Liner Notes from Freddy Fender Album with Brownsville Connections

by Diego Lee Rot

Music Writer for

the Brownsville Observer

Robert "El Turkey" Silva
on Stage with Fender

My friend of 17 years, Robert Silva, played with Freddy Fender in the early years.  Occasionally, he shares some funny story or incident about Fender, especially during their trip to Louisiana after Fender's release from prison.

I stumbled across these liner notes for Canciones de Mi Barrio, a compilation of songs recorded for IDEAL Records in San Benito 1959-1961 and 1963-1964. 

Fender released this album in 1992 when he was 55 years old and felt more comfortable with conjunto music, after spending most of his career in rock n roll, blues and country.

His "notes" read like a mini-biography.  There are some Brownsville references, a discussion of the word barrio vs. ghetto.  

Robert Silva Today

Five of the songs credit "Little Herman" as the drummer, but Fender explains that Robert "El Turkey" Silva drummed on the rest. 

Fender's liner notes are just below the album cover.

      Where does the music inside me come from?  I just started hearing it from the corners of the barrio in San Benito, Texas, where I grew up.  On juke boxes, over the radio, in houses, from my mother, that's where it comes from.  A lot of people confuse a city ghetto with the kind of barrio I'm talking about.  We didn't have any street lights, no pavement.  The Western Auto had the only TV in town, which came in around '53, and everybody would go downtown and stand around their window and watch.  In the early evening me and my band would rehearse in a garage.  All the neighbors and kids and cars would gather outside and watch and listen into the night.  We sang to the world from that little garage.

     

I'm from the 50's.  There's no "something new" for me.  As modern as I try to get, it always comes out 50's.  I lived through the 60's and 70's, but as far as the music I feel inside, it's the 50's, and even part of the 40's, music from when I was a young kid.  That's what I have inside of me.  Mostly slow dances and love songs, in English and Spanish.  After about twenty-five years of age my clock didn't run anymore.

     I was always different.  I'm still different from what you call La Onda Chicana or Tejano Music.  I'm from the same era, but I was never involved with it.  I was always trying to do something in English.  That was my thing since 1957 when I started recording with Falcon Records.  I wasn't doing the conjunto stuff.  I was doing rock and roll and ballads, just like I'm doing now, and rythm and blues.  Conjunto music didn't move me then, and the orquestras thought they were too hot shit for me.  Now I'm beginning to feel the kind of music I heard when I was a young person and enjoy performing the nitty gritty conjunto songs I sing now with Flaco Jiminez and the Tornados.  

I've recorded under all kinds of names.  Rafael Ramirez of Falcon Records called me "Baldemar Huerta, the Bepob Kid."  He wanted me to sing like Elvis Presley.  You ever try to sing like Elvis in Spanish?  It was terrible.  He would send me back in the studio and say "No, no, get back, sing it again, I understood a couple of words."  Finally I did it like he wanted so I could collect my twenty five bucks and get out.

In January of 1961 I recorded the album "Eddie Con Los Shades" under the name "Eddie Medina."  I used that name because at that time I was still with Falcon under my real name, Baldema Huerta.  I chose Eddie Medina because my father's mother's last name was Medina.  And Eddie, I just liked the name.  The group was called "The Shades" because whoever played with me, I just put sunglasses on them.  We all wore shades.

     I also recorded under the name Scotty Wayne, and of course, Freddy Fender.  I never recorded but I used to perform as "Little Bennie."  I don't know why.  I guess cause my grandfather's name was Bennie.  See, in the 50's everybody was "Little."  Little Richard, Little Freddie, Little Bernie, Little Johnny, Little Ricky, Little Anthony.  

     After Falcon, I started recording with the Duncan label.  The songs Mean Woman and Holy One were with Duncan.  Wayne Duncan was the first guy to embark on a project with me and put up all the money.  He was just a guy who had a juke box route, he didn't know anything about making records.  We recorded them both in a house that was a radio station in Brownsville, Texas.  We used a monaural machine, just one track.  That was '59 or '60.

     

I wrote Mean Woman in English first.  I wrote it again in Spanish and called it Que Mala.  It was the flip side of Holy One, and it helped sell 280,000 records.  It became #1.  It was kinda weird because Holy One became #1 in San Antonio and Mean Woman became #1 in Ft. Worth and Dallas with KLIF.  And the Holy One became #1 in Baton Rouge with WAIL and at the same time it also became #1 on WNOE and WTAX, New Orleans.  Both songs were potential singles.  Kinda weird.  Since it wasn't pushed by a major label, just word of mouth or whatever disc jockey we'd go visit and hand it to.  Hopefully he'd play it.  Later on, we got onto Imperial Records with the same recording of it.

     Holy One was first recorded in Spanish as Hoy Amor on Falcon in '56 or '57 with Don't Be Cruel on the other side.  Then when I started with Duncan Records it became the same song, but in English.  Holy One, with Mean Woman on the other side.  A couple of years later we had a problem with the title Holy One as being religious or something, instead of being understood as a tribute to a woman.  Duncan worried so much that Djs wouldn't play it that I had to change Holy One to Only One.

     

I think what we have here is a re-recording of  Holy One which I did many of between the years trying to keep it going.  I did this version for Rio Grande Music, Ideal Records in San Benito, Texas, on Houston Street, with Paco Betancourt and Johnny Philips.  They sold appliances, they had juke boxes.  Next door, the senior citizens played dominoes and in the back was the studio for Ideal Records.

