Tex-Mex singer Fender dies at 69

Published 9:00 pm Saturday, October 14, 2006

Freddy Fender, a Grammy-winning musician who was one of the first Mexican-American artists to cross over successfully to the mainstream pop market in the 1970s and who helped introduce Tex-Mex music to a wider audience in the 1990s, has died. He was 69.

Fender, who had been fighting lung cancer since early this year, died Saturday at his longtime home in Corpus Christi, Texas, a family spokesman said.

Open about his battles with drug and alcohol abuse, Fender also had struggled with diabetes and hepatitis C. He underwent a kidney transplant in 2002 using a kidney donated by his 21-year-old daughter. Two years later, he had a liver transplant.

“I feel very comfortable in my life. I’m one year away from 70 and I’ve had a good run,” Fender told the Corpus Christi Caller-Times in August after his cancer was diagnosed as incurable.

His life as a performer could be viewed in three distinct acts and included an interlude in prison.

He began as a ’50s balladeer who performed rock covers in Spanish as “El Be-Bop Kid,” then came back in 1975 as a country act with the chart-topping hit “Before the Next Teardrop Falls.” In the 1990s, he earned high praise as a member of Texas Tornados, a Tex-Mex group of all-stars.

In 2001, Fender received a Grammy Award for best Latin pop album for “La Musica de Baldemar Huerta.” He also shared two other Grammys for best Mexican-American performance in 1990 with the Texas Tornados and in 1998 with another group of Latin all-stars, Los Super Seven.

With his pompadour haircut and Spanish-language cover of “Don’t Be Cruel” (“No Seas Cruel”) and other songs, Fender was considered the “Elvis of the Rio Grande.”

“I was the first to take Hispanic rock ‘n’ roll south of the border,” Fender told the Sacramento Bee in 2002. “I demand recognition for being the one that broke it in.”

The curtain fell hard on Fender’s early career when he was arrested in 1960 in Baton Rouge, La., for possession of a small amount of marijuana. He spent almost three years in the Louisiana state prison at Angola.

After his release, Fender spent several years playing gigs on weekends. He worked as an auto mechanic and studied sociology at a junior college.

He found fame on the national stage in the mid-1970s when record producer Huey Meaux convinced Fender to bring his soulful tenor to country music. Recorded for a regional label in Texas, “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” became a No. 1 pop and country hit. The mellow song included a verse in Spanish.

Later in 1975, Fender recorded a version of the Doris Day hit “Secret Love,” which reached No. 20 on the charts, and remade his late 1950s recording, “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights,” which climbed to No. 8. Other pop and country hits followed.

The late 1970s were, artistically, the “best years of my life,” Fender told the Los Angeles Times in 1992, but drugs and alcohol had taken a toll by the mid-1980s.

His wife and friends convinced him to seek treatment, and he spent time in a drug rehabilitation center in 1985.

After he emerged, his career took a mild Hollywood turn. Robert Redford called to ask him to appear as the mayor in the 1998 film “The Milagro Beanfield War.” Fender also acted in several other films.

In 1989, Fender was “playing bookings for peanuts” when he was asked to team with three other elder statesmen of the Tex-Mex sound – Doug Sahm, Augie Meyers and Flaco Jimenez – to form the Texas Tornados.

Branded the “Tex-Mex equivalent of the Traveling Wilburys and Grateful Dead” by the Detroit Free Press, the group recorded and performed off and on through much of the 1990s.

Still, Fender remained committed to a career as a solo artist, alternately touring alone and with the Tornados. In 1998, he reunited with Jimenez to appear with the group Los Super Seven.

Asked in 1990 if he hoped to use the Tornados as a vehicle to jump-start his solo career, Fender answered: “Is pork chops greasy? I guess we all want it.”