Rumination led me to this musician (who died before I began listening to popular music, though two of his big hits were perennial favorites in “Oldies” stations), and his biopic, La Bamba. Lou Diamond Phillips starred as Ritchie, and was great in his first big, breakthrough acting role. Fifties rock and roll pervades the film, and Ritchie’s two big hit songs are prominent: La Bamba, and Donna.
La Bamba was a Mexican folk song that Valens made into a rock and roll hit. Donna was a song of unrequited love (I had a tangentially similar experience with a Donna in my neighborhood when I was thirteen).
The movie still works. Rooted in the late 1950s, it’s timeless because it was very well done, and because Ritchie Valens died at such a young age (frozen in time, as are James Dean and Janis Joplin), he will always be young.
I wondered whatever happened to the real Donna. Thanks to ubiquitous journalism and modern search technology, I found an article from the Washington Post, published September 4, 1987: The reveries of Valens’s Donna.