Ritchie Valens (born May 13, 1941, Pacoima, California, U.S.—died February 3, 1959, near Clear Lake, Iowa) was an American singer, songwriter, and guitarist and the first Latino rock and roll star. His short career ended when he died at age 17 in the 1959 plane crash in which Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper also perished.
(Read Britannica’s essay on The Day the Music Died.)
Valens grew up in suburban Los Angeles in a family of Mexican and possibly Native American descent. While in high school, he used an electric guitar made in shop class to front a band and came to the attention of Bob Keane, owner of Del-Fi records, who produced the sessions at Gold Star Recording Studios that resulted in Valens’s hits.
His first hit, “Come On, Let’s Go” (1958), was followed later that year by “Donna,” a ballad written for an ex-girlfriend, and “La Bamba,” Valens’s best-remembered recording, a rock and roll reworking of a traditional Mexican wedding song, sung in Spanish (though Valens hardly spoke the language). He performed the Little Richard-inspired “Ooh! My Head” in the film Go, Johnny, Go! (1959).
Valens left a small legacy of recordings, but his compositions (often based on only three or four chords), exciting guitar style, emotional singing, and stylistic versatility influenced generations of rock musicians. His story is told in the film La Bamba (1987), in which he was played by Lou Diamond Phillips. In 2001 Valens was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2018 the U.S. Library of Congress added “La Bamba” to the National Recording Registry, a list of audio recordings deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”