It is hard not to feel the energy and Soul that the great Ritchie Valens Sleepwalk put into every guitar lick in this song. Smooth as silk without being overproduced. I recently had a Groom ask for this song to be the song that he and his mother would dance to for their Mother-Son Dance. I fought hard to contain the tears that well-up every time I hear this song. I do not remember the scene in the film La Bamba but I remember it was one of the more emotional ones. There are few artists from that era that had a full-length feature film made about their life like Ritchie Valens Sleepwalk. As a professional Wedding DJ, I get requested plenty of his music these days and continue to feel moved by his music.
Ritchie Valens Sleepwalk Music Video
He was born Ricardo Esteban Valenzuela Reyes. He was asked by his producer and agent to change his family name to make it sound ‘more american’. Its strange in 2011 to contextually imagine that happening today, where nearly twenty percent of American population is Latino. His death along with other pop stars Buddy Holly and The Big Bopper is still considered an American tragic story. After the February 2, 1959, performance in Clear Lake, Iowa, Holly, Richardson, and Valens flew out of the Mason City airport in a small plane that Holly had chartered. He was on the plane because he won a coin toss. The plane, a four-passenger Beechcraft Bonanza, departed for Fargo, North Dakota, and crashed shortly after takeoff in a snow storm. The crash killed all three passengers and the pilot; at 17, Valens was the youngest to die on the flight. The event inspired singer Don McLean’s popular 1971 ballad “American Pie“, and immortalized February 3 as “The Day the Music Died”.
