POP MUSIC REVIEW : Hernandez Swings With Zest

It’s fitting that Little Joe Hernandez and Willie Nelson performed together at Saturday’s Farm Aid concert. Hernandez is practically the Hispanic Willie, as beloved to his fans as Nelson is to his. And Hernandez was once something of a musical outlaw, his fiery, politicized border music of the early ‘70s being driven by the often violent repression then faced by Texas Latinos.

The Tejano legend now anticipates and promotes a more harmonious future, and he moved easily from Texas Stadium and a national cable audience on Saturday to the Santa Ana Elks Lodge on Sunday.

In his two-hour performance, the gray-bearded, black-hatted singer and his five-piece band, La Familia, kept the crowd of more than 700 dancing with Tex-Mex stomps, ballads, waltzes and hot salsa numbers. Hernandez’s voice is nearly as expressive as Nelson’s, trading nuance for an emotionally unfettered delivery full of both romance and the most wicked yowls this side of an ocelot.

The set ranged from the cry-real-tears outpouring of the ballad “Prieta Linda” to a graceful take on the Earnest Tubb signature tune “Waltz Across Texas.”

The show wound down with Hernandez’s own signature numbers, “Redneck ‘Meskin Boy” and his classic “Las Nubes” (“The Clouds”), an early allegorical song about Hispanics’ loss of cultural identity.