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Nick Villereal is part of a talented musical family that goes back to his maternal grandfather, and his father and uncles sang in local groups. Nick started playing accordion when he was five years old and by the age of twelve he was sitting in with “El Conjunto de Joe Ramirez.” Through high school, he played with various groups, including his own conjunto with his brothers Roger and David. Later he played upright bass and bajo sexto with "Los Tres Reyes" and, in 1975, formed Nick Villarreal y Su Conjunto.
Conjunto (literally “group” in Spanish) is lively dance music originating in the 1860s or1870s in southern Texas and northern Mexico where German, Czech, Italian, Bohemian, Moravian, and Polish immigrants introduced the diatonic, button accordion into working class communities. By the 1890s, the accordion, in combination with a tambora de rancho (ranch drum) or oaja sexto (a unique Mexican guitar), was the instrument of choice at the many working-class dances and celebrations on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border. By the 1930s the modern conjunto style emerged as a boisterous and distinctive Tex-Mex fusion that revolved around at least two harmonizing voices, the accordion, the bajo sexto (a 12-stringed guitar-like instrument that added a bass rhythm), and a bass. In the late 1930s, drums were added and became a regular component of conjunto music. Today conjunto has expanded far beyond its Tex-Mex origins and has taken root in regions like the Midwest and California, where migrants worked and settled, and it continues to help preserve a Mexican, working class culture wherever it is played.
In 1994 Nick received a Pura Vida Award as a songwriter, and with his band was named "Best Traditional Conjunto." Nick, along with Mingo Saldivar, Flaco Jiménez, Tony De La Rosa, and Esteban Jordan is considered one of the important purveyors of tejano music.

http://www.discosjoey.com/
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/benson/border/arhoolie2/raices.html
http://educate.si.edu/migrations/bord/txmxcon.html