Rockabilly 1959. Then in April 1960, while touring with Gene Vincent in the UK, their taxi crashed into a concrete lamp post, killing Eddie at the young age of 21. The grim coincidence in this all was that his posthumous UK number-one hit was called "Three Steps to Heaven". Rockabilly music enjoyed great popularity in the United States during 1956 and 1957, but radio play declined after 1960. Factors contributing to this decline are usually cited as the 1959 death of Buddy Holly in an airplane crash (along with Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper), the induction of Elvis Presley into
Ritchie Valens Keane recommended shortening his surname to "Valens" from Valenzuela to widen his appeal beyond any obvious ethnic group. Valens demonstrated several songs in Keane's studio that he later recorded at Gold Star Studios in Hollywood. The demos primarily consisted of Valens singing and playing guitar, but some of them also featured drums. These originals can be heard on the Del-Fi album, "Ritchie Valens – The Lost Tapes". Two of the tracks laid down in Keane's studio were taken to Gold Star Studios and had additional instruments dubbed over to create full-band recordings. "Donna" was one track (although two other preliminary