La Bamba
Thirty years later, a neighborhood band replayed the songs a seventeen-year-old boy left behind, barely touching the original arrangements, and that playing carries the entire film.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
The people who made it ⏳🌊
- ComposerRitchie Valens
He wrote “Come On, Let's Go” and “Donna” and arranged the folk song “La Bamba” as rock and roll — the original author of the film's songs.
- ComposerCarlos Santana
With Miles Goodman, he wrote the background score that links the songs, winning a BMI Film Music Award.
- DirectorLuis Valdez
A theater artist who founded El Teatro Campesino, he both wrote and directed the film.
- ProducerTaylor Hackford
Produced the film with Bill Borden.
- LeadLou Diamond Phillips
Played Ritchie Valens, performing the song scenes to Los Lobos's recordings.
- LeadEsai Morales
Played Bob, the half-brother who loves Ritchie yet keeps falling out with him.
I. The songs of a seventeen-year-old
(The film) “La Bamba” is a biopic about the life of Ritchie Valens, the rock-and-roll singer who died at seventeen. It was written and directed by Luis Valdez, who founded the theater company El Teatro Campesino on the picket lines of a farmworkers' strike and made the film “Zoot Suit.” He is a man who has spent his career placing Mexican American stories at the very center of American popular culture. Taylor Hackford and Bill Borden produced it, and Columbia Pictures distributed it. (The original artist) The roots of this film's music are Valens himself. Born Richard Valenzuela in Pacoima, just north of Los Angeles, he signed with Del-Fi Records at seventeen and, in under 1 year, left behind “Come On, Let's Go,” “Donna,” and “La Bamba.” They were simple, forceful songs, driving rhythm and melody alike from a single guitar. He did not score the film; rather, the film walks in the footsteps of his songs. (The family) It was the family who chose who would sing the songs again. At the personal request of Valens's family, Los Lobos, a band from East Los Angeles, made new recordings. The band followed the original arrangements almost exactly. Instead of using Valens's old records, the film laid actor Lou Diamond Phillips's performance over these new recordings. The background music connecting the songs (the score) was written by Carlos Santana and Miles Goodman. (Lineage) This series's “Bird” followed the life of Charlie Parker, a musician who died young, through his own music. “La Bamba” does the same for a boy of 1950s rock and roll.
II. A guitar on the farm
(Nightmare) The film opens with a dream. In the sky above a school playground, two planes collide and wreckage rains down. The scene comes from a real accident: in January 1957, planes that had collided in midair fell onto the playground of a junior high school in Pacoima, and Valens was absent that day for his grandfather's funeral. The film turns this memory into the recurring nightmare of a boy who lost a friend, and lays a fear of flying at the bottom of the story. (The farm) In the summer of 1957, sixteen-year-old Ritchie works with his family on a farm in Northern California. When the work is done, what he holds on to is his guitar and the rock and roll pouring from the radio. At this point the music is not yet on a stage. It lives in a boy's fingertips and in his ears. (The brother) That summer his half-brother Bob comes home. The Bob of the film is rough and unstable. He loves his younger brother yet cannot bear the attention showered on him. The rift between the brothers deepens a little each time one of Ritchie's songs takes off. It is the other thread that carries the film to its end. (The move) Their mother, Connie, takes the family south to the San Fernando Valley. This move brings Ritchie to a new school and his first band, and then to a Hollywood recording studio. In this way the film carries the boy's world from the farm to the city.
III. The studio at Gold Star
(The band) At his new school, Ritchie loses his heart to a classmate, Donna Ludwig, and joins a neighborhood band, the Silhouettes. Their stage is nothing more than local parties and gatherings, but his guitar and voice quickly stand out. (Discovery) Bob Keane of Del-Fi Records finds him. Keane shortens his name to Ritchie Valens and takes him to Gold Star Studios in Hollywood. Through the glass of the control room, the boy hears his own sound as recorded sound for the first time. (Recording) The studio scenes feature “We Belong Together” and “Come On, Let's Go.” The first is a slow love song written by someone else; the second, a short, fast rock-and-roll number he wrote himself. Setting the two side by side, the film shows both of the boy's faces at once: he is a tender balladeer and a rocker who gets bodies moving. (Donna) Donna's father forbids his daughter to see a Mexican American boy. Kept from her, Ritchie pours his feelings into “Donna.” The song becomes the hit that makes him known across the country, yet it only drives him further from the girl it was written for. (The voice) Every voice heard in these scenes belongs to Los Lobos. Phillips does not sing himself; he moves his mouth and hands to the recordings. The scenes still never feel false, because the band faithfully followed Valens's singing habits, down to the places where he took a breath.
