, Hernandez has set out an ambitious new program aimed at spreading his popularity, and that of Tejano music--the Texan brand of Mexican-influenced music--in general.

Through most of the ‘80s, Hernandez’s albums either were released by, or had distribution through, major labels--first WEA’s Spanish-music wing, then Columbia/Sony’s.

Hernandez, who plays major venues in his home state, felt the big labels were content merely to market him to an established network of regional fans in the Southwest and California, rather than pushing to broaden his base.

He left Sony a year ago and formed his own label, Tejano Discos, convinced that there are far greater markets to be tapped, both among Spanish- and English-speaking fans. This spring, he plans his first-ever promotional tour to Mexico, a country where Hernandez says he has received airplay, but no record distribution.

“There’s a lot more for me to do, not just for me, but for other acts that come from my market,” said Hernandez, whose label staff includes his four children. So far, Tejano Discos has signed four other acts, including the San Antonio-based mariachi troupe, Campanas de America.

Hernandez sees Tejano Discos as a second shot at fulfilling an unrealized ambition he had in 1968, when he formed Buena Suerte Records. It was the first of several custom labels he has used over the years to issue many of his more than 40 career albums.

“I wanted to record Chicano music like Motown was recording black music. I wanted to do that in the ‘60s. Who knows? Maybe I’ll do it in the ‘90s.”

Little Joe y la Familia play tonight at 9 at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $17.50. (714) 496-8930.