Deep in the heart of this year's Grammy Awards, the gong for best Mexican-American performance went to Los Super Seven, a gathering of Texan luminaries from several genres and generations. There was the country-rocking Anglo Joe Ely, Tejano veteran Ruben Ramos, David Hidalgo and Cesar Rosas from Los Lobos, country act Rick Trevino, and a couple of genuine Texan legends, Flaco Jimenez and Freddy Fender.
The idea was to record an album of traditional Mexican songs (plus a version of Woody Guthrie's Deportee) and celebrate the impact of the Mexican-American community on the musical culture of the US. Special guests were wheeled in to add to the mix - people like Doug Sahm, who along with Jimenez and Fender was a member of The Texas Tornados, and the mariachi group Campanos de America. So whether it was a Texan from the Panhandle or a Texan from the borderline, Los Super Seven was bound to be a rich mix of Tex-Mex. Freddy Fender, the man who invented Spanish rock 'n' roll, gave me the history lesson.
"The only reason this area is called Texas is because of battles fought between a very young United States and a very young Mexican government in the 1840s. This war brought in the settlers of Irish but mostly German descent, and it was the Germans who brought in the accordions. I don't know if the Irish have anything to do with the accordion but I think credit should be given to the Polish and Czechoslovakians because they are accordion fanatics too.
"Eventually the Mexicans who were in Texas after the war, started playing these instruments and hearing this European type of music and assimilating it with our Mexican songs. Then in the 1920s and 1930s these Mexican-Americans were now into second and third-generation and could speak English. A sort of a Tex-Mex culture came out of it. A sort of south of the border, Texas/Mexican musical culture that brought all these things together."
The inclusion of the Woody Guthrie song Deportee on the Los Super Seven album is a deliberate statement. Texas is still a borderland of many identities, perceptions and prejudices. The border itself is crossed regularly and illegally and, over the years, it has signified everything from escape in one direction, to escape in precisely the other.
The resultant history is one of confusion and rootlessness, and it was into this culture of barrios and migration that Freddy Fender was born Baldemar Huerta in 1936. This was San Benito in the Rio Grande Valley. To the south was the river and to the east was the ocean.
"If I had been born any further south I'd have been born in Mexico. Up to now - and even ourselves - we don't consider ourselves the Americans who came in from Europe. It seems that if you're not an American that came in from Europe you are something else. But it is getting better. We are from a country that got defeated in battle, and you know how the victor often acts. Not everybody, but there are still some who believe that if they're not aggressive, they won't be able to communicate with the native people.
"But everybody in my house was of Spanish and Indian mixture descent. So that has a lot to do with our music, the fact that we were already assimilated with the Spaniards at the time we lost Texas, California, Arizona and all that."
Fender's family were migrant farm workers, and the young Baldemar accompanied them on their travels singing songs in Spanish along the way.
Aged 10, he sang Paloma Qerida on the radio and a year later he won a $10 food hamper for another rendition of the same song. It was also while travelling with his parents during picking season that he had first heard yet another type of music - one which he would later successfully incorporate into his repertoire of Tex-Mex Conjunto. "I first heard the blues in the State of Arkansas in 1947. I was 10 years old, and my stepmother and my mother would take us to the company store and there, in a little town called Crawfordsville Arkansas, was a blue joint or what you guys would call a pub. It was a kind of a saloon with nothing but black people inside. I went by the door there and I heard the most beautiful music I ever heard in my life coming from a jukebox.
"I sneaked in without them seeing me and I sat down behind the jukebox and listened to this blues coming out. It might have been B.B. King but it was probably, at that time, Elmore James and Screaming Jay Hawkins. They were all using the slide on the guitar and giving out a very primitive Mississippi River Delta feeling - cotton fields with little shotgun houses and black peoples sitting on the porch and little naked kids just standing out there - an environment where they couldn't go forwards and they definitely didn't want to go backwards. That is still the foundation of my music."
Fender joined the US Marines at 16 and, after a three-year stint, returned to pursue a career in music. He began to play the dance halls and honky-tonks of southern Texas under various names like Little Bennie, Scotty Wayne and even Eddie Con Los Shades. It was also around then that he had the idea that would make him star. It was simple: he would sing rock 'n' roll in Spanish. He began with Elvis's Don't Be Cruel, which went straight to No 1 in Mexico and South America. He was later to record a whole series of r 'n' b standards in Spanish: Ya Me Voy, Hay Un Algo En Tu Pensar and No Estes Sonando, versions of Ain't That A Shame, There is Something On Your Mind and I Hear You Knocking. He changed his name to Freddy Fender and joined the big names like Fats Domino at Imperial Records.
"I am one of the pioneers over here. The first Spanish rock 'n' roll came out in 1957 and that was before I went to Imperial. That was me. And that was a-year-and-a-half before Richie Valens. It was my own idea to do it. Spanish rock 'n' roll was created, by me, just after Elvis came out with it. The first time Don't Be Cruel was recorded was by me. It came out on Falcon Records in McAllen, Texas. Then it was distributed across the river and it went all the way down to Central and South America. There was El Twist also. And Corina Corina was recorded in the late stage of my Spanish recordings."
Fender began singing in English at the end of the 1950s and, in 1960, scored a major hit with Wasted Days and Wasted Nights. But lucrative crossover stardom was not to be. Later that same year, he and his bass player were arrested for possession of "two cigarettes of marijuana". Fender got a five-year sentence, and it looked a sudden end to his career.
On his release, Fender searched around for a break and it finally came in 1975. He had been working as a mechanic and playing honky-tonks at the weekend when a record he had recorded called Before The Next Teardrop Falls went to No 1 in the Billboard Pop and Country Charts. A new version of his 1960 hit Wasted Days and Wasted Nights was released and was a hit all over again. Secret Love and You'll Lose A Good Thing followed, and Freddy Fender was back. The 1980s were quiet and then, during the 1990s he worked successfully with The Texas Tornados and Ry Cooder.
Now with Los Super Seven he has just picked up another Grammy, and things are looking good - certainly much better than they did in 1960 - a national hit and five-year sentence all in the one year.
"If I'd had any brains at that time I'd have thought my career was over - but I didn't have any brains. My buffer has always been a total invulnerability to reality. I was too occupied to think about what happened. So that helped me keep a smile and be cheerful and do my time. I'm still like that. I've gone through all kinds of bankruptcies and everything and I don't let it wear me down. The only thing that's hit me real hard has been the death of a 21-year-old son in a wreck, a week after my mother died. But I've still been able to get up off the floor and I'm still going. "I've got the same wife and the same family. We were divorced and we got married again. The reason I keep going is because I don't let an event become a negative reality where it will just torment me. Or like I said, maybe I just don't have the brains to be thinking like that."