They might not have originally performed the hit song "La Bamba," but the eclectic Americana/Tex-Mex group Los Lobos rediscovered the song for the 1987 film of the same name, giving the world another chance to dance La Bamba after the original song's owner Ritchie Valens went down in flames beside Buddy Holly in a fateful plane crash in 1959.

Los Lobos draw from a plethora of music styles including rock, country, folk, Tex-Mex, blues and traditional Spanish and Mexican music, and the East Los Angeles-based band has used this melting pot of genres to create a sound totally unprecedented in the music industry. Los Lobos started up in 1973 in Southern California, releasing their first independent EP in the late ‘70s, followed by another in 1983 before their first major-label album How Will the Wolf Survive? was released in 1984. The album appealed to a pop-leaning crowd, but it was Los Lobos' rendition of Valens' "La Bamba" in the 1987 film that catapulted the group onto the big stage. "La Bamba," which has no literal translation in Spanish (except that "bambolear" means "to swing") was the extra oomph the band needed to achieve star status, and the track was Los Lobos' first number one to hit the Billboards (and it did so on the Latin and Billboard Hot 100 charts).

Running down the path of Latin and American stardom, Los Lobos continued to release hit albums and songs through the ‘80s and ‘90s, celebrating the group's 20-year anniversary in 1993 with the double-disc Just Another Band from East L.A. After 1996's Colossal Head was a minor flop, band members of Los Lobos took a break from the group to start careers with other bands, but eventually came back together in 1999 and are still going strong today.