Freddy Fender - Crazy, crazy baby

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An excellent version of the song from the highly obscure Buck Rogers. Buck may well have been obscure but the song is still well known across much of Southern Louisiana. Freddy and Huey do full justice to it, sticking closely to the original sound without taking undue liberties.

In 1999 Edsel issued a 3 CD set in their Crazy Cajun Recordings series dedicated to Freddy Fender and entitled "Freddy Fender: The Voice". The overall series was devoted to the music produced and released on a range of labels, including Crazy Cajun, by Texan entrepreneur Huey P. Meaux in the late fifties, sixties and seventies. Huey operated out of Houston but his activities covered much of SE Texas and Southern Louisiana.

Freddy Fender was a tex-mex rocker who recorded some raw rocking material in the late fifties which met with some local success. However his burgeoning career was brought to a shuddering halt when he was arrested in 1960 for marijuana possession and sentenced to 5 years in Angola prison. On his release in '63 he drifted for several years until eventually being signed up by Huey Meaux in 1971.

It was not until 1974 that things suddenly happened for Freddy and that was with the release of the ultimate country weepie, "Before the next teardrop falls". This set of albums largely documents what happened in the years in between. Disc 1 of the set is devoted to country, Disc 2 to rock'n'roll and Disc 3 to Spanish language versions. For me it's Disc 2 which contains the interesting stuff with much of it being swamp pop. When you consider that Huey Meaux was involved in many of the original swamp goodies then his qualifications for reproducing such material with Freddy on vocal were probably better than anyone's. The sound of many of these tracks is little different than those heard in jukeboxes in Southern Louisiana a good decade or more earlier. And although Freddy's heritage might have seemed very different from the cajun boys and the black R&B performers who were on those early records, in reality he had been steeped in the music for many years.