Paco Betancourt, from Ideal Records, gave me a job when I was in Louisiana.  I was doing time, about two and a half years, for a couple of "cigarettes" over there, me an my bass player.  In order for me to get parole, I had to get a job, so I asked Paco for a job.  My job went from sweeping the sidewalk in front of the store in the morning, to sorting out records, to even recording other groups there.  I learned to run a very simple monaural Ampex that he had there.  I think I recorded as sound engineer an album by the legendary Lydia Mendoza and I recorded the best album that Tony De La Rosa ever had.

     I remember when Lydia Mendoza came in, it was 1964, maybe early 1965.  She came into the studio to rehearse.  It was just her and the guitar.  We knocked out the album in two days, or one day.  I learned a trick from her that has helped me tremendously.  She almost whispered her songs through the rehearsal, you could barely hear her.  And then, when she was ready, then her lungs opened up like giant amplifiers!  I couldn't believe the strength of this woman!  She knew that her energy was very precious and she was saving it for the right time.

     

Lydia was just one of us.  I have had admiration for singers, movie stars, and all of that, but I have never spent my time worshipping any of them.  I've been too busy living with myself.  Now that I'm getting older I realize what a tremendous figure she has been.  But even now I don't dwell on anybody else, I just live my life.  I went through thirty years of making music without really thinking about whether I was going to have a future or not.  I didn't think about that.  Call it ignorance, call it "I don't care," but I was not business-minded and I couldn't care less.  I always had somebody who wanted to hear me sing.  I've been fortunate in that aspect that my singing gave me a lot of kind hearts.  They may not have become friends, but they were kind to me, they wanted to hear the music.

     About the other songs in the collection, I was probably the engineer on some of these sessions.  I would put the switch on and then run like hell to pick up the guitar with the boys waiting for me.  We had Bennie Mendez on the bass.  I played guitar and lead.  We had Robert Silva, "El Turkey," on drums, Carlos Cantu on horn, and probably a couple musicians I can't think of now.  They were all from Brownsville or Harlingen.  

     Hoy Un Algo En tu Pensor is from '61.  I got the words on that from "There is Something on Your Mind," which I heard back in the 50's.  Ya Me Voy and Diablo con Antifaz, they're songs I recorded in '63 or '64 when rock and roll had gone into Mexico.  In '57-'60 with Falcon, I was the first rock and roll they had in South America and Mexico.  By '63, when I came back from Louisiana, they had songs like Diablo con Antifaz, or Devil in Disguise, and Mexico had really gotten on the ball with Mexican rock & roll.  So I just copied an Elvis Presley song that had been done by Mexicans in Mexico and then I did it as a Mexican-American.  

     Que Soledad is a song I wrote that means Oh Lonely Nights or Oh Lonely Me.  La Banda Esta Borracha I recorded with my bass player Johnny "Bennie" Mendez, who has passed away.  I had a horn player from Harlingen, Carlos Cantu, and we recorded it in the same studio in San Benito.  It was part of a Spanish album and it was just a popular song I jumped on.  Mostly we kept an eye on the charts in Mexico and said, "OK, we gotta record this one or that one, it's hitting."

     As far as me liking the song La Banda Esta Borracha, The Band Is Drunk, no.  I do want it on this collection for historical reasons, because that was what was happening at that time.  Like a lot of musicians, we grab onto what is happening to help our careers.  I covered the song.

     Paloma Querida is a song I've always loved.  I heard it sung by Jorge Negrete years before.   Mi Destina Fue Quererte was a song that I've always loved.  It's an old song and I wanted to sing it.  Indita Mia came from Mexico.  My mother sang it.  It's an old song.  No Estes Sonando, I wrote the words down to I Hear You Knocking and sang it in Spanish.  

     Corina, Corina is a translation of what Big Joe Turner sang in Louisiana over at "The Place."  I became friends with the gentleman that had Gold Band Records, Eddie Shuler, and I did an album with him while I was there.

     Acapulco Rock, that was a big hit in Mexico, it was in one of the movies and everything.  I wrote that one.  Camisa Negra comes from Mexico.  It's about a guy who's from Northern Mexico with the patillas, the mustache and sombrero.  His camisa, his shirt, is very well ironed, and he has new shoes like a Texan.  He has a vieja, an old woman, but she's not old, she's jamona, like ham.  Jamona is a woman who's pretty old, but you can't tell because she's chunky and smooth.  And when you're fat and look like ham you don't have wrinkles.  So she's a jamona chick who don't look old, even though she's old.  Anyway, he talks about the fact that he gets in a lot of trouble at the border.  He always wears a black shirt and good boots and a good Texan hat.

     I wrote Pancho Pechos.  Johnny Mendez helped me with the words.  It's about a crazy guy, a funny character.  He was always strutting like a fighting rooster.  He had one eye, he was really a clown, just a goofy guy who was trying to be a hero all the time.  He had a shootout but he shot his girlfriend because he couldn't see the other guy.     

     Magia de Amor is a song I wrote entitled The Magic of Love.  I did it in English first. . . "the magic of love thrills me. . . . "

     I've always gone into every music project with the intention of blowing up the world.  No other intention but that.  I think I've done that a little bit, but not really to the proportion I was hoping for.  I'm 55 years old.  I've done a lot of running, a lot of miles on bad gas.  Only yesterday I was twenty.  It's a feeling of "I made it."  In my youth I was always afraid of hunger, always afraid of not paying the rent, afraid of the cops, afraid I was gonna get busted, afraid my wife would leave me.  I was always doing this or that.  I had a hangover.  I don't worry about that no more.  It's an attitude of acceptance of what I believe my life is.  The fact is that I don't know if I'm going to be here five minutes from now.  That is what I believe is the greatest gift in life.  That you accept life as a friend.  And since life is my friend.  I'm not afraid anymore.