3/14

kelly shire
on
freddy fender, “before the next teardrop falls”

(march badness)

For 2025’s March Second Chanceness, each day in march we are bringing back an essay that previously lost in the first round of previous March Xness tournaments for your consideration.

March Xness is a fun tournament, but also at times a cruel one! Each year 32 essays and essayists lose in the first round (and 63 of 64 will bow out before a winner is crowned). Because of the pace of the first round, many of our readers probably don’t get a chance to closely read all of the essays each year! So for 2025 we wanted to dig some of these out of the archive and give them another read, this time on their own, no competitor. Just a moment of attention and even of glory. The Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee picked these based on reader nominations as particularly worthy of getting a second look. There are many brilliant essays that lose each year. Which are your favorites? This year we’re not voting: we’re only reading and celebrating and remembering. The tournament proper will come back in 2026 with March Sadness (lottery entry link in the menu above). We hope these great essays will again earn your love. Signed, the Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee

Last week, I read a post on the wonderful Neko Case’s Substack, “Entering the Lung.” She was reflecting on her Ukrainian heritage, and of feeling so very removed from family history and not-so-distant ancestors who emigrated to the U.S. “We were ghost people,” Case writes of her family. “Not talking about the unspeakable things that pushed us to the United States. I still don’t know why we came. I only know that whatever it was, it was awful.” I related to every word of her piece—the sadness of that old American story, cultural annihilation, and self-inflicted.
Five years on from writing about Freddy Fender, I feel a mix of anger and regret when re-reading my piece. I’ve had another five years to mull over what it means to have been raised in my Mexican-American family. My own ghost family, where nobody talked about history, or ancestors, or why they came to the U.S. from northern Mexico. (The Mexican Revolution, probably, but as usual, I’m only guessing.) Five years to learn about generational trauma, and watch how that’s played out amongst various relatives.
I’m mad at myself for letting my grandparents off the hook so easily, and sinking into the warm nostalgia of 1970s TV consoles, playing ‘70s variety shows, while we all visited happily under their roof. My grandparents were not bad people by a long shot, but neither were they very happy, especially my grandmother. I might have touched on the shame they instilled into their offspring about speaking their native tongue—and how the amusement they displayed at hearing “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” over the airwaves was a front for some more uncomfortable feelings. In hindsight, their amusement falls uncomfortably close to condescension. I went easy on our collective past; easy as the people I quoted, sharing their histories in the YouTube comments of Fender’s songs, memorializing dead relatives as they sat watching and listening.
Personal history aside, I’m also mad at myself for not championing Fender’s song a little harder. That was probably due to the gray area of the Badness competition in general. I went into the writing a little unclear about whether I should be arguing for my song to be considered The Worst, merely Not That Bad, or So Bad It’s Awesome.  (The winner, Muskrat Love, is definitely an argument for the latter.) I never believed that “Teardrop” is a bad song at all. I think my theory of it edging awfully close to being a novelty song still holds water—again, it’s the Spanish that sets it apart, and makes the song work. Without it, it’s merely a catchy chorus, without any of the gravitas. I could’ve done a deeper dive into the likelihood of the song becoming a hit in the current political climate; how Fender and his Chicano beer-pansa would make an even more unlikely pop star now than in the mid-70s, despite the popularity of so many other Spanish-language artists in the years between.
As for regrets, I wish I’d spent more sentences focusing on Fender the artist, and all the music he put out post-Teardrop. (And also post “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights”). I’m especially thinking of the work he did with his group The Texas Tornadoes, and the great Flaco Jimenez. Although, looking over their discography, it strikes me that singles, like “Hey Baby, Que Paso?” and “Who Were You Thinkin’ Of” also veer pretty close to being novelty songs themselves. Either way, Fender was, is, a significant Texas musician, and his Badness song was never going to triumph as the Baddest of them all. —Kelly Shire

kelly shire On “Before the Last Teardrop Falls”

Recently my mom was complaining about having to fill out an early census survey sent to her by the United States government. In typical fashion, she’d ignored it awhile, then ignored a couple letters reminding her to complete and return the survey at her earliest convenience. Now the latest letter had moved from sounding mildly annoyed to mildly threatening, so she was filling it out, but wanted me to know her own annoyance at having to answer so many prying questions about her household.
In the midst of her complaint, she dropped an anecdote about her dad, my grandpa Ed.
     Ed was also once asked to complete a census questionnaire.
Before we continue, you should know that my grandpa was a gentleman, by which I mean that he was thoughtful, soft-spoken and measured in his opinions. He was a blue-collar worker, a foreman for an L.A. suburb’s water department throughout my childhood until his retirement. Every day he returned home hot and dirty and showered and changed into fresh chinos before relaxing in his armchair to read the newspaper. He was patient, and polite with telemarketers, never hanging up on them mid-sentence, like I do.
But my grandpa lied on his census form. According to my mother, Ed hovered a long while before checking off the box that inquired about his ethnicity. Latino? Chicano? Hispanic? Mexican-American? However it was phrased, he didn’t check off any of those boxes. Ultimately, he checked the box that said only “White.”
“I’m not any of those things,” my mother says he grumbled aloud later. This was, is, untrue. Unlike me, who comes honestly by my dithering over the same question on official forms (does half count? Am I of “Hispanic heritage?”), it should have been a fairly easy question for my grandpa.
Does his lie matter? Whose answer matters?
     And who wants to know?
For I think that may have been the real question at the heart of my grandpa’s fib to the United State Census Bureau: Who’s asking, and why?
     My grandpa Ed was not white. On paper, his was one of the most common Latino surnames in the local phone book. In person, the color of his skin, his high cheekbones were the giveaway: he was sometimes mistaken for Native American, and even Japanese. Basically, you would not ever have glanced at my grandpa standing on his driveway watering his beloved dichondra lawn and thought: White Guy.

