Clifton Chenier & The Red Hot Louisiana Band

WAY DOWN IN LOUISIANA

UNIVERSITY OF LOUISIANA AT LAFAYETTE PRESS

Clifton Chenier, Cajun, Zydeco,and Swamp Pop Music

WAY DOWN IN LOUISIANA

TODD MOUTON

Cover Photograph: Edmund Shea © Edmund J. Shea Trust

Book Design: Megan Barra

FRONTISPIECE: “Jumpin’ Joe” Morris, Cleveland Chenier, Big Butch, and Clifton Chenier (Courtesy

of Johnnie Allan and the Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette)

PRECEDING PAGES: Cowboy Stew Blues Revue, Swampwater Saloon, Lafayette, Louisiana:

Paul “Lil’ Buck” Sinegal, Richard “Dickie” Landry, John Hart, C.C. Adcock, and Steve Riley (Photo

by Lucy Henke)

OPPOSITE PAGE: Triple Row, Silk Composition by Megan Barra

To Paco for planting the seed;

to Jen for nurturing it;

and to all the folks

who cultivate the gardens of

Cajun and Creole culture.

University of Louisiana at Lafayette PressP.O. Box 40831

Lafayette, LA 70504-0831http://ulpress.org

©2015 by University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press and Todd Mouton

ISBN: 978-1-935754-73-2

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Mouton, Todd.Way down in Louisiana : Clifton Chenier, cajun, zydeco, and swamp pop music /

by Todd Moutonpages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-1-935754-73-2 (alk. paper)

1. Cajun music--Louisiana--History and criticism. 2. Zydeco music--Louisiana--History and criticism. 3. Swamp pop music--History and criticism. 4. Cajuns--Louisiana--Social life

and customs. 5. Chenier, Clifton, 1925-1987. I. Title.ML3560.C25M68 2015

Printed in Hong Kong.

CONTENTS

8 Foreword

12 Introduction: Surf Music from Jupiter

18 Hot Tamale Baby: Buckwheat Zydeco

32 South of I-10: Sonny Landreth

46 La Chanson de Mardi Gras: BeauSoleil avec Michael Doucet

58 La Vie Marron: Filé

70 Zydeco Sont Pas Salé: Clifton Chenier

98 Ay, Ai Ai: Clifton Chenier

122 It’s Christmas Time: Clifton Chenier & The Red Hot Louisiana Band

158 Grand Prix: Clifton Chenier & The Red Hot Louisiana Band

190 La Pointe aux Pins: Steve Riley & The Mamou Playboys

206 Run Down Cadillac: Lil’ Buck Sinegal

218 Dans le Nord canadien: Zachary Richard

230 Cold-Hearted You: Coteau

238 In Another Time: Lil’ Band O’ Gold

252 Mon Aimable Brune: Bonsoir, Catin

264 Riverside: Roddie Romero & The Hub City All-Stars

280 Acknowledgments

283 About the Author

284 Index

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8 | WAY DOWN IN LOUISIANA

FROM ITS FOUNDING IN 1718 AT AN IMPROBABLY PROVIDENT, SENSUALLY

curled passage in the Mississippi River, through pestilence, war, floods, changes in language and national allegiance, slavery, Jim Crow, Huey Long, civil rights, oil booms, economic crashes, and the near-death

blow of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has always been America’s most musical city. But it is just one deep pocket of blues and giving in a greater state of song and sharing. Take U.S. 10 west from New Orleans, and Louisiana be-comes an entirely different, magnetic South—with its own terrain, vernacular, cuisine, deep-seated spirituality, and dance-floor soul—as the interstate threads the fields and humidity toward Texas.

This is Acadiana —Cajun country in the local patois and as the travel brochures now cheerfully put it. It is a land branded with cruelty and diaspora: first claimed as property by Spanish conquistadores and French military peacocks without respect to the native Americans already in residence; settled in the mid-eighteenth century by French immigrants driven south by the British army out of northeast Canada, the original Acadie; then, one hundred years later, by slaves liberated out of cotton and sugar plantations into poverty and racism by the end of the Civil War.

This is also a place teeming with life —a nation unto itself in struggle, passionately tended traditions and determined celebration; a paradox of boggy wilderness and long horizons of cultivated land, tight family ties and state-house bloodsport, hard labor and reliable sanctuary, the last often distinguished by the distant flicker of a neon beer sign. And with all of that, there is music—everywhere, for every occasion. It is the kind that has travelled and thrived around the world, with pride and rugged virtuosity, but could not come from anywhere else. The rough, buoyant swing and waltz-time tenderness of a classic Cajun dance band, with fiddle, accordion, and anything handy for picking and strumming; the hardy, African American charge of zydeco, a turbulent rhythm and blues propelled by accordion and the trademark rattle of spoons on a metal chest board, or frottoir—these are the very, integrated air of south central

FOREWORD

Louisiana, the solace and stories of the generations that turned exile into home.In Way Down in Louisiana, native son Todd Mouton introduces you to

the storytellers: the stars, preservationists, and seekers who have mastered their heritage, then fought to keep it natural and true while taking it forward and way over the state lines. This is journalism, vigorously researched and intimately reported. Mouton is also a genuinely musical writer—a player himself, with an ear for the color and cadence in both a great fiddle lick and a musician’s spoken rhythm and recollection. These portraits and encounters, in clubs and kitchens, on porches and the road, are as dynamic as the records and performances Mouton describes.

This book is also a rare immersion in the personal lives of the working musicians in this singular America. Even if you’re from the neighborhood and know some of these artists personally, from gigs and crawfish boils, there is revelation here, like the striking, learning moment in the profile of Lafayette singer-accordionist-guitarist Roddie Romero and his Hispanic-Cajun combo, The Hub City All-Stars. According to Mouton, Romero first heard one of his seminal influences, slide-guitar wizard Sonny Landreth, during the Cajun Clapton’s soundcheck at the Montreal Jazz Festival. It was, Mouton notes, “a long way to travel to meet a guy from Breaux Bridge.” It was also an important road home for Romero, to decisive change.

The connections and lessons here run long, deep and strong. “I went out to find the essence of French fiddling,” Michael Doucet, founding violinist of the

Cleveland Chenier and Sonny Landreth, New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, 1982

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10 | WAY DOWN IN LOUISIANA FOREWORD | 11

Cajun institution BeauSoleil, says of his intense, early studies of Dennis McGee, Hector Duhon, and Rufus Thibodeaux—the last a surprising, overnight pop star when he became the Louisiana spark in Neil Young’s ’80s country band the International Harvesters. Peter Schwarz, bassist and fiddler in Steve Riley & The Mamou Playboys, turns out to be the son of Tracy Schwarz, a member of the august folk-revival group The New Lost City Ramblers and a close friend of Cajun fiddling giant Dewey Balfa. And it’s hard in any other music to beat the reach in this: zydeco giant Clifton Chenier’s debut at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1978, largely at the insistence of Cecilia, Louisiana, saxophonist Richard “Dickie” Landry, surely the only guy who has ever played with both minimalist composer Philip Glass and the rolling Cajun party Lil’ Band O’ Gold.

Chenier is the bigger-than-life heart of Way Down in Louisiana. Mouton’s epic profile is the first substantial biography of the St. Landry Parish-born singer-accordionist who established zydeco as commercial rhythm and blues—cutting singles for Specialty and Chess in the ’50s—then as super-charged rock’n’roll in the ’60s and ’70s, in the blues festivals and psychedelic ballrooms of Northern California and a legendary 1976 appearance on the TV show Austin City Limits. There is a logic, too, in the way Mouton leads up to, and out of, Chenier’s story here. Sonny Landreth, who gets an early feature treatment, was the first white member of Chenier’s band. And the way hippie California, in particular, embraced Chenier resonates later in the star-crossed tale of the ’70s band Coteau, which reinvented the Grateful Dead’s roots-and-jamming aesthetic with a Cajun twist—a tangent taken further by one member, Michael Doucet, in BeauSoleil.

“You can find Louisiana in everything,” Landreth once told me during an interview, after demonstrating how to play Jimi Hendrix’s “Crosstown Traffic” as blistering Cajun blues. Here is more proof—a dozen dispatches from way down in the state, by a writer who has done the miles and vividly caught the people he’s heard and met along the way. It is not the Louisiana in everything. But it’s close.

David FrickeRolling StoneJuly 14, 2015

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ON A WARM LAFAYETTE, LOUISIANA, DAY IN THE MID1990S I RAN INTO

a musician named Lafayette Saucier. We were outside the now-defunct Café 101 coffeehouse on Johnston Street, and I was at a table talking with musician and visual artist Richard “Dickie” Landry about Clifton

Chenier. The Hub City being the no-degrees-of-separation place it is, I jumped at the chance to add another saxophonist to my rolling cassette tape, and that’s when he said it.

“The first time I heard Clifton Chenier,” Saucier intoned, “it sounded like surf music from Jupiter!”

His bohemian baptismal revelation probably parallels the experience most folks who haven’t grown up in a south Louisiana Creole household have upon their first exposure to the noun and verb that is zydeco.

The music played, danced, and listened to way down in Louisiana and beyond is strange and powerful stuff, and it seems to pull just about everyone—and everything—in. Our sounds cause adjectives and feelings to collide, and it’s just that conjuring, that alchemical combining of elements, that makes Cajun, zydeco, and swamp pop music what they are: gorgeously indefinable and interrelated expressions.

Clifton Chenier occupies a singular nexus between all that’s come before and since, and his music stands at the crossroads of countless cultural currents. He’s the sun in this solar system born in largely rural south central Louisiana.

By the time the man now known as The King of Zydeco was in his mid-thirties, he’d shared the stage with a staggering array of stars whose work continues to shape popular music. Chenier received little formal education, but he learned the ways of the road courtesy of blues and soul luminaries from Jimmy Reed to Big Mama Thornton. By the early 1960s, the French-speaking Creole bandleader’s squeezebox riffs had traveled through famed musical constellations crafted by legendary producers and record labels. Bumps Blackwell and Specialty Records in Los Angeles, the Chess brothers in Chicago,

INTRODUCTION

Surf Music from Jupiter

Huey Meaux in Houston, and J.D. Miller in Crowley, Louisiana, all provided valuable schooling, and when Chenier came out the other side he birthed a galaxy of sound still resonating across the cultural cosmos.

Over the course of his thirty-three-year recording career, Chenier journeyed from the humblest possible beginnings to a pair of Grammy awards, including one for lifetime achievement, and his 1976 Bogalusa Boogie album has been honored with inclusion in the Grammy Hall of Fame collection. He was born on the muddy prairies 140 miles northwest of New Orleans at the dawn of the recording age in 1925, and his story began when south Louisiana was still split in half by the 140-mile-long by 25-mile-wide Atchafalaya Basin swamp, then navigable only by boat. But sound travels well in the humid Gulf Coast air, and like the rest of the country cousins of the Crescent City profiled in these pages, Chenier and his band invented music that stands starkly apart while still remaining deeply connected to the wellspring of funky sounds emanating from The Big Easy.

Chenier’s homeland is now called Acadiana, a group of twenty-two civil parishes (counties) that derives its name from the first New World home of the French Acadians who came to Louisiana from what is now the Canadian Maritimes after their mid-eighteenth-century exile at the hands of the British. Their descendants, known today as Cajuns, met and mixed with their new neighbors—the region’s indigenous peoples, Spanish colonists, slaves, and free people of color among them—to help create the cultural riches this book celebrates.

The mysterious process of creolization—in which cultural mixing unpredictably leads to the formation of new identities—often clashed with the social, economic, and political realities of history, and before long two musical styles divided essentially by skin color spawned further innovation and variation. And when mainstream mass culture further penetrated the isolated coastal marshes, swamps, and prairies of south Louisiana, the Cajun music of white culture and the zydeco music of African American culture served as a springboard for the development of a third art form, the sometimes black-and-white Cajun and Creole R&B and rock’n’roll sound British writer Bill Millar dubbed swamp pop.

Clifton Chenier died in 1987, and his sixty-two years form the backbone of this collection of stories about artists directly and distantly connected to his life and work. The tales that surround the central section of this volume are like planets, moons, meteors, and comets expanding the boundaries and definitions of roots music, and many of them were gathered during the 1990s when I worked primarily as a music journalist.

“Someone really needs to write a book about Clifton,” my dad said early in that decade, and I emphatically agreed, before realizing he envisioned me as

INTRODUCTION | 13


its author. With his help and encouragement I took up the challenge and began conducting extensive interviews with the surviving members of Chenier’s Red Hot Louisiana Band. About a decade later I realized that the King’s legacy was perhaps best understood through the diverse work of his many artistic acolytes.

So this book travels from the blistering electric slide guitar blues of Sonny Landreth to the bombastic accordion-and-horn-fueled soul of Buckwheat Zydeco, stopping off for visits with dozens of well-known and more obscure musicians gathered across more than two decades. Between the shorter chapters tied to specific datelines and Chenier’s chronological throughline, connections are revealed and fade away.

King Clifton is one of the world’s most important musicians and an historical figure on the order of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and Bob Marley. And, at some level, all the musicians in this book are working to stand on the stage he defined. But real life isn’t all tied up with neat little thematic

bows, so this book is not a definitive, encyclopedic, or exhaustive survey of anything. What you now hold is a collection of glimpses into a living, breathing, evolving culture.

We typically learn about our surroundings one bite, one tune, and one dance at a time. Our relationships connect to our individual journeys, and everyone involved in this project has worked to keep this collection as open-ended as possible. Cajun, zydeco, and swamp pop music were not preconceived, and the borders of these genres continue to shift. As a result, this sonic travelogue moves freely through themes, motifs, and an expansive collection of

characters, all very real and significant, all inextricably intertwined with the things they hold dear.

By gathering pivotal moments in these accomplished artists’ lives, this book aims to explore and illuminate the truest value of all of south Louisiana’s venerable and ever-changing art forms: They show us our interconnectedness.

Just as you could never understand a culture from just one source or perspective, it would be foolish to think anyone could ever compile the answers to every question about the gestalt of zydeco. But if you assemble enough eyewitnesses, you might be able to peer into the heart of the matter.

Cultures are experiential realities, and the musicians in these pages share influences like recipes, continually redefining their idioms, moment to moment. Their unique collages of expressions and meanings are best

King Clifton is one of the world’s most important musicians, and an

historical figure on the order of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and

Bob Marley. And, at some level, all the musicians in this book are

working to stand on the stage he defined.

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INTRODUCTION | 15

These 22 south Louisiana parishes (counties) are

known as Acadiana. Lafayette, in south central

Louisiana, is known as The Hub City and the

unofficial cultural capital of the region.


discovered bit by bit and savored bite by bite. One story and theme often rolls into another, and these artists’ lives and works provide our signposts. Their language, like so much else in their worlds, is rhythmic, and every effort has been made to both maintain the dignity of the subjects and capture the beauty of the dialects heard in the spoken words transcribed herein.

South Louisiana’s music, dance, cuisine, language, and other ways of living and being are sympathetically interwoven and constantly interacting on bandstands, in studios, in kitchens and living rooms, and on front and back porches. Each of our art forms is beautiful in its own right, and each naturally enhances its companions. Together, our folkways can make the simple exquisite and the exotic commonplace. Even the architecture of our low-slung dancehalls treats our humidity-soaked sounds like the inside of a snare drum finely tuned by the natural, wavy tremolo of the dancers’ vibrations.

Though this book overflows with first-hand tales of innovators known the world over, these artists’ gains have been primarily spiritual. Like Chenier, who was born a sharecropper and lived the majority of his six-plus decades on the

road, most of these players live their lives pretty close to the bone, thriving on the intrinsic rewards that come from reimagining your ancestors’ music for appreciative audiences. In the words of legendary south Louisiana guitarist and Red Hot Louisiana Band alum Paul “Lil’ Buck” Sinegal: “We weren’t doing it for the money, no. We were doing it ’cause it was fun.”

At its core, most of these artists play folk music as described by songwriter and longtime Steve Riley & The Mamou Playboys guitarist Sam Broussard: “It’s music of the people, by the people, for the people.”

As current Red Hot Louisiana Band leader C.J. Chenier says of his father in the documentary film Zydeco Gumbo: “It’s a pure music. Without all the electronics, without all the gimmicks, just pure down-home, get-down music. I never heard anybody play accordion nowhere close to him. I mean nobody. I mean, he was a incredible blues accordionist, zydeco, rock’n’roll, whatever you wanted to play, he could play it on a accordion. He was number one in my book, number one.”

Merci à tous!

Todd MoutonLafayette, Louisiana

INTRODUCTION | 17

Cajun jam band The Traiteurs—Pat Mould, Sonny Landreth, Al Berard, Zachary Richard, Danny

Kimball, Errol Verret, Tony Latiolais, Gary Newman—at Grant Street Dancehall, Lafayette, Louisiana

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Hot Tamale Baby

It’s alrightIt’s alright

We can party all night

Well, I got a girlsweet little country girl

sweet little brown-eyed girlsweet little country girl

She loves me in the mornin’loves me in the evenin’loves me late at night

She’ll make everything right

Hot tamale babyHot tamale babyHot tamale babyHot tamale baby

Loves me in the mornin’loves me in the evenin’loves me late at night

She’ll make everything right

Hot tamaleHot tamale baby

Music and lyrics by Clifton Chenier.© Flat Town Music. Used by permission.

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THIS TRAIN NEEDS AN ENGINE BLOCK.

It’s less than a week before the launch of two new records and a tour for Buckwheat Zydeco & The Ils Sont Partis Band, and the ensemble’s giant purple and silver tour bus is in trouble. After a million miles

(literally) on the road, the Buckwheat Express is burning oil. Lots of it. The band has just a two-week break to deal with the problem of the black muck, and things have just gotten worse. Buckwheat and his mechanic have discovered a crack in the engine block.

