The Very Best of Ritchie Valens

AMG Review of The Very Best of Ritchie Valens

Steve Leggett
All Music Guide

With only two brief albums, a poorly recorded live high school show, and some demos and rehearsal tapes to draw from, the legacy of the late Ritchie Valens rests on an extremely small canon. Most collections of his work, like this one, are mix and match affairs from these few sources, and while Valens' charismatic talent is everywhere evident, he simply didn't live long enough to refine and develop it. His huge hit "La Bamba" is here, of course, and his halting, touching version of "Bluebirds Over the Mountain" shows that Valens knew his way around a allad, but tracks like "Ritchie's Blues," which is an obvious rehearsal take, indicate how bare the cupboard actually is. Not that this is a bad anthology. It isn't. It simply shares the problem all collections of Ritchie Valens face: He died too young.