The Last Teardrop Falls

Perhaps one of the most well-known figures in all of music and Hollywood got his start in deep South Texas.

Baldemar Huerta, better known as Freddy Fender, was born in one of the poorest neighborhoods of San Benito. But Fender went on to top the charts with such songs as "Before the Next Teardrop Falls," and "Wasted Days And Wasted Nights." From his early days of working out in the fields, until the day he succumbed to cancer in 2006, music was always a part of Fender's life.

IN THE BEGINNING
Fender's voice and way with a song carried him out of the poverty he was born into and around the world several times, performing before presidents and millions of music fans.

His music career crowded his house with awards while his hits such as "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights" crowded the airwaves and the jukeboxes of thousands of bars and cantinas.

Fender was nominated for five Grammys and won three during what amounted to three careers in music. He had hits in the 1950s, '70s and '90s, the latter with supergroup the Texas Tornados.

No matter how far music took Fender from the Rio Grande Valley, he always remembered who he was -- Baldemar Huerta -- and where he came from -- the San Benito barrio of El Jardin.

GROWING UP VALLEY
El Jardin is a small neighborhood, a triangle of homes bordered by a resaca on one side and Stenger Street and Business 77 on the others.

For Fender, the music started here June 4, 1937, and he rode the ribbon of notes around the world.

His father, Serapio, sang at the back yard pachangas in El Jardin. On Mother's Day, he went from house to house serenading neighborhood moms.

Tuberculosis claimed his father when Fender was 7 years old.

His mother, Margarita, moved the Huerta family in with a trucker and they became migrant workers.

Fender heard the blues from the black migrant workers who worked with him in the fields.

"A lot of those guys had enough talent to be professionals," Fender said in a 2001 interview.

At 10, music began to dominate his life. Someone gave him a guitar --  sort of. The guitar had no back.

He learned to play it and made his first public appearance, singing "Paloma Querida" on KGBT-AM.

His mother saved her money, $13, and bought him a new Stella guitar.

He put it to good use. Back in the 1940s and 1950s, theaters had talent shows between movies.

Fender sang the song at the Grande Theatre in Harlingen and won a basket of food. The basket rode in his lap all the way back to El Jardin.

Music was already beginning to pay off, but it was put on hold for a while - but not a long while.

He signed up for a three-year stretch in the Marines at 16. Back in the Valley by 19, he started making his voice work for him.

PROFESSIONAL MUSICIAN
"I was going from theater to theater, competing in these talent shows -- the Grande in Harlingen, the Ruenez in San Benito, the Victoria and Majestic in Brownsville," Fender said.

The prizes weren't that much but they added up. Fender said he won about $50 a week.

"That was good money back in the '50s," he said with a laugh. "I made it a way of life."

Finally, the theater owners began asking him not to compete. "They said I was too good. I should let somebody else have a chance," Fender said.

One of those was Mary. She had also won a basket of food. And Mary had a sister named Vangie.

Vangie met Fender when she was just 14.

"My sister and I were born in San Francisco, Calif.," Vangie said during that 2001 interview. "When our parents died, we came down here to live with relatives."

But it didn't work out and Vangie ran away from home. She moved in with Fender at 15 and they married less than a year later.

Around the same time, Fender bumped into an old friend from El Jardin, Ramon Pion.

"We grew up together," Pion said in 2001. He still lives in the old neighborhood.

"Sometimes at night we would lie on our backs, on the side of this canal just over there.

"We'd look up at the stars. I'd play my bajo sexto and we would sing. We'd make up songs and sing. We thought we knew everything," he said and then added with a laugh, "We didn't know nothing; we were terrible."

In late 1956, Pion asked Fender to sing harmony at an audition for Falcon Records. But when it came time to leave -- no Fender.

"I found him down at the high school lookin' at the girls," Pinon said. "I said, ‘Hey, knucklehead, remember we have an appointment?' "

The two hopped a Valley Transit Co. bus to McAllen. At Falcon, they sang four songs. Afterwards, Fender said producer Rafael Ramirez asked Pion if he would mind taking the bus home alone. Ramirez wanted to talk to Fender.

Ramirez and his brother, Arnaldo, co-owners of Falcon, offered Fender a contract.

"They wanted to start recording rock n' roll and thought I had the right voice," Fender said.

With a ducktail haircut and long sideburns, Baldemar Huerta became El Bebop Kid.

The first session produced a single, "No Seas Cruel," a Spanish version of the Elvis Presley hit "Don't Be Cruel," backed with the Kid's own "Ay Amor."

The single was a huge hit selling more than a million copies in Mexico and South America.

In 1959, he signed with Imperial Records, the label of "Fats" Domino. El Bebop Kid became Freddy Fender, named after his favorite brand of guitar and amplifier.

One night he sat at the bar of the Starlight Lounge in Harlingen and wrote a song, "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights."

"I was separated from my wife at the time," Fender said. "A lot of people think I wrote it about prison.

"It's about days very wrongly invested in a love affair. You see, I'm a romantic and we romantics are more sensitive to the way people feel. We love more and we hurt more.

"And when we're hurt, we hurt for a long time."

Propelled by Fender's pain-filled tenor, "Wasted Days" became a hit. Fender hit the road.

In 1974, Fender was trying to record a rhythm and blues album at Huey Meaux's Crazy Cajun Studio in Houston. Meaux asked Fender to record this song he had, "Before the Next Teardrop Falls." Fender didn't want anything to do with a country weeper ballad.

The Crazy Cajun had a proposition: Fender could record the song or he could start paying for his recording time.

Fender translated some of the lyrics into Spanish, did one take of the song and went back to his R&B album.

He never got a chance to finish it.

On April 8, 1975, Fender became the first artist to have a hit top the country and pop charts the same week. They re-recorded "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights." It hit the No. 1 spot just like the next two singles.

In 1989, he teamed up with Doug Sahm, Augie Meyers and Flaco Jimenez to form the Texas Tornados. Awards, fame and hits followed.

The Tornados were an on and off thing. Each man has his own career. Sahm died in 2000 and with him the Tornados.

For the last decade or so of his life, Fender occupied a sort of elder statesman place in music. Every few years, he found himself with his hands in the wet cement of some walk of fame or another. On the Hollywood Walk of Fame you can find him between Paul Newman and "Soul Train's" Don Cornelius.

He continued playing almost to the end. His music appeared on countless albums -- more than 20 albums in 2001 alone including "Have a Freddy Fender Christmas."

Fender performed for three American presidents and acted in several movies.

In 2002, he won a Grammy for Best Latin Pop with "La Musica de Baldemar Huerta." In 1999 he won another as part of the Los Super Seven project. Fender sang Piensa en Mi, a song he first heard on the radio in El Jardin.

The Texas Tornados took home a Grammy in 1990.

He and Vangie lived in Corpus Christi for years. Vangie ran the office and the freddyfender.com Web site.

THE END OF AN ERA
Fender died on Oct. 14, 2006 at the age of 69.

Fender, who was diagnosed with lung cancer in early 2006, died at noon at his Corpus Christi home with his family at his bedside, said Ron Rogers, a family spokesman.

Over the years, he grappled with drug and alcohol abuse, was treated for diabetes and underwent a kidney transplant.

San Benito never forgot Fender. The city named his old street after him. In 2005, the city honored him by painting his likeness on a water tower along Express 77/83.

But that tenor with a teardrop is now forever silent.

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The Associated Press contributed to this report