It’ll be two days before they can get a new one. That block will arrive just four days before the group starts a month of roadwork. Engine parts are spread out under the carport and into the parking area of the bandleader’s large ranch-style home. The scene is representative of the frustrations of a touring band, and it’s not surprising that the chief of operations is concerned. What is surprising is that he’s doing the engine work himself.

No stranger to working with his hands, accordionist and keyboardist

Stanley “Buckwheat” Dural Jr. likes to be in the thick of things. An experienced mechanic, Buckwheat is better known as the leader of the world’s most successful zydeco band. His version of south Louisiana’s propulsive Creole French music was the first signed to a major label (Island, in 1986), and since then his band has maintained a higher profile worldwide than any other act in the genre. The group has recorded with Eric Clapton, Dwight Yoakam, Willie Nelson, and David Hidalgo of Los Lobos. Mavis Staples is featured on the band’s new record. The ensemble has opened gigs for U2. Dural was featured on Rolling Stone Keith Richards’s solo debut. On top of that, his band can probably name the best places to get a quick meal in about eighty U.S. cities.

Still, it’s not all that glamorous looking up the greasy rear end of a Silver Eagle bus in the hot Carencro, Louisiana, sun.

HOT TAMALE BABYBuckwheat ZydecoSEPTEMBER 1994

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Stanley “Buckwheat” Dural Jr. leads Buckwheat Zydeco onstage


Now a man and a band with an international following, Buckwheat Zydeco occupies a unique position in the music world. Fourteen zydeco and soul-flavored records and incessant touring have won the group a reputation for some of the hottest music this side of James Brown. The ensemble’s bombastic live shows have kept fans on their feet since 1979, when Buckwheat first launched his zydeco career. Along the way, the group’s records have incorporated a wide spectrum of musical styles, and the band’s two most recent endeavors are no exception. Five Card Stud, Buck’s fourth album for Island, features Tex-Mex and country influences alongside the requisite soul and zydeco tunes. Choo Choo Boogaloo, his first children’s album, offers young people a wide-ranging introduction to Louisiana sounds. In fact, the children’s disc features a couple of performances that Buck’s adult fans will likely want to add to their collections.

As Five Card Stud climbed the AAA radio charts—and the group’s bus underwent an unplanned pit stop—Buckwheat discussed his convictions about his Creole heritage, his musical attitudes, and how the late King of Zydeco Clifton Chenier taught him some very important lessons.

Dural grew up on the north side of Lafayette, Louisiana, hunting squirrels and rabbits in the wooded fields now home to strip malls and big-box retailers. And though the first musical sounds he heard were Louisiana Creole French and la-la music, the stripped-down precursors to his current sound, Buckwheat’s early relationship with the accordion was anything but love at first sight. A child prodigy, Buckwheat took to the piano at age four or five, vehemently resisting his father’s efforts to get an accordion into his hands. “I was truly against this stuff,” Buckwheat said. “I was against zydeco period. I’m serious.”

“In the house, my daddy played the accordion. That was the first thing I

remember as a really, really tee-baby. He played by himself. He and his brother with the washboard—the original washboard with the wooden frame. We used to use the same washboard to wash clothes. I know. I had knuckles, cut up them knuckles, man, washing clothes. That’s where the music originated from, with accordion and washboard only. That’s how the music was played. And if you had drums you had a cardboard box and sticks or forks and you’d play the cardboard box as your drums.”

Stanley Dural Sr. was also a mechanic, and the only man allowed to touch Clifton Chenier’s Cadillacs. Unlike his bandleader friend, however, the elder Dural was not a professional musician. “My dad never played on stage for the public. But you could have one hundred people at his house, he’d play for ’em. You take the same people and bring ’em in a club, he’d never play. He felt like the music was meant for family entertainment, only in the home.” And Buckwheat felt that his dad provided enough accordion entertainment for the whole family. The young keyboardist wanted to learn what he called the music of his generation.

And so he did, performing on Farfisa organ with Sam & The Untouchables, a rhythm and blues band, at age nine. He also won a string of talent contests around the Acadiana area. “I was in school and I used to go perform for talent shows. I wouldn’t be a 4-H member, none of that, but they’d say ‘he’s got to come’ and sneak me in there.”

Eventually, his father insisted that Buck take up the accordion. “I was about thirteen years old and I wouldn’t play the accordion so he took my keyboard away from me for close to a year,” the junior Dural recalled. If his mother hadn’t intervened, he added, he might have strayed from music altogether.

Thanks to her efforts he followed his muse, forming the venerable soul revue Buckwheat & The Hitchhikers in 1971. That band’s influence on Buckwheat’s sound is still heard today.

With the Hitchhikers, Buck’s talent for arranging and his ability as a

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ABOVE: Stanley “Buckwheat” Dural, Jr. at home

near Carencro, Louisiana. OPPOSITE PAGE: Stanley

Dural Sr. and Jr.


bandleader took center stage. The group rehearsed constantly, learning all the hits of the day. They played gigs from Texas to Mississippi and as far north as Arkansas, opening shows for artists including Bobby Womack. Featuring five vocalists, five horns, and five rhythm players, the band was as much a musical phenomenon as an ego factory.

In 1975, Buck decided to call it quits. He’d had enough of everyone wanting the spotlight, and he went home, planning to take a year off from the music business. That was when he got the call from Austin, Texas, that forever changed the course of his musical career.

It was his good friend Paul “Lil’ Buck” Sinegal on the line. The guitarist had heard about the breakup of The Hitchhikers. Sinegal was on the road playing with Clifton Chenier & The Red Hot Louisiana Band, and his message was simple. “Clifton wants to talk to you,” he said. “He wants to know if you are gonna play some organ for him.”

Buckwheat continues the story. “I said, ‘Man, I don’t know about that, Lil’ Buck.’ ’Cause I didn’t want to have nothing to do with zydeco. So he got Clifton on the phone and I spoke to him. He wanted to know if I would play organ in his band. And I respected Clifton. You’re raised to respect your elders, and you have to, I mean, that’s how I was raised.

“So he tells me not to do anything until he gets back to Louisiana. I said, ‘OK.’ Man I thought about that, I thought about that. I said Lord have mercy—oh no no, I can’t do that. And I really didn’t want to play any music at that time.”

But there was no stopping The King of Zydeco.

“He came over to my house and he said, ‘Buck come give it a try. See if you like it. If you like it, you’re gonna stay with me. If you don’t like it, I’ll understand.’ I said, ‘I don’t know,’ my head down like that. I’m thinking about my dad too. Lord! I said, that’s his buddy. So we talked a while and I said, ‘I’m gonna give it a try.’”

Their first gig together was on a Wednesday or Thursday night at Antlers on Jefferson Street in the heart of downtown Lafayette. Clifton called and said, “‘We’ll come and pick up your organ.’ I said, ‘I don’t know about that.’ I was gonna get a trailer, get my own organ and if I don’t like this I’m gonna leave. See I was truly against this stuff man. I was against zydeco period.”

Clifton arrived about six o’clock to find a silent Buckwheat with his massive Hammond B-3 organ, bass pedal board, and Leslie cabinet already outside the house. It was to be a pivotal evening for the young organist, and

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Stanley “Buckwheat” Dural Jr. on Hammond B-3 organ onstage with Paul “Lil’ Buck” Sinegal at

the Vermilionville Performance Center, Lafayette, Louisiana


Every night he performed that’s how hot it was.”

As proof of his conversion, Buckwheat offers a final endorsement. “I stayed with him over two years. I repeat this all the time but it’s the honest truth. I wouldn’t have nothing to do with zydeco, regardless of the wishes of my dad or what. I didn’t want to have nothing to do with it. But working with Clifton, man that really boosted me up.”

From that point, Buckwheat began a sort of musical reconciliation with his father, eventually culminating in the formation of Buckwheat Zydeco & The Ils Sont Partis Band. In the meantime, though, Buck hit the road and recorded several outstanding sides with Chenier and his now-legendary seven-piece Red Hot Louisiana Band. It was 1979 when he decided to try zydeco on his own.

Before that moment, he’d never played the accordion, and he’d never been featured as a lead vocalist. He gave himself two and a half years to experiment with his new approach, including eight months woodshedding with the accordion. Though learning the squeezebox often “gave him the blues,” he successfully learned to play both sides of the thirty-seven-and-a-half-pound instrument. Things went better than he had planned, and Buckwheat emerged from the woodshed with the basics of his now-trademark style. By late 1980, he and his band were touring Europe.

As Buckwheat’s zydeco career unfolded, he and his father grew closer than ever before. According to Buck, “He became my best friend. He had never in all my life come to listen to me perform on stage until I got with Clifton Chenier.” Now things were different, and his dad would travel as far as Texas to see his son play.

It also was during this period that Buckwheat decided it was time to teach his growing audience that Cajun and zydeco music were not one and the same. He’d seen enough mis-billings, and he decided to take preventive measures. To this day, all his contracts bear a large red stamp stating that if the word Cajun is used in any way to promote his show, the show is off. “People just

Dural was afraid that the pivot would not go his way.“I’d never been in a zydeco,” Buck said. “I didn’t know what it was like,

what I experienced that first night with Clifton Chenier.” It was quite a scene. “Man you had older generation, younger generation, people all around the wall and everything. And we started playing, never had no rehearsal.”

The nervous keyboard player was floored by what Clifton had done with the music he’d heard as a child. “Clifton Chenier started playing this accordion—piano-note accordion—and got to goin’ in I-IV-V [chord progression], in the blues. I said I can’t believe this!”

Buckwheat chuckles when he tells the story. “Please believe me, from that day I advise any person, any one individual ‘what you don’t understand, don’t criticize.’ If I hadn’t gone that night I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now. I’d never know tomorrow more than what I know today. And I was a critic! I couldn’t believe it.”

He continues, describing the scene as more than just music and dancing. “The energy! The energy that came out. It was so much, it was something I’d never seen before. And Clifton Chenier got on that stage and played for four hours nonstop, and I thought we’d play for about an hour. I’m serious as a heart attack. That’s what happened. I couldn’t believe that.”

And there was more than one Chenier onstage that night. “And listen,” Buckwheat continued. “Cleveland, his brother, I’m looking at this guy, I’m serious, I’m looking at this man, he’s got this washboard on him, I’ve never

seen nothing like that in my life. Wrapped around him like suspenders, like we’re using today. I said ‘What in the hell?’ And he’s got these things in his fingers, you know, some bottlecap openers. He’s got these things all wound up in his fingers. And this cat starts playing. Man, I couldn’t believe this. Cleveland starts playing this stuff and the sound just came up in such a rhythm. I said man that don’t sound too far from what I’m doing with the beat. Shoot, I said, I can’t believe this. And it went on every night every night.


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Stanley “Buckwheat” Dural Jr. in his barn at home near

Carencro, Louisiana

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didn’t know,” Buckwheat says about concert promoters who were unaware of the distinctions between south Louisiana’s two French-language accordion-led sounds. Zydeco music incorporates lots of rhythm’n’blues influences and evolved primarily in black communities, while Cajun music pulled in more country influences and was developed primarily in the region’s white communities.

From 1979 to 1985 Buck and his band released seven well-received soul- and horn-section-inflected albums on the Blues Unlimited, Blacktop, and Rounder labels. The hard-charging group was becoming a favorite on the national circuit, and the band’s music caught the attention of New York-based writer Ted Fox, who was a big fan before he became Dural’s manager. “Buck was always my favorite and I’d try to see him whenever I could,” said Fox, who first saw the group play at the old Tramp’s on Fifteenth Street in Manhattan. Fox had written a little about zydeco music, and the friendship that was struck between the two men led to a number of historic firsts for zydeco music.

It was on a cross-country flight that Fox first mentioned Buckwheat to Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records. Fox was completing an interview for In The Groove, his book profiling several music business figures, when he found out that Blackwell was unfamiliar with zydeco. A few weeks later, Fox made him a “best of Buckwheat” cassette mixtape.

The rest, of course, is history. The tape cataloged some of Buck’s landmark tracks and became a big hit at Island’s Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas. Soon thereafter, Blackwell called Fox wanting to sign Buckwheat to a multi-record deal, with Fox acting as producer. A deal was struck, and in less than two years, the music and band named for a song about snap beans found their major-label debut listed on year-end Top Ten lists. Six albums later, the team behind the ground-breaking On A Night Like This album is still together, a string of successful releases and unique collaborations behind them.

“He’s really an under-discovered musical genius,” Fox said of Buckwheat, describing him as one of Louisiana’s greatest talents. The writer-turned-manager is not a musician or an engineer, but he’s been instrumental in keeping Buckwheat’s career on an upward trajectory. He’s been in the booth for the band’s recordings of Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix tunes, and he’s come up with suggestions for original material as well. “I just felt that my role as producer was to introduce new ideas and to encourage Buckwheat in what he was doing,” he said. “It’s sort of part cheerleader and part guidance counselor. I’m just sort of trying to get the best and introduce a couple of new ideas when we can . . . in that way it’s kind of a collaborative thing.”

With the release of Five Card Stud and Choo Choo Boogaloo, the second wave of Buckwheat Zydeco’s major label days has arrived. Where his first Island albums scored on jazzed up traditional numbers and rootsy cover tunes, the new releases

more fully demonstrate the bandleader’s versatility. The children’s album (narrated by Taj Mahal’s brother, Winston Williams) features some New Orleans music, while Five Card Stud showcases the soulful side of Buck’s trick bag.

The first credit on the back of Five Card Stud reads: “All Arrangements by Stanley Dural Jr.” In truth, that mention is long overdue: Buck has been arranging nearly all of his music since he began working as a bandleader. A novice guitarist who also played sax for nine years, Buckwheat typically creates and learns all of the band members’ parts before he rehearses a new tune with the entire ensemble. That said, however, Five Card Stud features some showy arrangements worthy of the new listing.

The collection begins in an uncharacteristic manner, not even hitting a zydeco rave-up until the fourth number, a tune about the good ol’ “I.R.S.” Only two of ten songs are straight zydeco numbers, and the balance of the album is a menagerie, to borrow from the title of Mango Records’ 1993 Buckwheat compilation.

A Mexican trumpet line opens Buck’s duet with Willie Nelson on the country singer’s “Man With The Blues.” The deeply funky strut of “Bayou Girl,” one of the album’s highlights, was derived from a folky unreleased Van Morrison jam that Fox guesses dates back to the 1960s. All the tunes are inventive in one way or another, and they reflect the wide-open approach that has carried Buckwheat from his days as a Hitchhiker to the present. His discs have featured guitar solos from white Brit Eric Clapton, Texas cowboy Willie Nelson, and California Latino David Hidalgo, and the results have expanded the scope and popularity of zydeco music.

“It was a hard time for Clifton Chenier,” Buckwheat said. “I wish he was here to get the glory for something that he invented, for something that he made happen. It took a long time for his music to get played on any white station.” And it’s the most basic lesson Chenier taught him that has kept Buckwheat on top. That first night in Lafayette, Buck realized, in his words, “Don’t ever criticize something you don’t understand, ’cause man, you’ll be the loser.”

On Five Card Stud, Buck performs a soulful version of “This Train” in duet with legendary vocalist Mavis Staples. He’d been searching for the right spiritual to cover for some time, and their funky, Hammond B-3 organ-fueled rendition is a firm testament to the power of music to expose and bridge cultural gaps. That song also serves as a thematic companion to Buck’s new children’s release, which


“The energy! The energy that came out. It was so much, it was

something I’d never seen before. And Clifton Chenier got on that stage

and played for four hours nonstop, and I thought we’d play for about

an hour. I’m serious as a heart attack. That’s what happened. I couldn’t

believe that.” STANLEY “BUCKWHEAT” DURAL JR.


gonna sit back and you’ll listen to the whole hour and you’re gonna say, ‘Well can’t he play something else?’ I wouldn’t like you to ask that question. I want you saying, ‘Well I didn’t know he could do that.’”

POSTSCRIPT

In the decades since this story first appeared, Buck and his band have continued to rack up accomplishments. His Hammond B-3 organ is now a constant onstage, and the bandleader’s son and rubboard player Sir Reginald Dural often handles organ duties as well.

The years have not been without their challenges, however, as Buck has battled cancer in the midst of making several more great records and playing lots more live shows.

For more, visit www.buckwheatzydeco.com.

follows the story of a fictional rail ride from Lafayette to Carencro to Mardi Gras.

“This Train” also is an apt metaphor for Buckwheat’s freshly overhauled purple and silver tour bus, which is once again bound for venues all over North America.

Gigging—and traveling from stage to stage—have been constants in Dural’s life and career, and playing live is still his greatest musical release. “I love the road. I love to tour. Playing good music with good musicians and seeing smiles on happy people’s faces, that’s where I’m at,” he said, already hoping for over a million miles from his bus’s new engine block.

These days, though, fans on the Louisiana-East Texas zydeco circuit don’t see much of the ensemble. “When we park that bus here, by the time the motor says off you see a disappearing act. Everybody’s bookin’, man. ‘Thank you Jesus let me get back to my house.’ So not just me, everybody needs some rest,” the bandleader explained. And paychecks in the region’s intimate clubs just don’t

match the good money of the road shows.During his many decades as a performer, traveling has led Buckwheat to not

only a leading-edge career but also great satisfaction. “I’m enjoying it [now] just as much as I did in ’79 or with Clifton Chenier. I enjoy it every night. Bad night, good, I don’t care, I enjoy it, just as long as somebody’s happy in there,” he said.

The Zydeco King and Buck’s father are both gone now, but the junior Dural carries on their music. He’ll be touring well into the future, he says, with a few guiding principles to keep the nights interesting.

