Sad news: Baldemar Huerta, aka Freddy Fender has died.

For me, he was the sound and heart and soul of Tejano music, especially in the songs he sang as part of Los Super Seven. I will always cherish him, if for no other reason than on the first LSS album he resurrected a beautiful 70 year old song “Piensa En Mi” first popularized by Lydia Mendoza “the Meadowlark of the Border”: 

For the artists involved, the resulting music touched some deep and
rich personal places. One number Fender performs, “Piensa En Mi,”
is a song by the premier Mexican composer Augustin Lara which
Goodman presented for the project in a version by Tex-Mex music pioneer Lydia Mendoza. “She was very much one of my idols
from back in the 1940s,” explains Fender, who as a child first encountered Mendoza’s music on his family’s battery-powered
radio. “You would hear Lydia Mendoza with her rambunctious 12-string guitar and her strong voice, and she was sort of an earth
mama, a really strong woman.”

“When I listen to a song like that which focuses, in my case, on the memories of my childhood, it reminds me of my mother and
how our lives were back in the 1940s, and the way my town was, and the people who were there. It touches the cultural aspects of
what Mexican American life was like in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s,” explains Fender.

Other songs (also fabulous) he did with LSS include “Cupido” from the most recent LSS recording “I Heard It On the X” , and a song from the Spanish-American war:

“Un Lunes Por La Mañana” (”One Early Monday Morning”), is one Fender first heard back in the 1950s in
Matamoros, Mexico, in the early days of his recording career. A friend had told Fender that he should hear “this old man who has
a little beer joint there, and played guitar and sang. I went in there and this white-haired man was sitting there by the table with a
guitar. He started plunking on the guitar and singing about ‘one early Monday morning,’ and it was very exciting. And I always
remembered the song, though I never wrote it down. But when I went to sing it, the verses came to me like someone was typing
them to me.”

[link]

Piensa En Mi

 

Si tienes un hondo penar, piensa en mí;
Si tienes ganas de llorar, piensa en mí.
Ya ves que venero tu imagen divina,
Tu párvula boca que siendo tan niña me enseñó a besar.

Piensa en mí cuando beses,
Cuando llores también piensa en mí.
Cuando quieras quitarme la vida,
No la quiero — para nada, para nada me sirve sin ti.

If you feel a deep sorrow, think of me
If you feel like crying, think of me
Can’t you see I worship your divine image
Your beautiful mouth and you being so young
Taught me how to kiss

Think of me when you’re kissing
Also when you cry, think of me
Whenever you want you can have my life
I don’t want it
It’s worth nothing, nothing without you.

~~~~~~

Hoo boy, they don’t write ‘em like that anymore.

~Que En Paz Descanse~

 

Posted: October 15th, 2006 under Freddy Fender/Baldemar Huerta, General.
Comments: 2