While Ritchie Valens made waves with R&B-influenced Chicano rock in the late '50s, his death at age 17 left work to be done.
Puerto Rico-born Jose Feliciano was the next Latin artist to achieve significant crossover success, his 1968 LP Feliciano! earning a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year.
Feliciano missed out on the top gong but took away Grammys for Best New Artist and Best Male Song for his cover of The Doors' Light My Fire.
The blind singer, already a teen idol across South and Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean, had cracked the lucrative US market with his passionate collection of reworked pop tunes.
The album plays to Feliciano's strengths as a gifted guitarist and intuitive, expressive vocalist.
He makes each track his own (including moving instrumental versions of Lennon/McCartney songs And I Love Her and Here, There And Everywhere), embellishing them with Latin flourishes and transforming them into something more soulful and heartfelt than they had once appeared.
Yet Feliciano's devotion to pop music, and the influence of jazz, shines through.
He's not trying to outdo the original artists; he's merely filtering their work through his life experience and his cultural roots, and is unable to resist following the tangents that lead from his enthusiastic internal response.
Feliciano's choice of material also points clearly to a canny appreciation for his target crossover market.
In addition to the two Beatles instrumentals, he covers Lennon and McCartney's In My Life, Gerry and the Pacemakers' Don't Let The Sun Catch You Crying, Mamas and Papas hit California Dreamin', the Bobby Hebb-penned Sunny and Tom Paxton's The Last Thing On My Mind.
Best of the bunch is a defining version of the Bacharach/David composition Always Something There To Remind Me.