Freddy Fender was born in 1937 in Texas, which means that when his song “”Before the Next Teardrop Falls” hit #1 on the pop and country charts in 1975, he was almost 40 years old. Although this was the first time he’d gained attention on the national level, he’d been kicking around the south Texas music scene since he was a child: at 10, he won an amateur talent contest and could be heard on the radio singing “Paloma Querida.” In 1960, he had a regional hit with an early version of “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights,” the follow-up to single to “Teardrop” that reached number eight on the charts in ‘75.
You’ve probably already guessed that Freddy Fender wasn’t his real name. Perhaps, like me, you assumed the “Fender” was a play on his given surname of Fernandez, just like Richie Valens’ last name was a white-out of “Valenzuela.” Maybe Freddy’s first name was Francisco, or Federico. But Freddy was born Baldemar Huerta. (Pronounce the B like a “V” in your head, and you’re a little closer to what it may have sounded like when his parents called his name across the beet fields where they all labored as migrant workers during his childhood.)
Coming up around the same time as Richie Valens, who was a couple years younger, Huerta must have known that his given name wouldn’t get him very far. From the start, he  played under nearly a dozen stage names—El Bebop Kid, Scotty Wayne, and my favorite, Eddie con los Shades—before settling on the alliterative one he rode to the top. Fender for the famous guitars, Freddy  because “the gringos will like it.”

And it’s better to be a gringo, correct? I was raised with this assumption, though no one ever spoke that thought out loud. They didn’t have to. I grew up surrounded by my mom’s close-knit Mexican-American family, and by close-knit, I mean I was over at my grandparents’ house almost every single day of my life until I was eight, when we moved one town away. My mom, the eldest of her siblings, was the first of her two sisters to marry a white guy from the Midwest who came to Southern California, and in turn both of my aunts did the same.
I was white, our dominant culture was white. If you ignored the people who owned the house, there was scarcely anything you might point to and label “Mexican” about my grandparent’s household. And what exactly would such an item be, or look like, anyway?
     I hear tell there was a time, before I was born, when my grandma cooked traditional dishes like nopales (cactus) or tamales. When I was little, she kept a dark stone molcajete on her kitchen counter, a mortar and pestle used for grinding up chiles.  But as she grew older, my grandma abandoned most of that, cooking instead toward their doctors instructions for lowering cholesterol and preventing heart disease. Chicken breasts, well-done flank stank, nonfat milk and rainbow sherbet were the foods mostly eaten around the dinner table. (She regularly made “Mexican” rice; it involved a bottle of Heinz 57 ketchup.)

In the decade that gave us “Disco Duck,” “The Streak,” and so many other terrible hits, Mr. Huerta’s song is comparatively easy on the ears. I make the comparison, because in the weeks that I’ve spent listening to it on repeat and mulling it over, I’ve reached the conclusion that “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” almost qualifies as a novelty song. It’s not funny, it’s not a parody, and yet it has that element of strangeness that defines the stand-alone definition of the word “novelty.” After all, did the American audience that propelled this song to #1 in early 1975 on the country and pop charts enjoy it solely for its catchy tune and heartfelt sentiment, or was something else at play?
The premise of “Teardrop” is the spurned lover wishing happiness for his old flame: the singer pledges to rush to the woman’s side when the new guy makes her cry, to be there before her next tear can even fall. It’s a nice sentiment, though probably impossible to literally execute. And does this ex want him there, anyway? Does Freddy truly wish her all the best, is it her happiness that matters most? Are any among us that unselfish in matters of the heart, or do we all just want what we want? The listener can’t know, because there’s not much more to the lyrics besides the title. 
I’m pulling apart the few lines, trying to find deeper meaning to give the song its fair shake, but ignoring the obvious, the part I believe is the real draw, the power even, in the 2:33-minutes of this country-pop crossover. The part that makes it a novelty: the Spanish, of course.