First, he plays what he feels and never follows a set list. He improvises on accordion, Hammond B-3 organ, and even melodica when the mood strikes, and he’s seldom content playing the same type of music for a whole evening. “I’m not performing a set for only one set of people,” he said. On a long enough night he likes to mix “a little rock’n’roll, blues, jazz, funk, a little bit of everything and staying to the roots.” To help things along, his band has a repertoire of between two and three hundred songs.

As a final measure, Buckwheat aims to confound expectations. “You’re

Clifton Chenier & His Red Hot Louisiana Band, 1978

BUCKWHEAT ZYDECO:

Buckwheat’s Zydeco Party, 1987/2001

On A Night Like This, 1987

Where There’s Smoke There’s Fire, 1990

Five Card Stud, 1994

Choo Choo Boogaloo, 1994

Live links available at

waydowninlouisiana.com

SUGGESTED PLAYLIST

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Stanley “Buckwheat” Dural Jr. and his son, Sir Reginald Dural, Grant Street Dancehall,

Lafayette, Louisiana


South of I-10

I woke up in Mississippi in ’51migrated next door became a native stepson

grew up on the rhythm of Clifton and Clevelandand The Red Hot Louisiana Band

Rocking my baby through the ’70s rolledin ’81 I counted thirty years old

turning me loose and yet holding me closelife was a waltz that wouldn’t let go

Allons danserAllons danser

Come on, let’s danceCome on, let’s dance

South of I-10 we really had it made

Lafayette boomed ’til they capped offshorethen the oil families couldn’t take it no moreI two-stepped too fast with one foot slower

I lost my partner when we hit the floor



South of I-10 we really had it made

While the band was cooking at the bar went brokeand Clifton’s accordion was startin’ to smoke

With a gold-toothed grin and a laugh and a shouthe said, “I feel like a jet, y’all, we’re takin’ off now!”

So rock me high through the ups and the lows’til the music stops and it’s time to goAccept this dance for the life we know

and we’ll get back up when we hit the floor



South of I-10 we really got it madeMusic and lyrics by Sonny Landreth.

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SOUTH OF I-10 33

34 | WAY DOWN IN LOUISIANA SOUTH OF I-10 | 35

BASSIST DAVE RANSON WAS ONE OF THE FIRST TO BE BLOWN AWAY BY

Sonny Landreth’s six-string prowess. He was twelve or thirteen, and he went to a party in Lafayette where the budding virtuoso, a whole year older, was playing with his band.

“He might’ve been fourteen, maybe even fifteen. I know I wasn’t drivin’,” Ranson recalled, thinking it was a tune by The Ventures he first heard from the youthful combo led by Landreth. “We just went, ‘Wow! These guys are good.’”

More than three decades later, Ranson observes the ripple effect night after night from his onstage position as Landreth’s musical alter ego. “To watch people watching him, that’s hilarious,” he said. “You see people just standing there with their mouths open. It’s really great.”

After shows, witnesses have been known to tell the bassman, “I play a little slide guitar, but after hearing him, I’m going home and break all my slides.” “If I’ve heard that once,” Ranson related, “I’ve heard that a million times.”

Landreth’s 2000 album Levee Town is part of a long run of recordings that confirm that there’s much more than just technique inside the glass of the bandleader’s slide.

That collection opens with its title cut, a mythic tale of an Atchafalaya Basin flood, and the album pulls roots influences from Clifton Chenier to Duane Allman through tales of zydeco trail rides, romance, and the mysterious allure of the Deep South.

The disc offers brilliantly produced readings of a dozen original tunes, all colored by Landreth’s unique gifts as a sonic painter. His guitars, vocals, and lyrics speak in rhythmic slurs by turns floating and biting. From the acoustic-electric bottleneck blues of “Broken Hearted Road” to the ethereal pulse of “Love and Glory,” the collection is the culmination of decades of musical innovation, and it illustrates Landreth’s success at finding and developing his musical voice and weaving it into the fabric of his inspiration.

SOUTH OF I-10Sonny LandrethNOVEMBER 2000

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Sonny Landreth, Lake Martin, Louisiana


La Chanson de Mardi Gras

Les Mardi Gras, ça vient de Grand Mamou

tout autour du moyeuça passe une fois par anpour demander la charitéça demande une ’tite poule grassedu pain mais et des gratons

Capitaine, Capitaine, voyage ton flagon va s’aller chez l’autre voisinOn ira tous les soirshé, là-bas chez Marc SavoyC’est pour avoir un bon tempstout l’après-midi et toute la nuit

Les Mardi Gras, ça vient dans le grand brouillard

tout autour du moyeuça passe une fois par antout partout auras du bayoutout dans le voisinage pour demander

la charité

Capitaine, Capitaine, voyage ton flagallons se mettre dessus le cheminLes Mardi Gras vous remercient bienet vous, mon bon camaradeLes Mardi Gras vous remercient bienet vous, mon bon camarade

Capitaine, Capitaine, voyage ton flagon va aller chez l’autre voisinLes Mardi Gras vous remercient bienpour votre bonne volontéLes Mardi Gras vous remercient bienpour votre bonne volonté

Capitaine, Capitaine, voyage ton flagAllons se mettre dessus le cheminMardi Gras va dire, “Au revoir”Mardi Gras, passez un bon soirMardi Gras va dire, “Au revoir”Mardi Gras, passez un bon soir

“Passez-moi la bouteille, Adam!Hé, Capitaine, moi, je suis sec!”

The Mardi Gras Song

Music and lyrics traditional, additional music and lyrics by Michael Doucet.Used by permission. Transcription by Sharon Arms.

47

The Mardi Gras riders, they come from Big Mamou

all around the neighborhoodThey pass by once a yearto ask for charityThey ask for a little fat hensome cornbread and some cracklins

Captain, Captain, wave your flagLet’s go to the next neighbor’s houseWe’ll go every nightover there to Marc Savoy’sJust to have a good timeall afternoon and all night long

The Mardi Gras riders ride in the thick fog

all around the neighborhoodThey pass by once a yearall around the banks of the bayouall over the neighborhoodto ask for charity

Captain, Captain, wave your flagLet’s get back on the roadThe Mardi Gras thank you very muchAnd you, my good comradeThe Mardi Gras thank you very muchAnd you, my good comrade

Captain, Captain, wave your flagLet’s go to the next neighbor’s houseThe Mardi Gras thank you very muchFor your good willThe Mardi Gras thank you very muchFor your good will

Captain, Captain, wave your flagLet’s get back on the roadThe Mardi Gras will say “Goodbye”Mardi Gras, have a good nightMardi Gras will say “Goodbye”Mardi Gras, have a good night

“Pass me the bottle, Adam!Hey, Captain, I’m thirsty!”

Music and lyrics traditional, additional music and lyrics by Michael Doucet.Used by permission. Translation by Sharon Arms.


BEFORE 1986, THERE WAS NO SUCH THING AS A FULLTIME TOURING Cajun band. South Louisiana’s vibrant musical traditions were bright threads in the fabric of the region’s culture, but the guardians of the flame all held day jobs or played most of their gigs close to home.

Then BeauSoleil avec Michael Doucet recorded four albums in one year. Allons à Lafayette is a stripped–down collection featuring the late Creole fiddler Canray Fontenot and resonator guitarist Sonny Landreth. Christmas Bayou is the ensemble’s rootsy seasonal disc. Bayou Boogie, a third artifact from this dynamic period, is an adventurous album featuring co-producer Sonny Landreth on electric slide guitar and co-producer Steve Conn on piano and organ. Belizaire The Cajun, a poetic suite of traditional songs, is the soundtrack to the motion picture of the same name.

And when BeauSoleil took the plunge, the nation followed. Chef Paul Prudhomme burned a redfish, The Big Easy hit the big screen, and the Cajun craze was born. Cajun burgers, Cajun pizza, and Cajun potato chips seemed to come out of nowhere.

And the Cajun house band, an alternately traditional and progressive Lafayette, Louisiana, ensemble named after an Acadian freedom fighter, became the band to follow.

From Johnson Bayou to the Seine, BeauSoleil has carried their unique sound farther than any other Cajun group. The band has performed and recorded with many since–departed masters of Louisiana French music, and its members’ side projects include a rootsy children’s album and appearances on “Down At The Twist And Shout,” a Grammy–winning single by country artist Mary Chapin-Carpenter. In January 1997, Chapin-Carpenter and members of BeauSoleil performed the song on national TV during the Super Bowl pregame show.

Beginning with the band’s first American release, 1978’s The Spirit of Cajun

LA CHANSON DE MARDI GRASBeauSoleil avec Michael DoucetFEBRUARY 1997

Michael Doucet. musicians’ wagon, Mardi Gras, Mamou, Louisiana, 1979

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LA CHANSON DE MARDI GRAS | 49


La Vie Marron

Mo té tombé dans tracas, c’est pas ma faute soeurs et frèresMo té fait la promesse qui m’a chappé mes misères

Car, asteur mo couri po’ sauver ma vieComme un homme m’apé paré po’ mon jour avec l’diable

Guetté toi comment mo coup ce jeu et

Couri peut-être mouri dans les grands boisCouri à mouri dans les grands bois

Un rat-bois po’ diner, un chaoui po’ mon m’oreillerZ’ouaouaron c’est son bien mais m’veux voir m’Afrique et ma familleet tuer le roi q’apé fair ma coup, po’ a met son tête sur mon poteau

les carencros et les chiens po’ avoir de restespendant m’apé someil dans des bras des mes femmes et

Couri peut-être mouri dans les grands boisCouri à mouri dans les grands bois misères

Runaway Life

I fell into troubles, it wasn’t my fault sisters and brothersI made a promise to escape all my miseries

but now I’m runnin’ to save my lifeLike a man I’m prepared for my day with the devil

Watch me how I play this hand and

Run maybe die in the big woodsRun to die in the big woods

A possum for dinner, a raccoon for my pillowThe frogs sound good but I want to see my Africa and my family

and kill the king who sold me into slavery, put his head on my polethe buzzards and the dogs can have the restwhile I sleep in the arms of my wives and

Run maybe die in the big woodsRun to die in the big woods

Music, lyrics and translation by D’Jalma Garnier III.Used by permission.

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I T’S TEN O’CLOCK ON A SATURDAY NIGHT. DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR

rooster is?“WELCOME UNITED GAMEFOWL BREEDERS ASSN” exclaims the lighted

sign in front of the Holidome hotel in Lafayette, Louisiana. Inside the main banquet hall, the UGBA conducts a reverse raffle led by Cajun comedian Murray Conque. A stage full of instruments stands at the far end of the room, where the five members of Filé, pronounced “fee-lay,” wait to perform.

Someone wins five grand, and the band strikes up an instrumental Cajun two-step. The waltz “Jolie Blonde,” also known as “The Cajun national anthem,” follows closely on its heels, bringing out a few dancers. By the time the band counts off the swaying swamp pop classic “Mathilda,” things are starting to come together for the group of cockfighters and tonight’s featured entertainment.

This isn’t a typical gig for the band of bearded men who refer to themselves as “I-10 troubadours.” It’s just another interesting night in the life of the Cajun, Creole, and swamp pop ensemble named for the ground sassafras used to thicken and flavor Louisiana’s flagship dish, gumbo.

Filé formed in 1983, and, with three singers and songwriters out front, the group’s sets are as varied as the venues it plays.

“Everybody’s influences come out, and I think we’re rooted in traditional Cajun music,” accordionist and vocalist Ward Lormand explained. “But we like to step out of traditional boundaries.” Older dance forms like the baisse-bas of Canray Fontenot’s “Bonsoir Moreau” rub against the New Orleans-influenced shuffle of pianist and songwriter David Egan’s “I Just Can’t Do Right” on their fourth disc, La Vie Marron, whose title translates loosely as “The Runaway Life.”

The collection’s driving title cut tells the tale of a slave dreaming of escape, imagining his journey through the big woods, longing to make it home. It’s a song of hope, says fiddler and songwriter D’Jalma Garnier III, though listeners

LA VIE MARRONFiléSEPTEMBER 1996

David Egan, D’Jalma Garnier III, Pete Stevens, Kevin Shearin, and Ward Lormand,

New Orleans, Louisiana

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Zydeco Sont Pas Salé

“Eh, toi. Tout quelque chose est correct?”“C’est good. C’est bon, boy.”

“Tout quelque chose est magnifique, anh?”“Awww, yeah! Quitte-toi amuser avec ça.”

“Allons-les zydeco, nègre.”“Allons [unintelligible].”

Oh, bonne mamanquoi ça fait avec ton nègre?

Zydeco est pas saléZydeco est pas salé

Ça volait mon traîneauÇa volait mon traîneau

’Gardez Hip et Taïaut’Gardez Hip et Taïaut’Gardez Hip et Taïaut’Gardez Hip et Taïaut

Eh, maman, oh mamança volait mon traîneauça volait mon traîneau

Music and lyrics by Clifton Chenier.© Tradition Music Co. Used by permission.

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72 | WAY DOWN IN LOUISIANA ZYDECO SONT PAS SALÉ | 73

THAT BLEW MY MIND, MAN,” SAID DAVID HIDALGO, PAUSING FOR EMPHASIS.

“That blew my mind, bro.” The Los Lobos multi-instrumentalist was talking about his discovery

of the 1965 Clifton Chenier album Louisiana Blues And Zydeco, a stripped-down disc of Creole sounds that is simultaneously crammed with blues, soul, and R&B influences on tracks including “Ay-Tete-Fee,” “Banana Man,” “Hot Rod,” “Zydeco Sont Pas Salé,” “Lafayette Waltz,” and “Louisiana Blues.” Multi-Grammy-winner Hidalgo was in east Los Angeles when he first heard the record, and he described its significance over a late dinner of lobster, shrimp, and crabmeat fricassée with poached eggs after the first of three sold-out shows with his band and Roddie Romero & The Hub City All-Stars in Lafayette, Louisiana, in 2014.

Hidalgo’s first reaction to Chenier and his music was anything but unique. “Way back in 1965, when I first heard the ‘Black Snake Blues,’ I was just a little boy sitting there in my room,” sings Zachary Richard on the title track to 1988’s Zack’s Bon Ton. He was listening along the Gulf Coast in the other L-A, and his harmonica-led composition continues with “I snuck out the window, go down them country roads, looking for the King of that good rockin’ zydeco.” “He was my hero,” Richard said on the air at KBON FM in Eunice, Louisiana, in 2013. After one listen, the younger Cajun musician’s singing, songwriting, bandleading, harmonica and accordion playing would never be the same.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Chenier’s music has been performed and recorded by, and influenced, scores of artists. Diverse songwriters and performers from Paul Simon to Rory Gallagher to John Mellencamp to Phish have tipped their hats to his legacy. Over three-plus decades, Chenier’s influential recording sessions and marathon live sets in the United States and Europe had an alchemical effect, pulling cultural influences together to forge

ZYDECO SONT PAS SALEClifton Chenier

Clifton Chenier

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Ay, Ai Ai

Way down in LouisianaUnderneath the evergreenI was sitting there all aloneAlong came a Creole queen

Her mother dear had her by the handAsked her where she wanted to go

She said, “Ay yi yi, ay yi yi, Ay yi yi don’t know”

Ay yi yiAy yi yi

Ay yi yi don’t know

Ay yi yiAy yi yi

Ay yi yi don’t know


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THEORIES ABOUT THE ORIGIN AND MEANING OF THE TERM ZYDECO

abound. The word is a phonetic condensation of les haricots, the Louisiana French term for stringbeans, which are not salted in the lyric “Les haricots sont pas salés.” Folklorists John and Alan Lomax first

recorded that phrase as part of a primal, percussive south Louisiana juré ring shout in 1934. Over the years, it’s been suggested that the green legumes’ lack of seasoning from salt pork could reference everything from ancient harvest-season fertility rites to hard times to sexual innuendo.

Texas folklorist Mack McCormick standardized the now-common spelling and usage of the term in 1959 in his transcription of lyrics for A Treasury of Field Recordings, a set of two twelve-inch 33 1/3 rpm vinyl albums issued on the 77 Records label. However, the Texas State Historical Association points out that “McCormick originally intended for the term to apply only to the fusion of Texas blues and Creole la-la that he heard in [Houston’s] Frenchtown.”

Six years later, at Houston’s Gold Star Studios, Clifton Chenier tracked his now-definitive recording of “Zydeco Sont Pas Salé,” a moment that crystallized the genre he and so many other artists were forging. The thirty-eight-year-old accordionist and bandleader did this with the help of an eccentric German from northern California named Chris Strachwitz.

Some might argue that Chenier, especially up until this point, was not much more than a Creole-born bluesman with a knack for interpreting popular and traditional tunes on a piano accordion while singing in French and English. Numerous studio and live recordings before and after Chenier’s 1960s sessions for Strachwitz’s folky Arhoolie label seem to buttress this analysis.

But the point at which a hybrid becomes a new variety—and in turn contributes to the development of future hybrids and varieties—can be difficult to pinpoint when you’re talking about cultural anthropology. And it seems

AY, AI AIClifton Chenier

Cleveland Chenier and Clifton Chenier

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It’s Christmas Time

Well, it’s Christmas timeI wonder what will Santa bring for me?

Well, it’s Christmas timeWonder what will Santa bring for me?

All I’m hoping and prayingThat he bring my little girl back home to me

Yea, baby, I wanna be the happiest man in this worldIt’s Christmas time, baby

I wanna be the happiest man in this worldAnd it ain’t but one thing gonna make me happy

If my baby right beside my side

The snow is fallin’And my heart is real cold, cold, cold

Oh, the snow is snowing, babyAnd my heart is real cold, cold, cold

Ain’t but one thing gon’ make me happyIf I got my baby back home with me

Christmas time, Christmas time is hereWell, I wanna be the happiest man in the world

When my baby be home with me


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SOUTH LOUISIANA LOVES ITS ROYALTY. FROM THE KING OF SEAFOOD TO

the King of Mobile Homes and beyond, Cajun and Creole country is a place where harvest festivals crown queens all year long and debutantes are presented in lavish gowns at Mardi Gras balls.

