La Bamba
This song that I played at JGC OM 24 is the second song of a Hal Leonard songbook that I’m able to play thanks to Justin Guitar lessons. I started practicing it on April of last year. I don’t remember what exactly drove me to learn it. Maybe it was watching Justin Guitar lesson for it on Grade 2.
I started with practicing the two-bar mixed flat picking and strumming pattern the songbook suggests for most of the song, but at some point I replaced it with a two-bar all strumming pattern and left the other pattern as an exercise for my regular technique practice routine. After several months of practice it suddenly started to sound like the song and I also was able to sing along.
I replaced the solo Ritchie Valens plays with playing the riff with some variations I discovered while practicing and accidentally hitting the wrong strings, but liking what I heard. If it sounds good, then is good as Justin says. The ending I used was kind of the same thing, while having fun playing with the sound and the speed I liked what I heard and looked for ways to incorporate that in my version of the song.
Some research provided me with some information about the history of song well beyond being an unintended B-Side worldwide success by Ritchie Valens. This son jarocho is an 18th century or earlier dance song from the region of Veracruz in Mexico. When played and danced at weddings the newlyweds tie a bow with a ribbon using only their feet while dancing. It’s accompanied with harp and several other stringed instruments. There are hundreds of known couplets of the song so the song can go on and on just by adding couplets.
The son jarocho songs sound very similar to the music of the plains between Colombia and Venezuela that I may tackle in a future post.