By Dave Silva
My Cajun buddy, Rod Melancon, knocks it out of the park with his acoustic version of his tribute to the late Freddy Fender. He just put it on tape today and sent it to me. Thank you and congratulations Rod…love it and the doggie too.
Backstory: A few years ago Rod was being interviewed by a Corpus Christi radio DJ and, before Rod left the radio station, the DJ shared the story of running into Freddy at a local car-wash in the late 1960s’. The DJ asked Freddy why a recording star like him was working at a car-wash? Freddy responded by saying he was in-between gigs and going to junior college at night. Freddy was never ashamed of working all kinds of jobs to support his family.
Rod Melancon was so impressed by that story that he figured he’d write a song about that car-wash encounter one day. He finally wrote the song and included in his new album “Pinkville” released in 2019.
Presented by Austin, Texas’s KUTX 98.9fm:
According to a PBS special honoring Fender, they recounted the story of Baldemar Garza Huerta aka Fender, who was born in 1937 in San Benito, a remote town in Southeast Texas. The first music he played was called “Conjunto”, a combination of polka from the German and Czech settlers of Texas and traditional Mexican music played mostly by intolerant bands and centered on a button accordion, often accompanied by a 12-string guitar, violin and occasionally, a drum.
“We didn’t have streetlights in San Benito then,” Fender recalled. “I would hear the music and sneak out onto the street and see these little fireflies of light, which were the cigarettes in the hands of the players, and that was where it was happening. These were just home guys who picked cotton or whatever and then come home and play the hell out of those old songs.” During this time Fender was learning the Blues while working alongside African Americans in the fields as a migrant worker, following the crops season by season. The Blues became part of his own musical style.
Ultimately, Fender’s Spanish covers of rock and roll songs were good enough to get local radio play as El Bebop Kid. In 1959, he wrote “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights,” and the rest is history.
In the early 1990’s Fender and other artists put together a band, The Texas Tornados, and in 1996 he joined Los Super Seven, an all-star lineup of Mexican American artists that included another Tex-Mex legend, Flaco Jimenez, as well as David Hidalgo and Cesar Rosas of the East Los Angeles rock and roll band Los Lobos. By then Mexican music and Mexican culture had moved to the mainstream behind the Chicano Movement and the thriving Mexican immigrant populations of the Southwest. Los Super Seven was honored with a GRAMMY Award in 1998, playing, among others, Conjunto songs of Freddy Fender’s childhood, from the time he was still known as Baldemar Garza Huerta.
Fender died in 2007, at age 69.