Plays in the scene where the boy records his own song for the first time at the Gold Star studio. It shows Ritchie's rocker face.
- A short song of under 2 minutes. It drives all the way through on a single refrain (the hook) that repeats the same short shout again and again, and this simplicity was the power of 1950s teenage rock and roll.
- Los Lobos barely changed the original's tempo or guitar sound. As a result, the film's recording scene sounds like a studio in 1958.
- The drums pound evenly on every beat while the guitar chops short strokes above them to build the rhythm. It is an arrangement made for the body to respond first.
A slow love song paired with “Come On, Let's Go” in the same studio scene. It carries the boy's tender face.
- Originally sung by the duo Robert & Johnny, the song was covered by Valens. The film presents it as a newcomer making someone else's song his own.
- The vocal rides on a swaying triplet rhythm (dividing each beat into three). It is the classic gait of the ballads 1950s couples slow-danced to.
- Set right beside the fast “Come On, Let's Go,” it reveals by contrast that this boy was a singer who could not be confined to either side.
A song dedicated to Donna, whom he could no longer see. It made him known nationwide, yet drew him away from the very person it was written for.
- Valens's original climbed to No. 2 on the Billboard chart and became his biggest hit. In the film, too, this song carries him to “American Bandstand” and onto his first plane.
- A cycle of four chords common in 1950s love songs (the so-called '50s progression) repeats throughout. Chords circling the same spot resemble a heart that cannot reach its object.
- The lyric is a 1st-person confession of longing, calling out the name of a lover who has gone. The unadorned way it calls the name again and again sounds like the sincerity of a seventeen-year-old.
- Donna is played by Danielle von Zerneck. As the scenes she appears in overlap with this song, the true story and the song are bound into one.
IV. A night in Tijuana
(The border) Ritchie crosses the border to Tijuana with his brother Bob. In the nighttime pleasure district where his brother takes him, he is seized by a tune the band onstage is playing: “La Bamba,” the signature song of son jarocho, the folk music of Veracruz in eastern Mexico. The musicians who appear as that band in this scene are Los Lobos. It is the one moment when the band behind the film's songs steps onto the screen themselves. (Roots) Here the story changes direction. Ritchie is a California boy who stumbles over Spanish. Yet when he hears this old dance tune that the people of Veracruz have sung at their fiestas, he truly understands the sound of his own family for the first time. If the earlier songs spoke the language of American teenagers, this one asks where he came from. (The charm) The next day, in a village, the brothers meet a healer (curandero). The healer gives Ritchie a charm to ward off his fear of flying. The nightmare of the opening scene raises its head again here. This charm will later become an important object between the brothers. (The decision) Back home, Ritchie says he wants to record this folk song as rock and roll. It is a decision made at a time when no one could promise that a Spanish-language song would work on American radio. The film shows a song crossing the border as a change in the accompaniment beneath the same melody: the rhythm the band strummed together becomes a riff on a single electric guitar.
The song he first hears on a night in Tijuana and finally sings as his own on a Brooklyn stage. It is the film's title and the central axis of its story.
- Originally a song from son jarocho, the folk music of Veracruz. Singing and dancing unfold over a frame of three chords that circle around and around. Valens kept this frame intact and dressed it in an electric-guitar riff (a short, repeated guitar phrase).
- Valens is said to have learned the song from a cousin and to have sung the Spanish lyrics from memory, by sound alone. That it was sung by a boy who never learned the song of his roots as a mother tongue overlaps with the film's Tijuana scene.
- The Los Lobos version follows the original arrangement, then at the end adds a short closing passage (coda) on acoustic instruments in the traditional Veracruz manner. It is the moment that returns a song turned rock and roll to the sound of home.
- The Los Lobos version spent 3 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1987 and was nominated for the Grammy for Record of the Year. The music video featuring Phillips won the MTV Video Music Award for best video from a film.
V. The Brooklyn stage
(Flight) When “Donna” takes off, “American Bandstand,” the television music program in Philadelphia, calls for him. Ritchie swallows his fear and boards a plane for the first time. A hand clutching the charm and eyes avoiding the window are enough to fill the scene. In effect, his song has sent him up into the sky he feared. (Home) With the money he has earned, he buys his mother a new house. It is the moment the boy who played guitar on the farm becomes the pillar of his family. The film does not linger over this scene; it briefly shows what success meant to the family and moves on. (The Paramount) At Alan Freed's rock-and-roll show at the Brooklyn Paramount Theater in New York, Ritchie sings “La Bamba.” The song he first heard on a night in Tijuana now stands before a New York audience. The film fills the stages he played in this period with stars of the same era: Brian Setzer becomes Eddie Cochran to sing “Summertime Blues,” and Howard Huntsberry becomes Jackie Wilson to sing “Lonely Teardrops.” Ritchie is now their peer, sharing the same stage. (The rift) At a Christmas homecoming party, a fight breaks out with his brother, and the charm from Tijuana snaps. The cheers onstage and the rift at home collide within the same passage. Here the pattern is at its clearest: the higher the music rises, the deeper the gulf between the brothers grows.