It was the mid-1970s, and like most households of the era, my grandparents’ color television was housed in a massive console, a heavy slab of dark wood that my grandma polished with lemon Pledge. Atop it sat a silk houseplant, a couple of photographs or knickknacks. On this television was the usual: the local news, my grandma’s beloved afternoon soap, a lot of mid-afternoon talk shows with hosts like Mike Douglas or Dinah Shore. My grandpa loved Westerns—old Saturday matinee showings of John Wayne movies, re-runs of Gunsmoke and Bonanza.
Every once in a while, for whatever reason, my mom and I would drop by my grandparents’ at an unusual time, unannounced. Often when this happened, we’d come upon my grandparent’s watching an old Mexican western, usually in black and white, on a Spanish language station. My grandpa loved these old movies, but as soon as we walked through his front door and sat on the couch, he’d change the station back to regular English-language programming. The Waltons, perhaps, or a random sports broadcast. I mentioned that my grandpa was polite, so maybe that’s why he changed the channel so quickly: I didn’t speak Spanish after all, and though my mother could mostly understand it, she wasn’t a fluent speaker. But even as a kid, I felt a little guilty when our visits prompted my grandpa to turn off something he enjoyed. A longer, more complicated conservation might ask why I’d never been taught my grandparents first language, or why my mother was allowed to let her understanding lapse, though a condensed answer is mostly again: the gringos will like it.

Into my grandparent’s household, over the airwaves, came the sight and sound of Freddy Fender. There are several YouTube videos of Fender performing on 1970s variety shows, including Hee-Haw. In some he’s lip-synching, but in the best quality video, he performs the song live. I have no idea whether either of my grandparents actually caught one of these TV performances of “Teardrop,” but I’m willing to bet they did, based on how their TV was always on in the evenings, and the ubiquity of so many different music and variety shows back then.
There stands Freddy, in front of a fake farmhouse porch on a studio set, looking like no other pop or country star sharing the charts with him. His black mustache is thick and drooping, his black cloud of curly hair even thicker. He wears a patchwork blue denim suit, the jacket open to another denim shirt highlighting a bit of paunch; his brown hand grasps the mic. This is his moment—after years of playing in Texas tejano bands, getting kicked out of the Marines for drinking, and serving two years in a Louisiana prison for pot possession—middle aged Fender is singing on national television, and after the first lines of English, he busts out into a full stanza of Spanish.

I’ve never learned to speak Spanish. I had to consult the internet to find out what he’s saying in those lines, the only part of the song that Fender wrote himself. The words are almost identical to the English verses; instead of teardrops it’s crying, and he’ll be there to talk when she’s sad. And yet the Spanish verse feels so much like the main point of the song—when it begins, it’s the moment where (in the recorded version) the tejano accordion kicks in, lending a musical swell to this section where Fender’s emotions sound the most impassioned. The Spanish verse is the element, I’m convinced, that propelled the song to the top of the charts.
In the comments section of the Songfacts website, “Dianna” from Georgia primly expresses her concern that Fender’s lyrics are not in fact accurate Spanish: “these are very basic grammar mistakes,” she notes. Another commenter addresses this: “I see where your comming from [sic],” he says, but “it is very correct indeed. Maybe not European Spanish, but it is very much Mexican.” 

Bad or good, “Before the Next Teardrops Falls” is an important song, at least to the folks who wrote the dozens and dozens of comments accompanying the online videos, dedicating it to the memory of all the papis and abuelitos and dads and tios and older hermanos who are no longer with us, RIP to them and to Freddy himself, the best singer EVER who was the real thing, a real talent who did not need to use autotune ever, amen.
I know that my family, both immediate and extended, must have enjoyed it, because it was everywhere, a given in the cultural memory of my early childhood, along with a lot of other country-pop songs from the same year. (It was pushed off the #1 position the following week by John Denver’s slap-happy “Thank God I’m a Country Boy”—another near-novelty tune.)  Also, looking at the cover of Fender’s album that produced “Teardrop” along with “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights,” produces a jolt of memory: my grandpa owned the album, I’m guessing in 8-track format, the better to play in his tan Chevy pickup.
I think of what it meant to my grandparents, to see such a clearly Chicano man (Fender uses the term to describe himself in another video) on their television, not in an old movie on a staticky Spanish station at the top end of the dial, but on a major network. For the two and a half minute duration of the song, it was better to not be white, it was okay to not be white, because look at how the whole country embraced Freddy Fender as a star.
But at least once during my multiple listens to the song Fender was destined to perform for the rest of his life, I could hear my grandparents’ voices again. I saw them, sitting together in their living room, eyes on the television, and between them passed a murmur of approval and amusement, an appreciative chuckle at the spectacle on the screen: the fuzzy-headed man, his eyes shut tight with emotion, singing his cheesy song one more time.

Kelly Shire is a child of the seventies who was gifted a K-Tel album and Donna Summer’s Bad Girls for her tenth birthday. She’s lived her whole life in Southern California and has had essays about music and family appear in Brevity, Under the Gum Tree, and Memoir Mixtapes, among others. She also contributed work to the recent Springsteen anthology Shut Down Strangers and Hot Rod Angels (Bone and Ink Press). Last year she wrote about the The Cult for March Vladness.