On New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2005, sixty-eight-year-old Freddy Fender walked onto the s

On New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2005, sixty-eight-year-old Freddy Fender walked onto the stage for what would become the last concert of his life.

For five decades, the singer born Baldemar Garza Huerta had carried a blend of country, rockabilly, and swamp pop from South Texas dance halls to the top of the American charts. When that December night was over, he stepped away from the microphone to start chemotherapy for lung cancer.

The audiences who packed his shows knew him as the voice behind the 1975 number-one hits “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” and “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights.” Long before those records sold millions of copies, he had been raised in San Benito, Texas, traveling with his migrant farmworker family and singing the songs he heard on border radio. By joining English and Spanish verses on the same record, he created a rare bridge between Texas border music and mainstream country radio.

During his final years, though, the touring road gave way to medical appointments and long stretches of recovery. In January 2002, when diabetes and kidney failure threatened his life, his daughter Marla Huerta Garcia donated one of her kidneys to keep him alive. Two years later, in 2004, he underwent a liver transplant. Each time his strength came back, Fender returned to perform for the crowds who had followed his music since the 1950s.

When doctors found inoperable tumors on his lungs in early 2006, the concert calendar finally came to an end. Fender left the road behind and remained at his home in Corpus Christi, Texas, trading stage lights and tour buses for quiet months with his wife, Vangie, and his family.

Most families eventually face the season when a working life slows down and the people inside the home matter more than any accomplishment outside it. Even then, Fender spoke plainly in interviews about one wish he still held for the music he loved: hoping to one day see a Mexican American inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville.

On Saturday, October 14, 2006, Freddy Fender died at his home in Corpus Christi with his family at his bedside. He was sixty-nine years old. Four days later, on October 18, an overflow crowd of neighbors, fellow musicians, and state leaders gathered for his funeral before accompanying him to his final resting place at San Benito Memorial Park Cemetery.

After all the years on the national stage and the millions of records sold with “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” and “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights,” Baldemar Huerta was laid to rest in the South Texas hometown where his voice first began.