Ritchie
Valens was rock-and-roll's first Chicano star, and managed to come up with
some hit songs and leave his
mark
before his tragic death at age 17.
Richie
Valenzuela was born in 1941 in Pacoima, California, an area north of Los
Angeles where he lived his entire
life.
He learned to play a guitar and joined a group in high school, then met
with Del-Fi record producer Bob Keane.
He
recorded Come On, Let's Go and it almost made the top forty in 1958. Keane
had recording equipment that was
not
really state-of-the-art, and the equipment used by Valens in his brief
career was not top notch, resulting in a
sound
that is somewhat muddy but remains as very good vintage rock-and-roll.
He wrote a song for a girl in whom
he
was interested and named it for her; Donna was a smash nationwide hit and
earned Ritchie an appearance on
Dick
Clark's American Bandstand.
The
flip side of Donna was his re-arrangement of an old standard from south
of the border, La Bamba. It became a
top
forty song itself and was the most influential song he ever did. Valens
recorded a number of other songs for
Bob
Keane, including Little Girl and That's My Little Susie, which made the
top one hundred.
In
early 1959 Ritchie Valens appeared in the film Go Johnny Go and a short
time later left to join a group of
rock-and-roll
performers who were scheduled to tour the Midwest. The group toured by
bus but after one show, in
Clear
Lake, Iowa, a plane was chartered to the next stop and Ritchie was invited
to ride in the plane. Unfortunately
the
plane had instrumentation problems and it crashed on February 3, 1959,
killing Valens and the three other
occupants,
Buddy Holly, J. P. Richardson [a.k.a. The Big Bopper], and pilot Roger
Peterson.
Both
Donna and La Bamba were still on the charts at the time of his death. Valens
undoubtedly would have
contributed
a great deal to pop music had he lived. A film titled La Bamba was made
about his life in 1987.
Although
parts of his life story are fictionalized in the film, it is an interesting
motion picture and a tribute to a very
talented
performer. The title track was recorded by Los Lobos and this time, the
song reached number one.
Inscribed on Ritchie Valens' grave are the words "Come On, Let's Go."