Episode seventy-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "La Bamba" by Ritchie Valens, and is the first of a two-part story which will conclude next week with an episode on Buddy Holly. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.

Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Kansas City" by Wilbert Harrison.

Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/



Resources

As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.

Only one biography of Valens has ever been written -- understandably since his public career lasted a matter of months and he died when he was seventeen -- but Beverly Mendheim's book is about as good as one could expect given that.

And this CD compiles all three of the posthumous album releases, Valens' entire musical legacy.

Patreon

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Transcript

This is actually going to be part one of a two-part story, which will be continued in next week's episode. Ritchie Valens died so young that he is nowadays mostly known for his death, but in this episode we're going to look at why people cared about him at all -- the story of the plane crash that took his life will wait for next week's episode. This week, we're going to look at his short recording career, and at his most famous record:

[Excerpt: Ritchie Valens, "La Bamba"]

So far in this podcast, when we've looked at race, we've mostly dealt with either black or white musicians, along with a few people who are clearly white by the standards of 2020 but might not have been considered so at the time.

But there was, in Los Angeles, a whole parallel music culture growing up around Latino teenagers. This subculture only rarely impinged on the consciousness of the wider American public, but without it we would have had no garage rock and no punk, as we know them today. And the first big star, the person around whom that culture coalesced, was Ritchie Valens.

Now, I have to stress here that I am at even more of a disadvantage when talking about this subculture than I am when talking about black America. While black culture has been extensively documented in all sorts of other popular culture I've consumed, and I've studied mid-twentieth-century black American culture to a reasonable extent (though nowhere near enough, of course, that my thoughts on the subject should be taken as authoritative), I have had almost no exposure to the Latino culture of the same time period.

And on top of that, there's an additional problem, which is that I am going to have to refer to quite a few Spanish terms in the course of this episode, and I don't speak Spanish. While I'm going to try my best with those, I will undoubtedly mangle some things.

But that's sort of appropriate, at least, in the case of Ritchie Valens, because one of the things that people who knew him would say is that he spoke Spanish terribly -- while he was a Mexican-American, he was raised in an English-speaking household, and only spoke Spanish as a second language, in which he wasn't especially fluent.

By all accounts, in fact, Valens -- who was born Richard Valenzuela, but had his name shortened when he got a record deal -- was at least somewhat unpopular among the other Mexican-Americans at his school. Some of this was due to his appearance -- he was notably light-skinned for a Mexican-American, and apparently there was a level of colourism among Latino kids in that area at that time, and he was also quite fat -- and some was due to his willingness to associate with people of other races, as he had both black and white friends.

Valens' big interest in school was music, especially R&B, and esp