This song shows the 1950s rock and roll stage that Ritchie has stepped onto. Brian Setzer appears as Eddie Cochran and sings it.
- The lyrics comically air the grievances of a teenager stuck working all summer with no time for fun. Every so often a low voice cuts in, mimicking the tone of a boss or a parent, and that back-and-forth is the song’s charm.
- Setzer is the guitarist of the Stray Cats, the band that revived rockabilly (early rock and roll blending country and rhythm and blues) in the early 1980s. It is casting that chose a player who knows the original era in his bones.
- A hard-strummed acoustic accompaniment and a rhythm that stops short and then bursts back in lift the energy of the stage in a single stroke.
Howard Huntsberry appears as Jackie Wilson and sings it. The song shows that Ritchie now stands on the same stage as the stars of his day.
- Jackie Wilson scored a major hit with this song in 1958. One of its writers was Berry Gordy, who would later found Motown Records.
- The lyrics plead with a departed lover to come back. Throughout, the fervent delivery, which seems to come from church singing, features melisma, rolling a single syllable across many notes.
- Huntsberry’s recording is the longest track on the soundtrack. It sounds like a performance that labored to recreate the original singer’s onstage energy.
VI. The winter dance
(Tour) Ritchie joins the Winter Dance Party, a winter tour of the American Midwest, alongside Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper. In the bitter cold the bus breaks down again and again, and the troupe wears itself out. Behind the glittering stage, cold and exhaustion fill the screen. (Clear Lake) On the stage at Clear Lake, Iowa, Buddy Holly, played by Marshall Crenshaw, sings “Crying, Waiting, Hoping.” True to its title, the song is about a heart that waits for something. Carried on a buoyant accompaniment, it lifts the air of the night while somehow chilling it too. (Reconciliation) Before the show, Ritchie phones his brother. The brothers set down the words that have piled up between them, and Ritchie asks his brother to come along to the next show. The reconciliation the film has long put off takes place over the telephone line. (The choice) To hurry on to the next venue, a few of them charter a small plane. What happens next is left for you to see in the theater. Yet in this film the music has been bound to the stage from the start, and the fear of flying has run beneath it since the opening scene. Keep those two threads in mind, and when the sounds of the joyful stage recede, the audience will understand, without a word, what that moment means.
Buddy Holly, played by Marshall Crenshaw, sings it on the Clear Lake stage. It fills the film’s last big concert scene.
- It is said to be one of the songs Buddy Holly recorded in his New York apartment shortly before his death. For audiences who know that story, this performance sounds like no other.
- As the title says, the lyrics are about weeping, waiting and hoping for someone who will not return. Setting sorrowful words to a bouncy rhythm, the song makes the listener feel joy and sadness all at once.
- The song is driven by call and response, with the chorus catching the ends of the lead line and repeating them like an echo. It turns the sense of a waiting that never ends into sound.
- Crenshaw is regarded as a singer-songwriter in the Buddy Holly tradition. Rather than stopping at imitation, he sang in his own voice while keeping Holly’s unadorned style.
VII. A name on the bridge
(The bridge) In the final scene, Bob crosses a bridge alone. The days the brothers spent together pass through his mind, one over another. The film ends not with the younger brother who sang the story but from the place of the older brother left behind. It is a fitting close for a film that began as a story of brothers. (The charts) The song outlived the film. In the summer of 1987, Los Lobos’ “La Bamba” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for 3 weeks, also topping the charts in Britain, Canada and Australia. Some thirty years earlier, Valens’s original had appeared as the B-side (the flip side of a single) of “Donna” and peaked at No. 22. The soundtrack album also hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and was certified double platinum in the United States. (Preservation) The film was added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry in 2017, and Valens’s original “La Bamba” joined the National Recording Registry in 2018. A song left by a boy and the film that portrayed him have been preserved side by side as records of American culture. (Homecoming) After this great success, Los Lobos released “La pistola y el corazón,” an album of traditional Mexican songs played on acoustic instruments. The album was quiet on the charts but won a Grammy. A band that reached the top with someone else’s song went on to play the songs of its own roots.
