I was listening to “La Bamba” on the radio the other day and I got to thinking. The song is a wonderful fusion of rock and Latin styles. If Ritchie Valens hadn’t died so incredibly young and so soon after he started recording, it stands to reason that he would have continued making music which combined Latin and rock influences.
So how do you think the rock and pop landscape would have developed if Ritchie Valens’ career hadn’t been cut so tragically short?
Would what we think of as “classic rock” be a lot more Latin-ish? There have been a few popular Spanish/Latino rock bands, such as Santana and Los Lobos, but would there have been a lot more? Would non-Latino artists have co-opted the style? Would folk singers have incorporated Spanish folk songs into more of their work?
I don’t think it’s at all certain that Valens would have concentrated on the Latin side of his music. After all, although “La Bamba” is the song he is best remembered for today, at the time it was the flip side of the record, the lugubrious “Donna,” that was his standout hit.
I don’t think so. Valens was influenced by rock-a-billy blues, just like all other pioneers of rock music. The Brits took it to the next level and were the biggest driving force behind what we call classic rock today.
With a lot of recordings being rescued from obscurity these days and put out in collections by outfits like Collectibles’ Records, we are increasingly aware of how much music has been forgotten from that era. Many songs and artists that were hardly lower quality than those who are still remembered were remembered only by enthusiasts, and still more only by avid collectors. What exactly makes an artist stand out enough to be remembered?
It helps that Valens made it onto a famous Rock ‘n’ Roll tour circuit and was featured in an Alan Freed movie. But then so did many people a lot of use have never heard of.
I don’t doubt Buddy Holly would have been remembered, and as I speculated in a different thread on the 50th anniversary of his death, he probably would have become a producer. The Big Bopper might still be remembered for his one song, though it could have vanished from the collective consciousness like many other semi-novelty tunes. And given that I recently discovered that a co-worker of mine didn’t recognize a picture of Buddy Holly in his trademark horn-rimmed glasses, I doubt very much whether the more obscure Valens would have been such a legend with his tragic death.
I love Valens’ music, and I dug the movie they made of his life. But Rock ‘n’ Roll history seems to be full of such stories of rising stars plucked from obscurity that went on to just miss the big time, and even some who did went on to become old and lame.
For some reason, I think he would have had a career like Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. His era had a lot of one-hit wonders. Sometimes they were one-hit wonders because for the second record they asked for more money. Phil Spector told the Crystals that he could always find four women standing on a corner in any city.
Then again Waylon Jennings didn’t get on the plane and he had a long career.
Looking up the real Ritchie Valens after reading this thread yesterday, I was first surprised to see how friggin’ OLD he looked – does this man look 17? – and was even more surprised that he didn’t look anything at all like Lou Diamond Philips. I had no idea* La Bamba* had made that strong an impression on me.
If you just showed that to me and told me to guess how old he was in that picture, I probably would have guessed 30. But telling me he’s 17, I guess I can see it. He looks like a high school football player/wrestler/jock with good skin and an expensive hair stylist.
I can kind of see it, but even looking at him and actively trying to reconcile his age and appearance, he still looks like he’s in his mid-thirties to me.
Wasn’t he not a native Spanish speaker, despite being Hispanic? It doesn’t seem like he was all that attached to the Latino part of his roots, despite La Bamba.
Good question from the OP! Honestly, I don’t think Ritchie Valens would have headed very far into some kind of rock/latino hybrid, simply because the time wasn’t right for that and he would have risked becoming a novelty act. Hell, they made the poor child change his name from Valenzuela to Valens for Christ’s sake, just so there wouldn’t be any “problems”. He may have gotten into it at some point later in his career, but no, I don’t think the Latino influence on this big stew we call Rock would have been increased due to what he may have done.
On the other hand, we have so little to go by in terms of clues to his future music. His entire body of work extant consists of maybe twenty recordings, and on most of those tracks he sounds a lot like Ricky Nelson. With Buddy Holly, at least we have some indication as to the musical direction he was heading (as opposed to his actual direction, which was straight into an Iowa cornfield), so in Holly’s case we have more with which to back up any speculation regarding what he might have done. We do know that at age 17, Valens’ primitive guitar style was at least as good, if not better, than many of his contemporaries. He could sing reasonably well. His songwriting was about as good as could be expected from a kid his age, and would surely have gotten better. I think he probably would have had a pretty good run as a teen idol, then got thrown under the truck like everybody else did once the Beatles came along. Afterwards, I expect he could have stayed in music, at least as a writer and/or producer, if he wanted.
Of course, if he and Buddy hadn’t crashed, the Beatles may never have been necessary, but that’s a topic for another day.
He was working on a version of “Malagueña” (you’d recognize the traditional tune if you heard it, for sure) and it was released as an instrumental piece. IIRC, it was supposed to have rock and roll lyrics, but he died before he started recording vocal tracks.
No, actually. The Valenzuela family spoke English in the home; and so, Ritchie grew up speaking English, not Spanish. From the Wikipedia page on Ritchie Valens:
That’s what I thought. Based on La Bamba, the movie, but I guess movies can be right about things. I remember thinking that that was strange, I’d always assumed he was a native Spanish speaker, until I saw the film.
Yep there’s a scene in the movie where his older brother takes him to Tijuana and the next morning he wakes up in some shack owned by a shaman. When the shaman starts talking to him, he says something like “Yo no speako Espanol.”
I don’t know how true to life that scene as a whole is, but the part about him not knowing Spanish is correct.
And all things considered it doesn’t really seem that surprising. This was an era when Hispanic students were actively discouraged from speaking Spanish. And if his family had been in the U.S. for more than a generation or two, they probably wouldn’t have much need for it.