In this predominately Catholic region there are Christmas stories of the Three Kings and the King of Kings, and then there’s the tale of the King of Zydeco.

The story goes that Clifton Chenier won an accordion contest in Europe, was crowned and never really challenged again. The truth is a little harder to ferret out, and the fable seems to make the point. He was a gifted musician and a natural trailblazer, which meant he had to be a good promoter and a relatively shrewd businessman. How else could a country boy with little formal education send his French accordion music around the world?

And, as the 1960s wound to a close, things were truly beginning to come together for the man who began his career billed as The King of The South. On April Fools’ Day 1969, Chenier recorded his first album for strictly European release at Andrus Productions Studio in Houston, with his full band featured on the dozen tracks. Covers of fellow Louisiana keyboardist Fats Domino’s “Rose Mary” and “Gone A La Maison” (“Goin’ Home” in Creole French), both from the pianist and vocalist’s 1955 debut album, are featured along with a number of blues standards. The Home Cooking label’s 11-track release is called King of Zydeco; Prophesy’s 10-track version of the album is titled Clifton’s Cajun Blues; and Arhoolie’s 1987 12-track version is dubbed Sings The Blues.

Many of the tunes were staples of Chenier’s live sets, but the album lacks the excitement generated by a crowd of enthusiastic dancers and music lovers. The recording quality also is a step backward. There’s no sax and only a couple of guitar solos on the album, and many of the songs would later benefit from more thoughtful arrangements and more immediate-sounding production. But

IT’S CHRISTMAS TIMEClifton Chenier & The Red Hot Louisiana Band

Clifton Chenier, Blackham Coliseum, Lafayette, Louisiana, 1975

IT’S CHRISTMAS TIME | 125

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C’etait un grand prixmo’ te gain pour payer

uh-hunh, pour te l’aimerpour te l’aimer


uh-hunh, pour te l’aimermm-hmm, yeah, moi j’te dis

Mo’, te gain maisonet bague en l’or

mo’ faittout que’que chose


eh, pour te l’aimermm-hmm … oh …. alright, baby

Oh, what a priceyou made me payfor loving you, babyyou’re the only one

Oh, what a priceyes you, you made me payanh-heh, for loving youwell, let me tell ya

I bought you a carand a homeyou left me all aloneand what a price I had to payfor loving youyou’re the only one

Let me tell ya ….Oh, what a price, you made me payfor loving youLet me tell ya one more time

Oh, what a priceyou made me payfor loving you

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LIKE ARTHUR AND HIS KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE, THE KING OF

Zydeco and his seven-piece Red Hot Louisiana Band were a legendary match. And in the spring of 1977, the group was truly at the top of its game.

In the course of less than forty-eight hours in the Crescent City, the band played an evening concert and dance aboard a paddlewheel steamer on the mighty Mississippi River, performed at the closing day of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, and recorded the full lineup’s greatest studio album. The Riverboat President was a popular and prestigious venue for night shows during Jazz Fest for many years, and on Sunday, April 24, the band played Stage 1 at the New Orleans Fairgrounds just before headliner Fats Domino.

Two songs from the Red Hots’ 1977 Jazz Fest set were captured on video and are featured on Arhoolie’s The King of Zydeco DVD. Tenor man John Hart brings the bandleader on over a peppy B-3-led vamp: “We wanna bring on a young man . . . started out in 1955, worked his way from Louisiana to the Eiffel Tower. And I’m sure if you read the Jet magazine, you have read about this young man. The incomparable, the dynamic, a young man whom we think is way beyond category, the one and only Mr. Accordion, man who can do more with a ’ccordion than a monkey can a damn coconut and that ain’t no lie. Clifton Chenier! Let’s have it for Clifton Chenier! Your own Louisiana pride and joy! Clifton Chenier! Clifton Chenier! Clifton Chenier! . . . Have yourself a ball y’all! Alright! Whoo!”

The bandleader enters with a wave in a pale pink suit, striped tie, sunglasses, and leather headband, and the band, augmented by second guitarist “T-Jim” Benoit, launches into a full-throated romp through “I’m A Hog For You,” followed by an equally superlative rendition of “Caldonia.” The crowd extends to the horizon.

Those two tunes make a great moving image appetizer for the holy grail

GRAND PRIXClifton Chenier & The Red Hot Louisiana Band

Clifton Chenier before a July 30, 1984, gig at FitzGerald’s in Berwyn, Illinois

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La Pointe aux Pins

La plus vieille de la bande, elle est la plus vaillantemais la plus mignonne, elle a les yeux canaillesMais dis pas à ta mam que j’ai goutté ton bec

Mais dis pas à ton pap que j’avais pas bonne tête

Petit galop, mais pour la Pointe aux PinsPetit galop, mais pour la Pointe aux PinsChere cousine, mais donnez-moi cette-la

Mais si c’est pas cette-la, mais j’en veux pas du tout

Pine Point

The oldest of the bunch is the nicestbut the cutest one has rascal eyes

Don’t tell your mom I tasted your kissDon’t tell your dad I’m out of my head

Canter to Pine PointCanter to Pine Point

Dear cousin, give me this oneIf not this one, then none at all

Music and lyrics traditional, arranged by The Mamou Playboys.Used by permission. Transcription and translation by David Greely and Barry Jean Ancelet.

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BANNED FROM COMPETITION.

He sang French songs at three and played his first accordion riff at seven. Everything was peachy for the child prodigy until he won back-to-back accordion contests.

At twenty-three, Steve Riley was outlawed—declared no longer eligible for “The Original Cajun Restaurant” Mulate’s annual competition in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana.

Forced to take matters into his own hands, the fiery young accordionist decided to make his own rules.

And it looks like they’re sticking. He’s now the leader of a quintet that marches across musical genres and

Cajun styles with unusual savvy, and together, they’re taking their music far beyond the boundaries of the small prairie town that’s their namesake.

La Toussaint, the band’s fifth album, melds Cajun, zydeco, and even swamp pop with waltzes from 1934 and rootsy originals. The group’s intricate music tugs at the very heritage it upholds, and the ensemble continues to build its reputation for innovation in traditional music.

In 1993 and 1994, the group brought three-part harmonies, Louis Jordan tunes, fiddlesticks, and electric slide guitarist Sonny Landreth to the stage for the finale of Festivals Acadiens, the most prestigious gig in Cajun music. And with the recent release of La Toussaint, the group plans to eliminate English-language songs almost completely from their set at the festival, a homecoming show scheduled near the end of the Playboys’ most successful touring season to date.

The band marries rock-solid rhythms to delicate acoustic material, and their audience is growing, thanks in part to recent appearances on Rounder Records’s 25th Anniversary Red Hot Louisiana Music Tour and a late summer taping for the nationally-distributed public radio program World I.

LA POINTE AUX PINSSteve Riley & The Mamou PlayboysSEPTEMBER 1995

Steve Riley, Kevin Dugas, Peter Schwarz, David Greely, and Jimmy Domengeaux,


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Run Down Cadillac

I’m tired and hungryain’t got nothing to eatI’m tired and hungry

ain’t got nothing to eatAll I got is hangin’ on my back

and a run down Cadillac

I may be downbut I’m a long way from out

I may be downbut I’m a long, long way from outI’ve got something in my fingers

aching to make you shout

I’m gonna leave heregoin’ out and play the blues

I’m gonna leave heregoin’ out and play the blues

When I get backI’ll have a brand-new Cadillac

If I see yousee you here when I get back

If I see yousee you here when I get back

I promise you a ridein my brand-new Cadillac

Music and lyrics by Paul “Lil’ Buck” Sinegal and Allen Toussaint.Used by permission.

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AT 5 A.M., HE “CATCHES PRAYERS” ON LOCAL TV. AFTER HE PRAYS THE rosary in French, Paul Sinegal heads across the street to mass at Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Church. Once services wrap, he cleans the adjacent schoolyard and cemetery. Before noon, he’s tending his

vegetable garden.It’s another day in the life of a six-string legend.

“Lil’ Buck is the greatest nationally unknown guitar player alive,” longtime bandmate and fellow guitarist C.C. Adcock exclaimed. “And when I say greatest, I mean he’s not a hometown hero. He’s on the level of B.B. King, of Albert Collins, of Albert King. He can play in that arena, with those people, and stylistically is as different as each one of those guitarists.”

But since the early 1960s, Sinegal has flown well under the radar of a mass audience, largely due to the fact that—until recently—he’d recorded just two singles under his own name. With the release of The Buck Starts Here, his excellent solo debut on Allen Toussaint’s NYNO label, greater fame may be on the way for the fifty-six-year-old zydeblues master.

Friday night, Sinegal will be honored alongside other contemporary Louisiana artists including writer Ernest Gaines and guitarist Sonny Landreth when he receives the Acadiana Arts Council’s Folk Heritage Award.

Lil’ Buck was once a household name in Acadiana, thanks to his weekly show on Lafayette’s KLFY TV10, which aired at noon on Saturdays in the ’60s.

“I guess they wanted something new,” Sinegal said. “And [local soul singer] Lil’ Bob had been on TV a couple of times.” The program featured the fifteen-piece soul and R&B aggregation known as Lil’ Buck & The Topcats, and the show’s first emcee was Cajun broadcaster and singer Jim Olivier.

The group featured Stanley “Buckwheat” Dural Jr. on organ, and Sinegal’s

RUN DOWN CADILLACPaul “Lil’ Buck” SinegalJUNE 2000

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Paul “Lil’ Buck” Sinegal, St. Charles Street, Lafayette, Louisiana

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Dans le Nord canadien

Ça me donne des frissonschaque fois que j’entends le son

Ça me coupe au fondcomme les scies qui coupent

les grands sapinsDans le Nord canadien

Je le vois comme si c’est maintenantquand ils venaient brûler ma maison

Chantant leurs vilaines chansonstenant leurs torches dans leurs vilaines

mainsDans le Nord canadien

J’ai cherché travers de mon hiveraveuglé par cette grande lumière

Dans le silence et la glaceJ’ai cherché sans trouver une trace

Dans le Nord canadien

L’étoile de l’ours déchire la nuitL’aurore boréale brûle les cieux

La solitude et l’oublidansant seul autour des brandons de

mon feuDans le Nord canadien

Music and lyrics by Zachary Richard.© Les Editions du Marais Bouleur.

Used by permission.

In the Great Canadian North

It gives me the chillseach time I hear the sound

It cuts me to the quicklike the saws that cut the

great pinesIn the great Canadian north

I see it as if it were nowwhen they came to burn my house

singing their ugly songsholding their torches in their ugly

handsIn the great Canadian north

I searched through my winterblinded by the great lightIn the silence and the ice

I searched without finding a traceIn the great Canadian north

The bear star tears the nightThe Aurora Borealis burns the sky

Solitude and forgettingDancing alone around the embers of

my fireIn the great Canadian north

Music and lyrics by Zachary Richard.© Les Editions du Marais Bouleur.

Used by permission.English translation by Zachary Richard.

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THE CAJUNS HAVE BEEN PERSECUTED AND THEY HAVE PERSEVERED. A French-speaking culture surrounded by Américains, they have suffered and they have celebrated.

And more often than not, their very nature has been hard to define. Just like one of their most famous sons.

Zachary Richard entered the looking glass as a young man with a guitar writing songs in English. Along the way, he became a multi-instrumentalist, a dancehall icon, a cultural and environmental activist, an acclaimed poet, and the recipient of six Félix awards, the Grammys of French Canada. Two and a half decades later, he’s still got the guitar, and he composes in English and French.

“I wouldn’t want to stop singing in English and I wouldn’t want to stop singing in French,” Richard explained from a chair in the living room of his home outside the small town of Scott, Louisiana. “I’m frustrated that it’s been a while since I’ve been able to have a relationship with an American audience, because I really like to sing in English and I like to write in English and I think that’s a part of my culture that’s valid and interesting to me. But I haven’t been able to make the connection between the two parallel aspects of the career.

“I mean, in Quebec, from 1981 to 1996, fifteen years, they thought I was on a sabbatical. They didn’t know I was doing 150 dates a year in the United States for ten years. And the audience that we’ve been able to maintain in the United States may not even know that I have sold many more records in French than I ever have in English. It’s out of phase for me personally.”

And a simple translation won’t do.“I tried that,” he said. The English version (“Give Me Back My Wings”) of

his French song “Les ailes des hirondelles,” he emphasized, “is not as good a song in English as it was in French.”

Richard’s career has been defined as much by his unique choices as his ongoing

DANS LE NORD CANADIENZachary RichardJULY 1999

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Zachary Richard, Acadian Memorial, St. Martinville, Louisiana

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Cold-Hearted You

I woke up this morning reflecting on my dreamtrying to find another way to get back to you

something inside me was worried and screamed“I gotta get away, I wanna shake these blues”

Somebody told me there was fire in the junglesmoke on the horizon, cold-hearted you

I looked all around for the light but I was blindedMaybe there’s a simpler reason why I’m blue

I live in the land where the honeysuckle’s strongy’all correct me if I’m wrong, this is God’s country

Livin’ ain’t hard but the livin’s not easyEverybody knows but nobody sees

Summertime brings a strange kind of madnessordinary sadness, cold-hearted you

I made my next move, thought I’d changed for the betterbut here I sit waitin’ on you, stuck like glue

I tried my hand at a little different lifestylebut it wasn’t my style, I ask you how?

Carryin’ the flag for the boys in the valleyhow you ever gonna get yourself to right now?

Somebody told me there was fire in the junglesmoke on the horizon, cold-hearted you

I looked all around for the light but I was blindedWon’t somebody tell me please, is love true?

Is love true?Cold-hearted you

Music and lyrics by Bruce MacDonald.Used by permission.

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TEXAS’S LEGENDARY FLATLANDERS, A BAND OF COUNTRY AND FOLK

influenced singer-songwriters that includes Butch Hancock, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Joe Ely, have often been billed as “more a legend than a band.”

The group of talented players got together as a bunch of unknowns in Lubbock, stuck together just long enough to record one obscure eight-track tape, and then embarked on solo careers.

Acadiana’s version of that group is Coteau, a progressive Cajun rock band that came together for two pivotal years in the history of south Louisiana music. The group combined fiddles and accordion with searing twin lead guitars and the ensemble has been described as the “Cajun Grateful Dead” or the “Cajun Allman Brothers.” Still characterized by its members as “more a feeling than a band,” Coteau was a galvanizing force during the mid-1970s Cajun renaissance.

In the decades since the group’s dissolution, Coteau’s sound has been most closely reflected in the more electric music of BeauSoleil, a band led by fiddler and Coteau alum Michael Doucet. When the band’s remaining members reunited twenty years after the group’s initial breakup to record Coteau’s first full-length recording, Highly Seasoned Cajun Music, folks everywhere finally had a chance to hear a wide cross-section of the band’s progressive repertoire performed from a rear-view perspective.

The group’s Cajun French name translates as “ridge” or “higher ground,” but it was the term’s widespread promotion that first attracted band members. Paul Thibeaux, the first black disc jockey in Lafayette, Louisiana, was widely influential, and his on-air promotion of dances in the small south Louisiana settlement of “Coteau! Coteau! Coteau!” was all the musicians needed to hook them on the moniker.

COLD-HEARTED YOUCoteauOCTOBER 1997

Kenneth Blevins, Gary Newman, Bruce MacDonald, Kenneth Richard, Tommy Comeaux, Michael

Doucet, and Bessyl Duhon

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In Another Time

In another time, in another placewe coulda been so together

In another time, in another placewe coulda been so together

You’ve got his name, you’ve got his ringwrapped ’round your finger

There was that night, face to faceYou said you loved me, I still remember

that face, now I’m ashamed to sayI believed in sadly ever after

You’ve got his name, you’ve got his ringwrapped ’round your finger

If you had to do it over again, baby, would you do me the same?Could you pick up all these broken pieces?

Would this heart ever mend?

If she was mine, one more timethere’d be no reason or need to

cry night and day, each step of the wayI still see her

She’s got his name, she’s got his ringwrapped ’round her finger

Yeah, she’s got his ring, she’s got my heartI can’t forget her

Music and lyrics by C.C. Adcock and Willy DeVille.Used by permission.

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W ARREN STORM LAUGHS A DEEP LAUGH. THE SIXTYTHREEYEAROLD

musician sits on an apartment couch in downtown Lafayette, Louisiana, looking at photos and remembering his first tour. He’s worked professionally for more than five decades, cracking the

national charts back in 1958 with the anthemic “Prisoner’s Song.”His first tour was last week.

Barnstorming with the all-star amalgamation known as Lil’ Band O’ Gold, Storm and company took no prisoners on their maiden voyage to festival stages in Colorado and California. This month, the nine-piece “band of bandleaders” heads to Lincoln Center and other points along the East Coast.

The multi-generational ensemble has been called a “South Louisiana Buena Vista Social Club,” an unusually apt metaphor. The band’s rollicking sets combine Gulf Coast genres like so many mismatched socks, and their soulful debut release plays like a collection of the best 45 rpm records you never heard.

“It’s great American music,” Storm intoned, offering the first of a series of old-school press conference soundbites. LBOG combines three saxes, an accordion, a piano, a pedal-steel guitar, and a stack of songwriters to create their wall of sound. And while it might not be surprising that the group unites “first-call” players from some of Acadiana’s top touring bands, it’s definitely worth noting that the members’ primary bands play Cajun, Creole, rock, country, blues, and swamp pop.