Lesser-known stories
(Pronunciation) Valens learned “La Bamba” from his cousin Dickie Cota, and he is said to have memorized the Spanish lyrics by sound. The song is counted as the most famous Spanish-language rock and roll record, yet it was sung by a California boy who was not at ease in that language. As his symbolism as a Mexican American star grew, this fact was talked about less, not more. (The players) Los Angeles’s top studio musicians played on the original 1958 recording. Earl Palmer handled drums and the rhythm sticks (claves), Carol Kaye acoustic rhythm guitar, René Hall baritone guitar, and Ernie Freeman piano. Singles of the time did not list the players, so their names came to light only later, as researchers sorted through the session records. (B-side) Today “La Bamba” is Valens’s signature song, but when it first came out it was the flip side of “Donna.” While “Donna” climbed to No. 2, “La Bamba” stalled at No. 22. Its present fame was, in effect, conferred in reverse by the 1987 film and Los Lobos’ No. 1 hit. (Mother) Valens’s real mother, Concepción Valenzuela, makes a brief appearance in the film. Entrusting the songs to Los Lobos was also the family’s wish. The film was, among other things, a revival of a son’s songs in a voice his family chose themselves.
Glossary notes 📚🔎
Score (background film music)
(Word origin) Score originally meant a notch or tally cut into a stick. In music it came to mean the full score that gathers the parts of many instruments into one, and in film it became the word for all the music newly written for that film. (In film and musical theater) Unlike songs sung by characters or played by a band on screen, the score is music that supports mood and emotion from behind the scene. In “La Bamba,” Los Lobos handled the songs, while Carlos Santana and Miles Goodman wrote the score. If the song a character sings in a video game is a song, the tense music that swells as you enter a dungeon is the score. (Elsewhere) In sports, score means points.
Cover (singing it again)
(Word origin) The English word cover means to lay something over. The name comes from the idea of laying one’s own performance over another singer’s song and releasing it anew. (In film and musical theater) A cover is a new recording of an already released song by a different singer or band. Nearly every song on the “La Bamba” soundtrack is a cover. Los Lobos re-sang Valens’s songs, and Brian Setzer and Marshall Crenshaw re-sang those of Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly. Singing a favorite artist’s song in your own voice at a talent show is a little cover, too. (Elsewhere) The front of a book or a magazine is also called a cover.
Son jarocho
(Word origin) Son means sound in Spanish, and in Mexico and the Caribbean it refers to a strand of folk music in which song and dance go together. Jarocho refers to the people or things of the Veracruz region of Mexico. (In film and musical theater) The folk music of Veracruz, born from a mingling of Spanish, Indigenous and African music. It is played on the jarana, which looks like a small guitar, the requinto, which carries the melody, and the harp. Repeating a short chord cycle, it stretches on and on with dancing at fiestas. “La Bamba” is its signature song. It is like a game in which classmates clap out the beat while each takes a turn making up and singing a line.
Riff
(In film and musical theater) A short phrase repeated throughout a song, usually played on guitar or bass. Once heard, it sticks in the ear and serves as the song’s face. Valens turned the chord cycle of the folk song “La Bamba” into an electric guitar riff and made it rock and roll. Just as the short drumbeat repeated at a field-day cheer, ba-bam, ba-bam, binds the cheering together, a riff binds a song together.
Coda (closing section)
(Word origin) Coda is Italian for tail. It means the tail section attached after the body of a piece has ended. (In film and musical theater) The part added to round things off after the main material of a piece is finished. Los Lobos’ “La Bamba” follows the original, then closes with a coda in the Veracruz tradition on acoustic instruments, sending the song home to the sound of its birthplace. Like a postscript (P.S.) added after a letter is finished, it is the place for one last word you still want to say.
B-side
(In film and musical theater) Singles on vinyl used to carry one song on each side. The label put the song it was pushing on the front (the A-side) and the one it expected less from on the back (the B-side). Valens’s “La Bamba” was first the B-side of “Donna.” Even so, the song on the back was remembered longer. It is like a school play, where a supporting player rather than the lead is the one remembered for years.
Melisma
(Word origin) The Greek word melisma means song or melody. (In film and musical theater) A singing technique that rolls a single syllable of the lyric across many notes, drawing it out at length. It is common in church chant and gospel, and often appears in rhythm and blues songs like “Lonely Teardrops” to heighten emotion. Bending the last syllable of “Happy Birthday” through several notes for flair is exactly melisma.
Rockabilly
(Word origin) A blend of rock, from rock and roll, and hillbilly, a disparaging name for the rural music of the American South. (In film and musical theater) An early form of rock and roll born in the 1950s American South when country music met Black rhythm and blues. It is marked by a finger-plucked upright bass, a sharp electric guitar and a bouncing rhythm. Brian Setzer’s band the Stray Cats, who sang “Summertime Blues,” revived the style in the 1980s. Much as an old song from Grandma’s house sounds new when sung to a modern beat, it is country music dressed in a city rhythm.