Ritchie Valens’ high school sweetheart still vividly remembers the moment in the fall of 1958 when she first heard the ballad “Donna” that Valens had written for her. Donna Fox (then Donna Ludwig) was ...

Ritchie Valens‘ concert at Pomona’s Rainbow Gardens was so exciting a prospect, a young Frank Zappa was desperate to go. The teenager, then living with his parents in Claremont and a fan of Valens’ ...

He’s most famous for writing “La Bamba,” a rock and roll classic adapted from a Mexican folk song, that became a modest hit in 1958, and a hit again in 1987 when Los Lobos recorded it for La Bamba, a ...

MONTEREY • The temperature was nine below zero, but a trip last week to one of the final sites that rock 'n' roll star Ritchie Valens played was "worth every bit of it," for his brother. "There was 40 ...

Ritchie Valens was just 17 years old when he changed the course of pop music in the late 1950s. As the first Mexican-American hitmaker in the U.S., he laid the groundwork for Chicano rock and beyond, ...