“I think the Cajun and Creole cultures in south Louisiana were the perfect cultures for rock’n’roll to set in and grow,” opined guitarist/vocalist/producer C.C. Adcock, who—along with accordionist/vocalist Steve Riley of The Mamou Playboys—brought together the LBOG dream team. “When we got

IN ANOTHER TIMELil’ Band O’ GoldJULY 2000

David Greely, Pat Breaux, Richard “Dickie” Landry, Dave Ranson, C.C. Adcock, David Egan,

Richard Comeaux, Warren Storm, and Steve Riley in front of the former location of KVOL FM in

Lafayette, Louisiana

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IN ANOTHER TIME | 241


Mon Aimable BruneJe m’en irai voir mon aimable brune

Mais je sais pas si je l’auraiOui, je l’aurai quoi-ce qu’elle me coûteQuoi que ses parents lui en dégoûtent

Vive le vin, vive l’amourVivent les filles à la nuit comme le jour

Viens avec moi, mon aimable bruneViens avec moi dans mon jardinNous commencerons une saladeAux artichauds, à la poivrade

Vive le vin, vive l’amourVivent les filles à la nuit comme le jour

Oh, si l’amour prendrait racineJ’en planterais dans mon jardin

J’en planterais aussi long et aussi largeJe ferais part à tous mes camarades

My Lovely Brunette

I will go to see my lovely brunetteBut I don’t know if I will have herYes, I’ll have her whatever the cost

Though her family may try to dissuade her

Long live wine, long live loveLong live girls in the night as well as the day

Come with me, my lovely brunetteCome with me in my garden

We’ll start a saladOf artichokes, and pepper dressing

Oh if love were to take rootI would plant some in my gardenI would plant some far and wide

I would share it with all of my friends

Music and lyrics traditional, arranged by Kristi Guillory and Dirk Powell.© Bassette Music, BMI / Crying Bayou Music, BMI. Used by permission.

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IT WASN’T PLANNED AS A CELEBRATION OF WOMEN IN CAJUN MUSIC. IT WAS

originally just another Friday night double-header dance at The Feed & Seed, an old tin warehouse just across the train tracks in downtown Lafayette, Louisiana. But history had other plans.On Friday, December 5, 2014, when the nominees for the fifty-seventh

annual Grammy awards were announced, three Cajun bands were among the five artists up for Best Regional Roots Music Album. The Magnolia Sisters, a repeat nominee, are an all-female quartet, and Bonsoir, Catin, The Feed & Seed headliner, brings together five women and a man. The night’s opening band, Sweet Cecilia, is a female trio that shares a member, guitarist and vocalist Maegan Berard, with the Catins. And fiddler and vocalist Anya Burgess was christened a double nominee that day as a member of two nominated groups, the Mags and the Catins.

Bonsoir, Catin accordionist and vocalist Kristi Guillory’s husband Mike was even at the gig sporting a T-shirt featuring La reine de musique Cadjine (The Queen of Cajun Music), accordionist Sheryl Cormier. The high-ceilinged Feed & Seed has a large wooden dancefloor surrounding the bandstand, and that’s a good thing, because the Catins’ many friends, family members, and fans were there to dance the night away in commemoration of this watershed moment.

Bonsoir, Catin was nominated for the group’s third album, Light The Stars, the product of a creative burst born in many ways from Guillory’s role as a mother. The accordionist wrote a batch of fresh-sounding Louisiana French and English songs around the time of the birth of her second daughter Hilda, and her concepts were given even greater dimensionality by her talented bandmates and co-producer Joel Savoy of Valcour Records.

“You’re so in the moment with a baby,” Guillory said over lunch with Burgess at Saint Street Inn in Lafayette. “You have to be so in the moment, and

MON AIMABLE BRUNEBonsoir, CatinDECEMBER 2014

Anya Burgess, Christine Balfa, Kristi Guillory, Maegan Berard, Yvette Landry, and Danny Devillier

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Riverside

Where I’m from the river runs wideMud is black, and the cane grows high

Sweet magnolia, cypress kneesFront porch lovin’, just you and me

Where I’m from should be no surpriseGulf wind blows ’cross the big blue skies

Sweet potatoes and black-eyed peasDown-home lovin’, baby, just you and me

Take my hand, let’s walk for a whileGive you a kiss, just to see you smile

Come on baby, let’s dream for a whileLet’s fall in love by the riverside

This river runs deep, down insideWhere my love flows there’s no compromise

Bow your head and be baptizedBy the waters of love runnin’ deep and wide

Take my hand, let’s walk for a whileGive you a kiss, just to see you smile

Come on baby, let’s dream for a whileLet’s fall in love by the riverside

Music and lyrics by Roddie Romero and Eric Adcock.Used by permission.

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THERE’S YOUR STORY,” RODDIE ROMERO SAID, POINTING HIS FINGER AND

laughing as he walked away. “But don’t write it just yet.”It was a big night. He and his Hub City All-Stars had just jammed

with their idols Los Lobos, the two bands combining into one pan-roots ensemble, a dozen musicians simultaneously trading licks on acoustic and electric basses, saxophones, drums, percussion, guitars, keyboards, and accordions. Now they were sharing dinner and drinks, and the downtown Lafayette after-party was filled with up-close reflections on the artists’ shared Spanish heritage.

Onstage a couple of hours earlier, during Lobos’ loping “The Giving Tree,” vocalist David Hidalgo gestured to Romero to take the next verse. When he stepped up to the mic, the south Louisiana musician began singing the traditional Cajun tune “Bayou Teche Waltz” in French over the songs’ similar chord changes. Hidalgo played diatonic accordion on his band’s original recording, and now his composition was circumnavigating its inspiration. “It just came to me on the spot,” Romero said after the fact. “They’re the same song.”

He wasn’t referencing the pejorative crack about how there are only two Cajun songs, the slow one and the fast one. He was speaking to the origins of creativity and the mysteries of shared histories.

Cajun, zydeco, and swamp pop music were born of myriad musical and cultural cross-pollinations, and great questions remain about the intertwined histories of border cultures everywhere, especially in what’s now the southern United States.

The All-Stars’ guitarist is Chad Viator (his last name a shortened form of Villatoro, one of many Spanish surnames credited among the founders of nearby New Iberia, Louisiana), and the chef cooking an exquisite roux-based turkey neck stew in a large black cast-iron cauldron that night was Toby Rodriguez, who grew up in Poché Bridge, a small St. Martin Parish community named for its Bayou Teche crossing.

RIVERSIDERoddie Romero & The Hub City All-StarsMAY 2014

Chris French, Eric Adcock, Derek Huston, Roddie Romero, Gary Usie, and Chad Viator,


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280 | WAY DOWN IN LOUISIANA ACKNOWLEDGMENTS | 281

TO BORROW FROM THE ALBUM FILING SCENE IN THE FILM HIGH FIDELITY:

“Chronological?”“No.”“Not alphabetical?”

“Nope.”“What?”“Autobiographical.”I don’t think “I can tell you how I got from Deep Purple to Howlin’ Wolf

in just twenty-five moves,” but that seems a good framework for thanking my many far-flung personal and professional mentors and the scores of other folks who’ve contributed directly and indirectly to this twenty-two-year labor of love in so many significant ways.

Writer Jason Berry, through his many gifts and generous friendship, opened my eyes and ears to so many possibilities back when I was still in my mid-teens. Two equally special friends, publisher Jan Ramsey and the late editor Richard Baudouin, have also been great helps along the way. And bosses and colleagues Keith Spera and Scott Jordan have taught me directly and by example.

Artist and designer Megan Barra—who co-created this book—has been a truly inspirational friend and collaborator for so long now, and photographers Daniel Lincoln and Terri Fensel have also gifted me with their insight and friendship so many times over the years.

All the artists featured in this book are immeasurably special to me, and I would not be the person I am without the longtime friendship and support of Stanley “Buckwheat” Dural Jr., Sonny Landreth, Michael Doucet, Zachary Richard, C.C. Adcock, and David Egan.

And there are so many more people who’ve changed the course of my life and work, illuminating and expanding on the subjects in this book in so many ways, and supporting my growth and journey with their wisdom and knowledge.

The Index also counts many of the names of my heroes and friends, and there are also those folks behind the scenes to whom I owe so much: Dave Spizale,

Karl Fontenot, Steve & Cherry Fisher May, Odie Terry, Katrinna Huggs, Jane Nicholes, Joseph Irrera, Vince Marino, Tony Daigle, Ted Fox, Claude Thomas, Buddy Palmer, Gregg Gothreaux, Pamela LaFleur, Don and Andy Begneaud, Gerald Breaux, Ben Berthelot, Ray Abshire, and Ben Sandmel. For invaluable assistance, his immense knowledge of Clifton Chenier and south Louisiana music, and his friendship and generosity, special thanks go to my brother in Dirty Rice, Bill Boelens.

This road started of course with my family, and my many musical and personal twists and turns have been made so joyful by my closest friends. Deep love to ma famille: Ray and Melony Mouton; Janis Thiberville Heymann; Chad, Bianca, and Lila Mouton; Jeanné Mouton and Jay Gielow; and the late Francis and Marjorie Breedlove Mouton.

For all the fun adventures, love and support along the way, the special-est of thanks go also to my extended family of friends: John Daigre and Michael Donnell; Robert “Boomer” Leyendecker and Erica Silver; Doug and Lisa Cotter Kirsch; Jenny and Rod Nielsen; Berkeley and Brent Claxton; Jacques Pierre Beauregard Billeaud and Georgia Daspit; Scott, Cindy, Evan, and Quinn Jordan; R. Reese and Heather Fuller; Chris and Amy Lee; Matthew Goldman and Elise Gallinot; Dino and Ragan Gankendorff; Scott Aiges; Sam Broussard; Mike Larson; Bob and Barbie Miller; Nabil Loli; and my great friend and deeply missed mentor, the late Al Berard and his family.

Writing, like music, is a personal and cultural expression, and the villages of friends and acquaintances who’ve shaped my experience are my most prized possessions. And huge thanks, too, to everyone who’s ever put me on their guest list or given me a record.

I am also forever indebted to the many credited and uncredited individuals who contributed to the wonderful recordings discussed in these pages. I also owe an incalculable amount of thanks to not just the many authors, journalists, liner notes writers, and online content creators I’ve credited herein, but also to the innumerable, often anonymous contributors to the resources of the Internet.

The work of a truly staggering list of gifted photographers, filmmakers, visual artists, and archivists has added incredible dimensions to this project. Merci bien

Paul “Lil’ Buck” Sinegal, Lafayette, Louisiana

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Ric

k O

livie

r


for expressing beauty and truth beyond words to: Terri Fensel, Philip Gould, Rick Olivier, Michael P. Smith, Edmund Shea, Brian Ashley White, Richard “Dickie” Landry, Megan Barra, Neil Burgard, Gwen Aucoin, Jock Pottle, Lucy Henke, Taylor Desormeaux, Dragan Tasic, Robley Dupleix, Jack Spencer, Barry Brecheisen, Harold Bacquet, Chris Strachwitz, Howard Brainen, Paul Natkin, Liz Linder, Gabrielle Savoy, Nick Spitzer, Erika Goldring, Zack Smith, Lena Romero, Carl Colby, Dan “Buddha” Hildenbrandt, Earl Hébert, Charles Kimball, Gary Joseph Cieradkowski, Shelley Diekman, Jenny Gorman, Tom Diamant, Pudd Sharp, Becky Smith, Michael Vital, Herman Fuselier, Bill Boelens, and R. Reese Fuller.

David Greely is not just a subject of these stories, he also helped with the French sung and spoken in these pages. Marsha Engelbrecht provided crucial editorial support. And, after so many years of preparation, when it was finally showtime, time to go live, many more great folks came together to help us fund our production budget. Thanks so much to everyone who joined in this effort—you make culture real, meaningful, and so much more than just a good idea.

For inspiring me from the dawn of my interest in music and writing through this very moment, and for his commitment to our music and cultures, merci bien à David Fricke.

Thank you all for your greatness. And to my friends and editors at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, James Wilson and Michael Martin, I offer my humblest and deepest appreciation for your thoughtful enthusiasm and ongoing support. You brought this ambitious project to life.

Merci beaucoup!

Autographs, Clifton Chenier & His Red Hot Louisiana Band, south Louisiana, mid-1970s (Courtesy

of Neil Burgard)

Over the course of his twenty-plus years as a writer, editor, non-profit arts executive, and producer of concerts, events, records, and radio programs, Todd Mouton and his work have received a Louisiana Governor’s Arts Award and recognition from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. He’s widely known as a passionate advocate for the artists and cultures of his home state.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Terr

i Fen

sel

ABOUT THE AUTHOR | 283

284 | WAY DOWN IN LOUISIANA INDEX | 285

1984 World’s Fair (New Orleans), 181“(Allons à) Lafayette,” 49, 64, 74, 97

Abbeville, La., 93, 118, 242, 270Abshire, Nathan, 91, 144, 204, 269Acadiana Arts Council, 209, 216Acadiana Center for the Arts, 274, 277Acadiana Symphony Orchestra, 262Acadian Memorial (St. Martinville, La.),

221Action Cadienne, 227Adams, William, 184Adcock: C.C., 4, 66, 199, 205, 209-10,

214, 216-17, 239, 241, 246-50, 265, 267-68, 270-71, 274-77, 280; Eric, 267-68, 270-71, 274

Against The Tide, 228; see also Contre Vents, Contre Marées

“Ain’t No Need of Cryin’,” 126“Ain’t That Lovin’ You Baby,” 82Alabama, 64, 134Aladdin (record label), 83Aldus Roger & His Lafayette Playboys,

119Alesi, Tommy, 51-2, 54, 56-57Alex Broussard’s Ranch, 201Allen, Dick, 128-29Alligator Purse, 57Alligator Records, 177Allman Brothers, 233Allman, Duane, 35, 118“All Night Long,” 87-88

“Allons À Grand Coteau (Let’s Go To Grand Coteau),” 152

“Allons Rock’n’Roll,” 242“Amédé Two-Step,” 256American Bandstand, 150American Folk Blues Festival, 126American Routes, 195A&M (record label), 227Anderson, Laurie, 247Andrus Productions Studio (Houston,

Tex.), 125“Angeline,” 40Angelle Hall, University of Louisiana at

Lafayette, 44, 53Antlers (Lafayette, La.), 25, 214Antone, Clifford, 149Antone’s Club (Austin, Tex.), 149Appalousa (Native Americans), 78Arceneaux, Arthur, 120-21Archive of New Orleans Jazz, 128Ardoin: Amédé, 74, 76-7, 95, 97, 112,

126, 150, 256; Bois Sec, 51, 128, 144, 250; Brothers Band, 144; Family, 187

Argo (record label), 88Arhoolie (record label), 52, 81, 101-04,

109-13, 116, 118, 125, 127, 129, 130-32, 138, 148, 151, 161, 174, 177, 185

Armstrong, Louis, 128Arnaudville, La., 137Asleep At The Wheel, 64, 145, 205Atakapa (Native Americans), 78

Atchafalaya: Basin, 13, 35, 42, 257; Ba-sin Welcome Center, 257; swamp, 74, 260

Atlantic Records, 83, 186A-Train, 63-4A Treasury of Field Recordings, 101Austin City Limits, 10, 149Austin Mouton’s Club (Milton, La.),

137Austin, Tex., 66, 149“Ay, Ai Ai,” 99, 101-03, 112“Aye Aye Mama (Ay, Ai Ai),” 155“Ay-Tete-Fee,” 73“Ay-Te Te Fee,” 82-3, 85, 92

Babineaux, Sidney, 75“Baby, Please Don’t Go,” 112 “Baby, Scratch My Back,” 91“Baby What You Want Me To Do,” 189“Baby, What You Want Me To Do?,”

167Baker, Lee, Jr., 78Balfa: Brothers, 67, 144, 197, 202-03,

242, 256; Christine, 255-56, 261; Dewey, 10, 50, 56, 65, 113, 153, 172, 180-81, 194-95, 202-03, 205, 249-50, 256-57; Rodney, 56, 203, 256; Will, 56, 203, 256

Balfa Toujours, 256Ball, Marcia, 27, 88, 116, 145Ballou, Classie, Jr., 275Baltimore, Md., 199“Banana Man,” 73, 105, 185Barker, Danny, 52Barton, Lou Ann, 145Barzas: Kevin, 198-99; Maurice, 198;

Vorance, 198Basile, La., 133, 194Baton Rouge, La., 62-3, 133, 135, 162,

198, 277Bayou Blue, La., 271Bayou Blues, 88, 131Bayou Boogie, 49, 55Bayou des Mystères, 67, 222Bayou Drifter Band, 222“Bayou Drive (Sloppy),” 89

“Bayou Girl,” 29Bayou (record label), 130, 134Bayou Soul, 113Bayou Teche, 137, 267“Bayou Teche Waltz,” 267Bayou Vermilion, 40“Beast of Burden,” 277Beau Jocque, 184, 187Beau Jocque & The Zydeco High Roll-

ers, 184Beaumont, Tex., 79-80, 113, 137, 173BeauSoleil, 7, 10, 36, 46-57, 180-81,

198, 222, 233, 235, 246, 262Beautiful Dream, 44Belizaire The Cajun, 49, 55, 179Bell, Carey, 126Belote, Doug, 44, 108, 109Benny Goodman, 165Benoit: Felix James, “T-Jim,” 116-17,

119, 134, 142, 161, 169; Tab, 274Berard: Al, 16, 260, 262, 281; Maegan,

255, 260-61Berkeley Blues Festival, 110Berkeley, Calif., 117Berlin, Steve, 274Bernard, Rod, 150Berry, Chuck, 80, 84, 86, 88, 118“Bertha,” 277Berwyn, Ill., 161Beau Jocque & The Zydeco Hi-Rollers,

187Big Butch, 128“Big Mamou,” 113Big Pete, 109, 120-21; see also Pitre,

DavisBikel, Theodore, 128Bishop, Elvin, 134, 138-39, 142Black Dog, 200“Black Gal/Blues de Ma Negresse,” 75,

112, 148-49Blackham Coliseum (Lafayette, La.),

125, 144, 148Black Snake Blues, 73, 114, 117-19,

121, 126, 187Blacktop (record label), 28Blackwell: Bumps, 12, 28, 81, 82;

Chris, 28

INDEX

Note: Artist and band names, and song and album titles, are listed as they appear on commercially released recordings, resulting in some multiple entries reflecting varia-tions of spelling and punctuation.


Bland, Bobby “Blue,” 84, 86, 177Blank, Les, 142Blevins, Kenneth, 40, 233-34, 236Blind Bébé’s (Breaux Bridge, La.), 137Bloomfield, Michael, 134Blue Angel Club (Lafayette, La.), 115-

16, 135-38, 143-44, 162-63, 178“Blue Dog,” 69Bluerunners, 65, 186“Blues After Hours,” 126Blues Attack, 44Blues Unlimited (record label), 28Bogalusa Boogie, 13, 92, 150, 152, 157,

163Bogalusa, La., 92, 150, 154, 157, 175Bone, Ponty, 66Bonsoir, Catin, 7, 252-63“Bonsoir Moreau,” 61Bon Ton Drive-In, 79“Bon Ton Roula,” 79-80, 97“Bon Ton Roulet,” 51, 92, 103, 110-13,

121, 129, 162Bon Ton Rouley Club (Lafayette, La.),

51, 94-5, 226Boo Boo’s Club (near Breaux Bridge,

La.), 234Boogie In Black & White, 150, 153“Boogie Louisiane,” 168Boogie ’N’ Zydeco, 114, 153, 157, 168Booker T. & The M.G.’s, 104, 182Boots Randolph, 152“Boozoo” Chavis, 120-21, 180, 184,

189; see also Chavis, Wilson An-thony “Boozoo”

Boozoo Chavis & His Magic Sounds, 184

“Boppin’ The Rock,” 82“Bosco Blues,” 204Bourque, Darrell, 40Bowie, David, 177Brainen, Howard, 109Brasseaux, Danny, 201“Breathless,” 243Breaux Bridge, La., 9, 36, 62, 67, 137,

193, 196, 198, 200, 234, 259, 260, 269

Breaux: Dana, 234-35; Jimmy, 51, 54-

7, 201; Pat, 241, 243, 247Bridge City, Tex., 115-16, 120, 137Bridgeview, Ill., 43“Broken Hearted Road,” 35, 40Brooks, Lonnie, 78, 79, 82; see also

Guitar JuniorBroonzy, “Big Bill,” 118, 121, 165Broussard: Alex, 201; Family, 187;

Jeffery, 69; Sam, 17, 205Brown: Buster, 139; Charles, 130, 157;

Clarence “Gatemouth,” 114, 145, 155, 177; James, 22, 115, 163, 168; Nappy, 189

Bruneau, Jean-Pierre, 142Buckwheat & The Hitchhikers, 23, 25,

29Buckwheat Zydeco, 7, 14, 18-31, 40,

121, 132, 145, 154, 177, 180-82, 187, 206, 209-10, 214-15, 217, 270-71, 274-75, 277, 280

Buckwheat Zydeco & The Ils Sont Partis Band, 21, 27, 214, 270

Buckwheat’s Zydeco Party, 30Buena Vista Social Club, 241Bug Music, 64Burgess, Anya, 255-56, 258, 261, 263Burke, Solomon, 69Burns, Wayne “Blue,” 175Butte La Rose, La., 257Butterfield, Paul, 134Byrd, Henry Roeland, 83; see also Pro-

fessor Longhair

Café 101 (Lafayette, La.), 12Café Des Amis (Breaux Bridge, La.),

196, 203Caillier Records, 179Cajundome, 181Cajun Music: A Reflection of a People, 75“Caldonia,” 148, 155, 161“Calinda,” 139, 162, 167, 187Cameron Parish, La., 132Campbell, Joseph, 40Candy, Louis, 82Cankton, La., 27, 68, 95, 143-45, 162,

234

“Can’t Go Home No More,” 120Canton, Miss., 36, 169Cap Enragé, 227, 229Carencro, La., 21, 23, 26, 30, 201Carlton, Larry, 226Carnegie Hall, 10, 165-66, 210Caron, Danny, 175, 177Carpe Diem (Lafayette, La.), 261Carrière: Bébé, 53; Calvin, 53Carrier Family, 187Carter, Jimmy, 57Cashdollar, Cindy, 45Castille, Hadley, 199Catalon, Inez, 144Catholic Hall (Lake Charles, La.), 137“C.C. Special,” 139Ceaser, Warren, 174-75, 177Cecilia, La., 10, 137, 142, 260Cedric Watson & Bijou Creole, 69“C’est un péché de dire un menterie (It’s a

sin to tell a lie),” 52Chapin-Carpenter, Mary, 49Chapman, Mike “Chop,” 198“Charivari,” 50Charles: Bobby (see Guidry, Bobby

Charles); Ray, 84, 86, 111, 128, 134, 148, 157

Chavis, Wilson Anthony “Boozoo,” 120, 121, 184, 180, 189; see also “Boozoo” Chavis

Checker (record label), 89Chenier: Clayton Joseph Thompson

(C.J.), 17, 168-69, 173-75, 177, 179, 181, 185, 187-88; Cleve-land, 4, 9, 26, 33, 76-9, 82, 90, 94-5, 101-05, 110, 115-17, 119, 126, 128-30, 139, 143, 145, 148, 150, 152, 154, 156, 157, 163, 167, 169, 172, 175, 185-87, 210; Clifton, 3, 4, 7, 10, 12-6, 19, 22-3, 25-7, 29, 30, 33, 35, 42, 64, 68, 70-189, 197, 203, 210, 216-17, 226, 270-71, 275, 281-82; Delier, 74; Joseph, 74; Margaret, 78, 174, 185; Morris, 75, 78, 80, 103, 110-12

“Cher Catin,” 93, 95-6, 149

“Chère Alice,” 64, 222Chess: Brothers, 12, 88-9; Leonard, 88;

Phil, 88Chess Records, 10, 12, 88Chicago, Ill., 12, 79, 83-5, 88-9, 91,

93, 96, 135, 177Chicot State Park, 257Chitimatcha (Native Americans), 78Choates, Harry, 112, 202Choo Choo Boogaloo, 22, 28, 30“Choo Choo Ch’Boogie,” 155“Choo Choo Ch’ Boogie,” 78, 153Christmas Bayou, 49Chuck Guillory & His Rhythm Boys,

97Church Point, La., 250Clapton, Eric, 9, 21, 29, 43, 45, 118,

187Clark, Octa, 52, 260Clay, Francis, 110Clifton Chenier Club, 185Clifton Chenier & His Red Hot Loui-

siana Band, 7, 14, 17, 25, 27, 30, 33, 89, 125, 151, 154, 161-62, 166-67, 169, 172, 175, 184-85, 187, 189, 197, 210, 270, 282

Clifton’s Cajun Blues, 125“Clifton’s Waltz,” 109Clinton, Bill, 57“Cliston Blues,” 80-1Club DeLisa (Breaux Bridge, La.), 137Club Spice (Lafayette, La.), 271Cocker, Joe, 63Colby, Carl, 162Cole, Nat King, 80Collins, Albert, 149, 209Coltrane, John, 262Comeaux: Richard, 241, 243, 246;

Tommy, 45, 57, 212, 233-37Commander Cody, 145Compass Point Studios, 28“Congo Mombo,” 91Congo Square (New Orleans, La.), 128Congrès Mondial Acadien, 227Conner, Varise, 53Connor, William, 144Conn, Steve, 36, 41, 44


Conque, Murray, 61Contre Vents, Contre Marées, 228Cooke, Sam, 81Cool Calm Collected, 97Corey “Lil’ Pop” Ledet & His Zydeco

Band, 217; see also Ledet, Corey “Lil’ Pop”

Cormier: Nolan, 200; Sheryl, 255Costello, Elvis, 251Coteau, 10, 145, 222, 230-37Cotten, Elizabeth, 76“Cotton-Picker Blues,” 168Count Basie, 165Country Boy Now Grammy Award Win-

ner 1984!, 179“Country Bred (Nobody Loves Me),”

81Country Music Today, 243Country Oaks Club, 201Courville, Sady, 55, 144Cowboy Stew Blues Revue, 4, 214“Cow Cow Blues,” 134, 157Crawfish Festival, 259“Crawfishin’,” 80, 97Cray, Robert, 177Crayton, Pee Wee, 84, 86Creedence Clearwater Revival, 181Crossing Muddy Waters, 40Crossroads Guitar Festival, 43“Crosstown Traffic,” 10Crowley, La., 13, 91-2, 112, 119, 137,

151, 242Cush-Cush, 65

Dale & Grace, 113, 242Dallas, Tex., 135Daniels, Charlie, 64Danny Brasseaux & The Wandering

Aces, 201“Danse Caribe,” 52Davenport, Cow Cow, 134Davis, Quint, 167Dawson, Ronnie, 246Dayton Symphony Orchestra, 262Dedans le sud de la Louisiane, 142Delafose: Family, 187; John, 180, 275

Delcambre, La., 271DeLuxe (record label), 83Desmond, Paul, 248DeVille, Willy, 247Devillier, Danny, 255-56, 261-62Dewey Balfa Cajun and Creole Heritage

Week, 205, 257DiFranco, Ani, 251“Diggy Liggy Lo,” 132Dis Graceland, 250Dixon, Willie, 150, 163, 177Dockside Studios, 40Doggett, Bill, 84, 86, 97“Doing The Dirty Boogie,” 105Domengeaux, Jimmy, 193, 199-201,

205Domino, Antoine “Fats,” Jr., 118, 121,

125-26, 129, 139, 152, 157, 161-63, 181, 189, 250-51, 277

Don & Dewey, 113“Done Got Over,” 126“Don’t Mess With My Toot Toot,” 274“Don’t You Lie To Me,” 118, 121Dopsie, Rockin’, 180-81, 185-86, 210,

217; see also Rubin, Alton“Do Right Sometime,” 163Doucet: David, 51, 54, 56, 57; Mi-

chael, 7, 9, 10, 36, 46-7, 49, 50-4, 56-7, 233, 236, 262, 280

Douglas, Jerry, 42, 53“Down At The Twist And Shout,” 49Downtown Alive! (Lafayette, La.), 69,

173-74, 178Dr. John, 270Drust, Greg, 78-79, 82-84, 127, 152Dubuisson, La., 78Dugas: Kevin, 193-94, 197, 200-01,

205; Marcel, 109; Mike, 200; Duhon: Bessyl, 51, 233-36; Hector, 10,

53, 260Dupuis, Russell, 142-43Dural: Reginald, 31; Stanley “Buck-

wheat,” Jr., 18-31, 121, 162, 163, 169, 182; Stanley Sr., 22-3

Dylan, Bob, 28, 182, 210

Earth, Wind & Fire, 168East L.A., 268“Easy Baby,” 163Eddy, Duane, 248Edwards, Edwin, 271Edwards, Honeyboy, 165Egan, David, 61-4, 66, 68-9, 241, 247,

280“Eh, Petite Fille,” 83“Eh, Tite Fille,” 102“Eh, ‘Tite Fille,” 105Eiffel Tower, 161“Eighteen Long Years,” 177Elektra (record label), 222Elemental Journey, 45Elko (record label), 80-1El Sid O’s Zydeco & Blues Club, 18,

270Ely, Joe, 233Eno, Brian, 177“Entre l’amour et l’avenir (Between Love

and the Future),” 200Erath, La., 271Ertegün, Ahmet, 134Etienne, Clarence “Jockey,” 251Eunice, La., 73, 95, 197-98“Eunice Two-Step,” 112Evangeline Parish, La., 153, 198, 257“Evangeline Special,” 64“Everybody Calls Me Crazy,” 92“Eyes Like a Cat,” 92

Falcon: Cléoma Breaux, 74, 97, 109, 257; Joe, 74, 97, 109

“Falksy Girl,” 163“Family Rules,” 78, 97Fantasy Festival, 69Fathers and Sons, 134-35, 157Faulk: Claude, 75-6, 113, 153, 163:

Helen, 163Faulkner, William, 69, 227“Faut Tu Voir,” 256Feed & Seed (Lafayette, La.), 252, 255Félix awards, 221Fender, Freddy, 242

Fernest & The Thunders, 180Ferriday, La., 270Festival International de Louisiane, 62,

187, 274Festivals Acadiens et Créoles, 64, 67,

144, 193, 204, 226, 263Field, R.S., 37Filé, 7, 58-69“First You Cry,” 247FitzGerald’s Club (Berwyn, Ill.), 161Five Card Stud, 22, 28-30Five Royals, 84, 86Flat Town Music, 154Flett: Bruce, 64; Buddy, 63, 247Floyd’s Record Shop, Ville Platte, La.,

95Fogerty, John, 181, 242Fontenot: Canray, 49, 61-2, 65, 67-68,

144, 202; Merlin, 144; Family, 196Ford, Richard, 40Forestier, Blackie, 144Forte, Dan, 215Four Aces Club (Lafayette, La.), 116Fox, Ted, 28Fran, Carol, 91, 275Frank Family, 187Franklin, La., 85Fred, John, 247Fred’s Lounge (Mamou, La.), 198Freetown (Lafayette, La.), 65“Freetown Breakdown,” 261French, Chris, 267, 271, 274Frenchin’ The Boogie, 154“French Town Waltz,” 112“French Two-Step,” 129Frilot Cove, La., 133“Frog Legs,” 111, 112Fullbright, J.R., 80-1, 117Fulson, Lowell, 82-6Funky Features Studio (San Francisco,

Calif.), 134

Gaines, Ernest, 209Gallagher, Rory, 73, 185Garlow, Clarence, 79-80, 97, 111Garnier: D’Jalma III, 59, 61-2, 65-9;


“Papa” D’Jalma, 65Gayten, Paul, 83“(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66,” 80Gibbons, Billy, 78Gilmore, Jimmie Dale, 233“Give Me Back My Wings,” 221Glass, Philip, 10Gleason, Ralph J., 110Glendora, Calif., 64GNP Crescendo (record label), 168,

173“Going Back Home,” 176“Going Down Slow,” 178, 189“Going Down Slow (in Paris),” 156“Going La Maison (Goin’ Home),” 129“Goin’ Home,” 114, 125Goin’ Home: A Tribute To Fats Domino,

250Gold Star Studios (Houston, Tex.),

101-02, 104“Gone A La Maison,” 125“Goodbye Baby,” 91-2Good Hope Hall (Lafayette La.), 115Goodman, Charles, 142“Good Rockin’ Daddy,” 82Good Rockin’ Dopsie, 180: see Dopsie,

Rockin’“Got It Made (In The Shade),” 79, 97“Got To Have Your Love,” 176Graceland, 181, 250Grammy: awards, 13, 44, 49-50, 57,

73, 86, 88, 103, 150, 173, 177, 179, 181, 187, 205, 221, 255-56, 258, 262, 275; Hall of Fame, 13, 103, 150

Grand Bois, La., 143Grand Chenier, La., 80Grand Coteau, La., 130, 268, 270Grandma Gee Gee, 114“Grand Mamou (Big Mamou),” 130Grand Ole Opry, 234“Grand Prix (What A Price),” 163“Grand Texas,” 80, 97Grant Street Dancehall (Lafayette, La.),

16, 31, 41, 44-5, 174, 206, 212, 215, 237, 243, 249

Grateful Dead, 10, 57, 76, 233-34, 277

Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, 74

Greely, David, 191, 193, 196-97, 201, 202, 204, 241-43, 246-47, 249, 282

Green, Cornelius, 87Green Linnet/Redbird label, 62Greenwich Village, 65, 181Gueydan, La., 271Guidry: Bobby Charles, 88, 118, 121;

Madison, 104Guillory: Burke, 202; Chuck, 97;

Family, 196; Ida Lewis “Queen Ida,” 173; Kristi, 253, 255, 257, 261, 263

Guitar Gable, 91, 97Guitar Junior, 97-98; see also Brooks,

LonnieGuitar Slim, 81

Halfway Club (Vermilion Parish, La.), 93

Hamilton’s Club (Lafayette, La.), 137Hammond, John, 165Hampton, Lionel, 105Hancock, Butch, 233Hang On To Your Chapeau, 68-9Happytown, 204“Hard To Love Someone,” 129Harris, Paul, 85-6, 115Hart, John, 4, 116-18, 135-39, 143,

145, 148-50, 152-53, 161, 163, 167-69, 181, 184, 187, 216

Harvard University, 194Hawking, Stephen, 182Hawkins, Dale, 246“He, Tit’ Fill,” 164Hébert, Earl, 69Heider, Wally, 139Heizer, Michael, 165“Hello Josephine,” 162“Hello Rosa-Lee,” 168Hendrix, Jimi, 10, 28Herman’s Hermits, 113“Hey Little Girl,” 83“Hey Ma Ma,” 92

“Hey, Tite Fille,” 148Hiatt, John, 36-7, 40, 242Hidalgo, David, 21, 29, 73, 267, 274,

277“Hideaway,” 145Highly Seasoned Cajun Music, 233High Performance, 205High Time: The Elektra Recordings, 229“Highway Blues,” 164“Hi-Heel Sneakers,” 167, 189Hildenbrandt, Dan “Buddha,” 182“Hip Shake,” 247Hip Shakin’: The Excello Collection, 97Holly Beach, La., 51Hollywood, Calif., 81Home Cooking (record label), 125Honeycutt, Miki, 63, 64“Honky Tonk,” 86, 97“Honky Tonkin,” 213“Hoochie Coochie Man,” 163, 176Hooker, Earl, 126Hooker, John Lee, 10, 88, 134, 165Hopkins, Lightnin’, 10, 89, 102, 105,

110, 145, 165, 212Hot Cajun Nights Festival, 69Hotel Acadiana (Lafayette, La.), 185Hot Ice, 169Hot Pepper, 142, 143“Hot Rod,” 73, 105, 112, 142, 168Hot Sizzling Band (Clifton Chenier’s),

78“Hot Tamale Baby,” 114, 153-54, 162-

63, 182, 277Houma, La., 271, 274“Hound Dog,” 165“Houston Boogie,” 103Houston, Tex., 13, 91-2, 101-03, 105,

110, 113-16, 120, 125, 128-29, 137

Howard, Steve, 36Howlin’ Wolf, 88Hub City All-Stars, see Roddie Romero

& the Hub City All-Stars“Hungry Man Blues,” 163Hurricane Katrina, 8Huston, Derek, 267, 274Huval, Brazos, 205

Hypolite, Harry, 174, 187

“I Ain’t Got No Home,” 162“I Believe I’ll Go Back Home,” 129Iberia Parish, La., 137“I Can Look Down at Your Woman,”

109“I Can’t Stand,” 105“If I Ever Get Lucky,” 92, 112“I Get Evil,” 118“I Got A Little Girl,” 119“I Got A Woman,” 148“I Got Loaded,” 135, 157, 275, 277“I Got The Blues,” 174“I Have To Go,” 165“I Just Can’t Do Right,” 61“I Just Want To Make Love To You,”

155“I Lost My Baby (In French),” 119COMBINE WITH BUCKWHEAT Ils

Sont Partis Band, 21, 27, 214, 270“I’m A Hog For You,” 133-4, 139, 148-

9, 161, 277“I’m A King Bee,” 91“I’m A Lover, Not A Fighter,” 91, 97I’m A Lover, Not A Fighter, 97“I May Be Wrong,” 152“I’m Back Home,” 175“I’m Coming Home,” 142, 148, 175,

182, 185“I’m Coming Home (To See My Moth-

er),” 130“I’m Goin’ Home (I’m Coming

Home),” 164I’m Here!, 175, 177-78I Miss You So, 189“I’m Leaving It Up To You,” 113Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic

Church (Lafayette, La.), 209“I’m On My Way (Back Home To

You),” 87“I’m On The Wonder,” 103, 138, 148,

187Imperial (record label), 80-1“In Another Time,” 247-48In New Orleans, 168

INDEX | 291


International Harvesters, 10In The Groove, 28“In The Mood,” 126“I.R.S.,” 29Island Records, 21, 28“It Happened So Fast,” 91“It’s Christmas Time,” 130“It’s Hard,” 105“I Want To Be Your Driver (Me And

My Chauffeur Blues),” 155“I Want To Go Home,” 130, 157

Jack Daniel’s, 246Jackson: John, 126; Michael, 177Jagger, Mick, 182, 226Jagneaux, Rufus, 145“J’ai Passé Devant Ta Porte,” 164“J’ai Reveille À Ce Matin,” 186“J’ai réveillé à ce matin,” 197“Jambalaya,” 80, 97, 148James: Elmore, 169; Etta “Eddie,” 82,

84-86Jay’s Lounge & Cockpit, (Cankton, La.),

27, 68, 95-6, 143-45, 158, 162, 174, 230, 234

Jefferson Street, Lafayette, La, 25, 68Jeffery Broussard & The Creole Cow-

boys, 69Jefty’s (Los Angeles, Calif.), 81“Je Marche Le Plancher (Good Hearted

Man),” 139, 162“Je m’en fous pas mal (I Don’t Care),”

197“Je Me Reveiller Le Matin (I Woke Up

This Morning),” 152Jennings, La., 132“Je Suis En Recolteur (I’m A Farmer),

152, 168“J’étais au bal,” 222Jet, 161“Je Vais Jamais Faire Ça,” 256Jimenez, Flaco, 277Jimmy Breaux & Cajun Delight, 201“Johnny B. Goode,” 222“Johnny Can’t Dance,” 119Johnson Bayou, La., 49, 51

Johnson: Alonzo, Jr., 177; Eric, 45, 260; Robert, 14, 15, 74

Johnston Street (Lafayette, La.), 12“Jolie Blonde,” 61, 112, 148, 166“Jolie Catin,” 93, 96Jones: Elvin, 262; James K. “Coonie,”

82Jordan, Louis, 78, 97, 111, 139, 142,

152-53, 155, 157, 193“Josephine C’est Pas Ma Femme,” 133“Josephine Par Se Ma Femme (Josephine

is Not My Wife),” 130Judice, La., 53Juke Boy Bonner, 126“Jump the Boogie,” 103“Just a Lonely Boy,” 81Just Another Band From East L.A., 276“Just Like A Woman,” 142, 157

KAOK, 80Kaplan, La., 93, 109, 222, 271KBON, 73, 251K-Doe, Ernie, 145“Keep On Scratching,” 111-12Kershaw, Doug, 132, 149, 172, 229Keyes, Cleveland, 105, 115, 116“Key to the Highway,” 118, 121Key West, Florida, 69Kimball: Charles, 235; Danny, 16,

234-35King: Albert, 118, 177, 209; B.B.,

141, 143, 209, 270; Freddie, 145; Gabriel, 175

King Karl, 97King of the Bayous, 127, 129, 130, 131,

157King of Zydeco, 125KLFY, 209Knopfler, Mark, 45Kristi Guillory & Anya Burgess, 263KSAN, 134KSLO, 201KVOL, 241

“La Bamba,” 277Labor of Love, 66“Lacassine Special,” 64“Lâche Pas La Patate,” 132“La danse de limonade,” 66Lafayette, La.: 4, 9, 12, 15-7, 22, 25, 29-

31, 33, 35-6, 41, 44-5, 49, 53, 61-2, 64-5, 67-9, 73-4, 76-7, 84, 89-91, 93-5, 97, 105, 109, 113-16, 119, 125, 127-28, 132, 135, 137, 142-44, 148, 150, 152, 154, 163-64, 169, 172-74, 178-79, 181-82, 185-87, 194, 199, 204, 209, 211-12, 214-16, 226-27, 233, 237, 241-43, 246, 248-50, 255, 257-61, 267-71, 274, 277, 281-82; High School, 271

Lafayette Playboys, 94; see also Aldus Roger and the Lafayette Playboys

Lafayette Soul Show, 216“Lafayette Two-Step,” 93“Lafayette Waltz,” 73, 105, 109“Laissez Les Bon Temps Rouler,” 155Lake Charles, La., 78, 80, 87, 109, 121,

133, 137, 173, 180-81Lake Geneva, Switzerland, 148Lake Martin, La., 35la-la, 62L’amour Ou La Folie, 50, 52, 55, 57Landfall Records, 44Landreneau: Adam, 128; Cyprien, 128Landreth, Sonny, 7, 9, 10, 14, 16,

32-45, 49, 53, 92, 162, 169, 172, 187, 193, 209, 211-12, 223, 226, 242-43, 269, 275, 280; see also Sonny Landreth & Bayou Rhythm

Landry: Bill, 259; Richard “Dickie,” 4, 10-2, 142-44, 165-66, 241-43, 246-48, 250-51, 282; T-Don, 78; Trevor, 259; Willie, 78; Yvette, 255, 257, 259, 261, 263

Lanois, Daniel, 186La Palace (France), 164“La Porte D’en Arrière (The Back

Door),” 64Lastrapes, Dud, 185Late Night with David Letterman, 187

Latiolais, Tony, 16La Toussaint, 193, 195-97, 200, 204-05Lausanne, Switzerland, 66“La valse de Kaplan,” 222“La Valse De Paris,” 156La Vie Marron, 61, 65, 68-9“Lawdy, Miss Clawdy,” 81Lawtell, La., 133, 275Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs,

118Lazy Lester, 91, 97, 242Ledet, Corey “Lil’ Pop,” 217; see also

Corey “Lil’ Pop” Ledet & His Zydeco Band

Led Zeppelin, 200, 251, 260, 262Le Fou, 229Lejeune: Iry, 67, 95, 204, 226, 269;

Louis “Vinesse,” 194Leleux, Lionel, 53, 144Leonville, La., 137Le roi du Zydeco (The King Of Zydeco),

164“Les ailes des hirondelles,” 221“Les flammes d’enfer,” 93Let Me In Your Heart, 185“Let’s Go To Lafayette,” 93“Let’s Talk It Over,” 118Let The Four Winds Blow, 157“Let The Good Times Roll,” 111Levee Town, 35-7, 40, 43-4Lewis: Jerry Lee, 248, 270; Richard, 83;

Smiley, 152, 157Liggins, Joe, 78, 81, 97Lightnin’ Slim, 91, 97, 242Light The Stars, 255, 260-61, 263Lil’ Band O’ Gold, 7, 10, 69, 205, 217,

238-51Lil’ Bob, 209Lil’ Bob & The Lollipops, 135, 157,

275Lil’ Buck & The Topcats, 209Lincoln Center, 241Lipscomb, Mance, 110Little Richard, 81, 84, 86, 88-9, 155,

246Live at Humpfree’s, 68Live at Mulate’s, 65

INDEX | 293


Live at St. Mark’s, 131-32, 134Live at the 2008 New Orleans Jazz &

Heritage Festival, 57Live! At The Long Beach And San Fran-

cisco Blues Festivals, 177Live From The Left Coast, 55Live in Louisiana, 55Live in Montreal, 229Live Oak, Fla., 69Living Blues, 182Loafers’ Glory, 64Lomax: Alan, 101; John, 101Lombardo, Guy, 54London, England, 126, 166Lonesome Sundown, see Green, Cor-

neliusLong Beach, Calif., 177Long, Huey, 8“Long Toes / My Baby Don’t Have No

Shoes,” 112Loreauville, La., 137, 185Lormand’s Bar (Ossun, La.), 68Lormand, Ward, 61, 63, 65-6 69Los Angeles, Calif., 12, 37, 66, 73, 81, 86,

88, 91, 117, 166, 177, 181-82, 187Los Angeles Times, 182Los Lobos, 21, 73, 177, 267-68, 277Louis Armstrong Park (New Orleans,

La.), 128“Louisiana Blues,” 73, 105, 130Louisiana Blues And Zydeco, 73, 104,

110-11, 121Louisiana Creole Fiddle Method, 69Louisiana Folk Roots, 205, 256Louisiana Heritage & Gifts, 259Louisiana Kitchen, 179Louisiana Music, 186Louisiana State University, 198“Louisiana Stomp,” 80-1“Louisiana Two-Step,” 109, 134, 149La Louisianne Studios (Lafayette, La.),

275“Love and Glory,” 35-6Lubbock, Tex., 233“Lucille,” 75Lynn, Barbara, 113

MacDonald, Bruce, 231, 233-36Magic Sam, 126Mahal, Taj, 29Maison de Soul (record label), 113,

150, 153, 168, 179“Ma Louisianne,” 227Mama I’ll Be Long Gone: The Complete

Recordings of Amédé Ardoin 1929-1934, 97

“Ma Mama Ma Dit (My Mama Told Me),” 152

“Mama Told Papa,” 134, 179Mamou, La., 49, 130, 196, 198, 222Mamou Playboys, 7, 10, 17, 186,

190-205, 217, 241-42, 250; see also Steve Riley & The Mamou Playboys

“Ma Negress Est Gone,” 134Mango Records, 29Manhattan, 28, 165, 203“Man With The Blues,” 29“M’Appel Fou (Everybody Calls Me

Crazy),” 92“M’Appel Fou (They Call Me Crazy),”

151, 153Marchan, Bobby, 152, 157Mardi Gras, 229“Marie Marie,” 182Marley, Bob, 14, 15, 74Master-Trak Studio, 91“Mas Y Mas,” 277Matassa, Cosimo, 81, 88“Mathilda,” 61“Ma vie s’est arrêtée,” 50Mayall, John, 45, 63Mayfield, Percy, 81McComb Addition (Lafayette, La.), 89McComb Cleaners (Lafayette, La.), 210McCormick, Mack, 101McCracklin, Jim, 84, 86McGee, Dennis, 10, 51, 53, 55, 74, 97,

144, 150, 198, 202-03, 260McLain, Tommy, 251McLaughlin, John, 44McZeal, Paul, 115“Me And My Chauffeur Blues,” 126

Meaux: Huey, 13, 113; Mark, 65Medicine Show: Live at Grant Street

Dancehall (Vol. 1), 237“Meet Me Tomorrow Night,” 148Mel Bay Publications, 69Mellencamp, John, 73Memphis Minnie, 155Menard, D.L., 44, 53, 64Mendoza, Lalo, 183Menil, Christophe de, 165Merchant, Natalie, 57“Mess Around,” 134, 157Meyers, Augie, 50“Mi Cucu,” 181Mid-City Lanes (New Orleans, La.),

185; see also Rock’n’Bowl, (New Orleans, La.)

Migration, 226Milburn, Amos, 130“Milk Cow Blues,” 155Millar, Bill, 13Miller: J.D., 13, 91; Steve, 135, 139Milton, La., 40, 137Monette, Raymond “Schwank,” 90,

115, 130, 213“Money,” 149“Money (That’s What I Want),” 111“Monifique,” 119Monterey Jazz Festival, 173Montreal, Canada: 9, 166, 222, 226,

229, 269; Jazz Festival, 9Montreux, Switzerland: 148-49; Jazz

Festival, 148Moore, “Whistling” Alex, 126Morris: Gene, 172; Jerry, 90; Joe

“Jumpin’ Joe,” 114-17, 119-20, 128, 130, 145, 163, 165; Theresa, 116

Morrison, Van, 29Mould, Pat, 16Mouton: Austin, 137; Walter, 197, 275Muddy Waters, 14-5, 40, 74, 88, 110,

134, 149, 157Mulate’s, 62-3, 65, 67, 69, 193, 198Munzing, Mike, 255Murphy, Bob, 102Murphy, Lyle “Spud,” 66

“My Babe,” 150, 162“My Baby Don’t Wear No Shoes,” 185“My Little Angel,” 126“My Soul,” 89“My Toot Toot,” 86, 181

Nashville, Tenn., 37, 144, 234Nathan Williams & The Zydeco Cha

Chas, 132, 139, 189, 270National Endowment for the Arts: 179,

194; National Heritage Fellowship, 262

Neches River, Tex., 116Nelson: Ricky, 248; Tracy, 63; Willie,

21, 29, 187Neville Brothers, 45New Iberia, La., 41, 51, 54-5, 65, 78,

85, 137, 185, 267New Lost City Ramblers, 10, 194Newman: Gary, 16, 233-36; Jimmy C.,

144, 234New Orleans, La., 8, 9, 13, 29, 52,

56-7, 61-6, 69, 74, 81, 83, 88, 94, 109, 118, 121, 127-28, 133, 139, 141, 143, 145, 148, 151-52, 155, 161-62, 167-69, 172-73, 175, 179, 180-81, 183, 185-86, 188, 193-94, 214, 217, 227-28, 234, 236, 246, 267, 270, 274; Fairgrounds, 270; Jazz & Heritage Festival, 9, 52, 57, 127, 143, 145, 148, 161, 167, 169, 174-75, 183, 194, 234, 236

“New Orleans Beat,” 186Newport, Rhode Island, 51, 128, 194,

257; Folk Festival, 51, 128, 194, 257; Jazz Festival, 128

Newton, Wendy, 62New York, N.Y., 10, 28, 64, 83-4, 109,

165-66, 195, 197, 203, 216, 222, 248

New York Times, 165“Night and Day My Love,” 93“Night Time Is The Right Time,” 189Nixon, Elmore, 102, 105, 110, 130Nocentelli, Leo, 214“No French, No More,” 227

INDEX | 295


NYNO (record label), 209, 216

Oakland, Calif., 166Oakland Tribune, 110O’Connell, Maura, 63Oden, “St. Louis Jimmy,” 178, 189“Oh! Lucille,” 113“Oh! My Lucille,” 153Oliver, Paul, 126Olivier, Jim, 209On A Night Like This, 28, 30, 182On Tour, 164, 173“One Step At A Time,” 151“Opelousas Hop,” 87Opelousas, La., 74-5, 78, 87, 93, 95-6,

128, 133, 135, 137, 179-80, 184, 197, 199, 201-02, 258

Organ, Michael, 36, 40Original Southwest Louisiana Zydeco

Music Festival (Plaisance, La.), 180, 182

Ossun Blues, 260Ossun, La., 66Out West, 103, 134-35, 138-39, 151-

52, 157

“Paper In My Shoe,” 120-21, 126, 180

Paris, France, 120, 133, 156, 164, 166Parker, Junior, 84, 86Parks, La., 137, 261Parks, Todd, 53“Parlez-nous à boire,” 242Parnell, Lee Roy, 243“Parti de Paris,” 163“Party Down (At The Blue Angel

Club),” 162-63, 178Pasadena, Tex., 113Patoski, Joe Nick, 113Pavy, Francis, 65Pedersen, Herb, 36“Pepper In My Shoe,” 119Peppermint Harris, 97Philip Glass Ensemble, 247Phillips, Travis, 92

“Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie,” 132, 134, 148-49, 157

Pineville, La., 41Pitre, Davis, 109, 120-21; see also Big

PetePlaisance, La., 180, 182Plank Road, 55Plant, Robert, 245-46, 251Plaquemines Parish, La., 66Plays Fats, 251“Please Mr. Sandman,” 242Poché Bridge, La., 267“Poison Ivy,” 133Port Arthur, Tex., 78-9, 85, 87, 109,

115-16, 137, 149, 168Portland, Oreg., 138Port Neches, Tex., 115Post, Mike, 37, 40Post (record label), 81Prairie Ronde, La., 75Presley, Elvis, 130, 146-48Prevost, Lionel, 85-7Price: Lloyd, 81; Ray, 130“Prisoner’s Song,” 241, 251Professor Longhair, 64, 83, 145, 155,

180, 226, 270; see also Byrd, Hen-ry Roeland

Prophesy (record label), 125-26Prudhomme, Paul, 49, 179

Quebec, 221, 222, 227Queen Ida & The Bon Temps Zydeco

Band in New Orleans, 173“Quelque Chose Sur Mon Idee (There’s

Something On My Mind),” 152Quiet Riot, 200Quinn, Bill, 102, 104

Racines, 205“Rainin’ In My Heart,” 91Raitt, Bonnie, 36-7Randol’s, 62, 259Ranson, Dave, 35-6, 40-2, 241-42,

248, 251, 269, 275Rault, Philippe, 154

Rayne, La., 75, 137, 251, 268Reagan, Ronald, 179“Reconsider Baby,” 82Red Hot Louisiana Band, see Clifton

Chenier & His Red Hot Louisiana Band

Red River, 63Reed: Jimmy, 12, 82, 84, 86, 92, 189;

Mitch, 56-7“Release Me,” 128, 130“Réveille,” 227Reynolds: brothers, 76; Jesse, 75; ZoZo,

75Rhino Records, 89, 186, 229Rice Building (Crowley, La.), 137Richard: Belton, 67, 269; Kenneth, 51,

233-34; Sterling, 234-35; Zachary, 7, 16, 50, 67, 73, 172, 199, 218-29, 280

Richards, Keith, 21, 246Richard’s Club (Lawtell, La.), 122, 135,

137Richardson, Tiny, 116Richmond, Calif., 132, 166“Ride ’Em Cowboy,” 152Riley, Steve, 4, 7, 10, 17, 186, 190-205,

217, 241, 246, 249Riverboat President, 161, 172River of Madness, 41River of People, 68River Road, 243Roberts, Jane, 40Robertson, Sherman, 177Rock and Rollin’ With Fats Domino, 157“Rockin’ Accordion,” 92Rockin’ Dopsie & The Zydeco Twisters,

180-81, 186, 217“Rockin’ Hop,” 81“Rockin’ the Bop,” 81“Rock Me (Baby),” 177“Rock Me Baby,” 166Rock’n’Bowl, (New Orleans, La.), 64,

185; see also Mid-City Lanes (New Orleans, La.)

Rock’n’Roll Gumbo, 155Rockwell, John, 166Roddie Romero & The Hub City All-

Stars, 7, 9, 73, 264-79Rodrigue, George, 69Rodriguez, Toby, 267Roger, Aldus, 67, 94, 119, 269; see also

Aldus Roger and The Lafayette Playboys

Rolling Stone, 112, 150Rolling Stones, 21, 80, 91, 118, 182,

277“Roll With Me Henry,” 84Romero: Eddie, 268; Jeff, 269; Roddie,

7, 9, 73, 264-89“Rooster Blues,” 91, 97Rosas, Cesar, 274, 277“Rosemary,” 152“Rose Mary,” 125Rounder Records, 28, 193, 235“Route 66,” see “(Get Your Kicks on)

Route 66”“Route 90,” 80, 97Royal Albert Hall, London, England,

126Rubin, Alton, 185; see also Dopsie,

Rockin’Rupe, Art, 81

Sahm, Doug, 242Saint Street Inn (Lafayette, La.), 255Salt Lake City, Utah, 196Sam Bros. 5, 189Sam, Leon, 185Sampy & The Bad Habits, 180Sam & The Untouchables, 23San Antonio, Tex., 113San Diego, Calif., 184San Francisco, Calif.: 76, 92, 110, 132,

134, 139, 166, 173, 177-78; Blues Festival, 173

San Francisco Chronicle, 110San José, Calif., 166Santa Monica, Calif., 184São Paulo, Brazil, 108Satriani, Joe, 45Saucier, Lafayette, 12“Saute crapaud (Jump Little Frog),” 202Savoy: Ann Allen, 74-5, 83; Joel, 255;

INDEX | 297


Marc, 46-7, 53, 75, 93, 96, 144, 172, 197, 199, 202, 222; Wilson, 205

Savoy, La., 75Savoy Music Center, 75, 95, 198, 202Schexnider, Warren, 242; see also

Storm, WarrenSchenectady, N.Y., 64Schneider: Phil, 65; Steve, 65Schwarz: Peter, 10, 193-95, 197, 201-

02; Tracy, 10, 194Scott, La., 186, 221, 228“Scratch My Back,” 91Sea-Saint Studios (New Orleans, La.),

162Seattle, Wash., 138Sebastian, John, 57Seeger, Pete, 128Seine River, France, 49, 157Semien, Wilton, 82Senegal, Donald, 210, 212, 217Sensational Space Shifters, 251; see also

Plant, Robert“Shake It Up,” 164Shearin, Kevin, 61-62, 65, 69“She’s About A Mover,” 113“Shirley,” 247Should Have Known, 263Shreveport, La., 63, 135Shrine Auditorium, Los Angeles, Calif.,

177Sierra Sound Laboratories, 117Silver Jubilee: The Best of Zachary Rich-

ard, 229Simien: “Rockin’” Sidney, 86, 181;

Terrance, 180-81, 185-86Simoneaux, Harry, 50, 150Simon, Paul, 73, 165, 181, 210Sims, Frankie Lee, 81Sinegal: Greta, 216; Inolia, 216; Paul

“Lil Buck,” 4, 7, 17, 25, 89-91, 115, 135-37, 139, 142, 145, 148-49, 152-54, 162-65, 167, 169, 181, 187, 206-17, 251, 271, 275, 281

Sings The Blues, 125Sledge, Percy, 63

Slide Supernatural, 45Sliman Theater, New Iberia, La., 41, 51,

54-55Slim Harpo, 91, 97, 111, 242Slim’s Y-Ki-Ki (Opelousas, La.), 70, 96Smith: Michael P., 151; Pinetop, 132,

157 Smithsonian: Folklife Festival, 68;

National Museum of American History, 78

Snake Bite Love, 229Soileau: Floyd, 113, 150, 168; Leo,

130, 157; studio, 153SOLA Violins, 258Solo, 250Sonet Records, 175Sonnier, Jo-El, 57, 64, 275Sonny’s Krewe, 45Sound of the Swamp: Excello Records

(Vol. 1), 250Southern University, 135South of I-10, 7, 33, 35, 37, 44Spann, Otis, 134Sparkle Paradise Club (Bridge City,

Tex.), 116, 137Specialty (record label), 10, 12, 81, 82,

87, 88, 102, 103, 105, 131Spin Magazine, 185Spitzer, Nick, 195“Squeeze Box Boogie,” 87Squeeze Box Boogie, 166“Standing On The Corner,” 88Staples, Mavis, 21, 29, 187Steady Rock, 189Stellio, Alexandre, 52Stevens, Pete, 61-62, 64, 69Steve Riley & The Mamou Playboys,

190-205; see also Mamou PlayboysSt. Francis of Assisi Church (Houston,

Tex.), 120St. Julien, Robert, 80, 104-05, 110,

116-17, 119, 126, 128, 145, 148-49, 153-54, 156, 163, 165, 169, 174-75, 178, 187, 210

St. Landry Parish, La., 179St. Malachy’s Parish (Calif.), 182, 184St. Martin Horns, 242-43

St. Martin Parish, La., 137, 247, 267St. Martinville, La., 132-33, 137, 185,

187, 221, 275“Stop and Think It Over,” 113Storm, Warren, 91, 150, 200, 241,

243, 246-48, 250, see also Warren Schexnider

St. Paul, Minn., 65Strachwitz, Chris, 100-05, 109-10, 113,

117-18, 126, 128, 132-34, 142, 148, 282

Strong, Barrett, 111Studio in the Country, 92, 154, 175Sud du Sud, 204“Sugar-Coated Love,” 91Sunset, La., 78Super Bowl, 49Swallow Records, 104Swamp Pop: Cajun and Creole Rhythm

and Blues, 250Swampwater Saloon, 246Sweet Cecilia, 255, 256“Sweet Little Angel,” 126“Sweet Little Doll Zydeco (Cher

Catin),” 112Sydney, Australia, 108

“Take Off Your Dress,” 163Talking Heads, 247“Talle D’Eronces,” 68Tampa, Fla., 67Tampa Red, 118, 121“Tante Na Na,” 163Taylor, Koko, 177Teach for America, 258“Tell Me,” 81“Tequila,” 166Texaco, 78-79, 85Texas Southern University, 168Texas State Historical Association, 101Texino, Bozo, 145Tharp, Al, 51, 54-57“That Feel,” 246“That Was Your Mother,” 181The Alley Boys, 53The Balfa Family: A Retrospective live

from Festivals Acadiens et Créoles, 263

The Band, 36The Band Courtbouillon, 204-05The Basile Boys, 68The Beatles, 113, 187The Best of Louis Jordan, 97The Big Easy, 49, 154, 179-80“The Big Wheel,” 88The Bill Landry Orchestra, 259“The Black Eagle Two-Step,” 53The Blasters, 182The Bluebirds, 64The Blue Moon Club, 87The Buck Starts Here, 209, 214, 216The Cajun Aces, 144The Cajun Hee-Haw Band, 200The Caterie, Baton Rouge, La., 198“The Cats Dreamin,” 87The Champs, 166The Coasters, 133The Commodores, 168The Complete Early Recordings 1929-

1930 (Dennis McGee), 97“The Crawl,” 78, 97The Dipsy-Doodle Club (Grand Bois,

La.), 143The Dixie Cups, 180The Eunice Playboys, 180The Fabulous Thunderbirds, 145“The Fat Man,” 277The Fire Next Time, 66“The Flames of Hell,” 93The Flatlanders, 233“The Giving Tree,” 267The Golden Gate Quartet, 165The Goners, 37, 40The Gypsy Club, 137The Happy Hour (Lafayette, La.), 115“The Honeydripper,” 78, 97“The Hucklebuck,” 139, 157The Jackson 5, 185The Kingfish (Baton Rouge, La.), 162“The King of Zydeco,” 185The King of Zydeco DVD, 81, 161, 178,

188The King of Zydeco Live at Montreux,

INDEX | 299


148, 157, 216The Kinks, 91The La Louisianne Sessions, 275-76The LeRoi Brothers, 66The Louisiana Ramblers, 93The Lucky Playboys, 69Them, 91The Magnolia Sisters, 255, 258The Mallet Playboys, 180The Mamou Playboys, 7, 10, 17, 186,

191, 193, 195, 198, 199, 200, 203, 204, 205, 217, 241, see also Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys

The Meters, 214The Midnighters, 84, 86The Moody Blues, 91The Neville Brothers, 180, 185The New York Concerts, 203“The Night Time (Is The Right Time),”

148, 167The Old Man, 69The Phoenix Learning Group, 162The Police, 262The Portable Plato, 40The Promised Land: A Swamp Pop Jour-

ney, 250-51“There’s Something on Your Mind,”

157The Rhythm of The Saints, 181The Riptides, 64The Rising Sun Club (Montreal, Cana-

da), 166The Rock Shop, 64The Rodair Club (Port Neches, Tex.),

115-16The Sam Brothers Five, 185, 189The Scott Playboys, 197The Shadows, 200The Sir Douglas Quintet, 113The Spirit of Cajun Music, 49, 51The Surfaris, 64The Swampwater Saloon (Lafayette,

La.), 243“The Things I Used To Do,” 81The Topcats, 209-10, 217The Traiteurs, 16, 45“The U.S.S. Zydecoldsmobile,” 40

The Velvet Underground, 177“The Wallflower (Dance With Me,

Henry),” 82The Wandering Aces, 201The Waterboys, 214The Wild Magnolias, 155The Wild Tchoupitoulas, 180“They Call Me Crazy,” 92, 178They Call Us Wild, 155The Zydeco Ramblers, 87Thibodeaux: Ambrose, 128; Gladius,

194; Rufus, 10, 53, 144“Things Ain’t Like They Used To Be,”

119“Think It Over,” 97“This Should Go On Forever,” 91, 150Thistlethwaite, Anthony, 214“This Train,” 30Thomas and Thomas Club, Leonville,

La., 137Thompson, Richard, 50Thornton, “Big Mama,” 12, 165Thriller, 177“Time Is Tight,” 182Times of Acadiana, 248“Ti Na Na,” 152, 157Tipitina’s, 179, 246Tommy Comeaux Memorial Endowed

Chair in Traditional Music, Uni-versity of Louisiana at Lafayette, 45

“Ton Na Na (Aunt Na Na),” 130TopPop, 155Torrence, Lionel; see Prevost, LionelToups, Wayne, 119, 199, 205, 275Toussaint, Allen, 209, 214-15, 217“Tout Chacun Apres Parler (Everyone Is

Talking),” 174Toys for Tots, 69 Tradition Music Company, 118Trahan, Horace, 206, 260Tramp’s, New York, N.Y., 28Trapp, Guthrie, 53Tribute to Cajun Music, 67, 144, 148Triple Threat Revue, 145“Trouble In Mind,” 126Tucker, Tommy, 167, 189Tulane University, 128, 228

“Tu Le Ton Son Ton,” 130, 162, 186“Tu Le Ton Son Ton (Every Now And

Then),” 129“Tu Peux Cogner (Mais Tu Peux Pas

Rentrer) (Keep A-Knockin’ [But You Can’t Come In]),” 155

Turner, Big Joe, 135“Turning with the Century,” 40“Tutti Frutti,” 88Twenty Years of Trouble, 69

U2, 21, 187Ultrasonic Studios (New Orleans, La.),

168United Gamefowl Breeders Association,

61United States Collegiate Wind Band,

259University of Louisiana at Lafayette,

4, 45, 53, 76-7, 84, 90, 127, 142, 212, 237, 261, 274, 282

University of Southwestern Louisiana, 142, 144

Upchurch, Phil, 153, 157Usie, Gary, 267, 274

Valcour Records, 255Valens, Richie, 277Vancouver, British Columbia, 116, 138Vanguard (record label), 40Van Zandt, Townes, 149Vaughan, Stevie Ray, 145, 177, 270Vent d’Été, 226Ventures, 35Verbum Dei High School (Watts,

Calif.), 182Vermilion Parish, La., 113Vermilionville Performance Center, 25Verret, Errol, 16, 36, 57Viator, Chad, 267, 274Victor, Antoine, 129-30Vidrine, Randy, 260Vietnam War, 227Ville Platte, La., 95, 104, 113, 150, 153

Vincent, Gene, 248Vive L’Amour, 263“Voices of Americana,” 114Voyageurs, 204

Waits, Tom, 246Walker: Lawrence, 50, 242, 269, 275;

Phillip, 82, 87; T-Bone, 79, 84, 86, 88

“Walking to Louisiana,” 118-19“Walking to New Orleans,” 118, 121Wally Heider Studios (San Francisco,

Calif.), 139Walter Mouton & The Scott Playboys,

197Ware, Billy, 51-2, 54, 56Warnes, Jennifer, 36Washington, D.C., 68Watson, Cedric, 69Way Down in Louisiana, 44Webster, Katie, 91-2Wein, George, 128Welk, Lawrence, 109“Well, I Done Got Over It,” 81Welsh, La., 79“What Am I Living For,” 175“What’d I Say,” 111, 178“Where Can My Baby Be?,” 88Where There’s Smoke There’s Fire, 30White, Michael, 50, 52“Who Can Your Good Man Be (Brown

Skin Woman),” 129“Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” 270“Why Did You Go Last Night,” 103William Club (Lafayette, La.), 90, 137Williams: Hank, 80, 97; Lucinda, 251;

Nathan, 187; Paul, 139, 157; Winston, 29

Willis, Chuck, 175“Will The Circle Be Unbroken?,” 185Wilson, Russ, 110Wimmer, Kevin, 205Winnie, Tex., 113Winston, George, 155“Wipe Out,” 64Womack, Bobby, 25

INDEX | 301


Wonder, Stevie, 69World Acadian Congress, see Congrès

Mondial Acadien“Worried Life Blues,” 92, 126“Wrap It Up (Zydeco),” 126“Wrap It Up Zydeco,” 120

“Yesterday (I Lost My Best Friend),” 87

Yoakam, Dwight, 21, 187“You Can’t Sit Down,” 153, 157You Don’t Know Your Mind, 68“You Got Me Walking On The Floor

(Good Hearted Man),” 126“You’ll Lose A Good Thing,” 113Young, Neil, 10“You Promised Me Love,” 128“You’re Fussin’ Too Much,” 139, 149“You’re My Mule,” 134“You’re The One For Me,” 139“You Used To Call Me,” 153-54

“Za Belle,” 79Zack’s Bon Ton, 73“Z’Haricot Est Pas Salé,” 186“Zodico Stomp,” 87“Zodico Two-Step (Zydeco Two-Step,

French Two-Step),” 129ZydeCajun, 119Zydeco Blues, 92“Zydeco Cha Cha,” 139Zydeco Cha Chas, see Nathan Williams

& The Zydeco Cha Chas“Zydeco Disco,” 176Zydeco Dynamite, 79, 89, 97, 150, 186,

189“Zydeco Est Pas Salé,” 128 “Zydeco Et Pas Salé,” 126, 187Zydeco Festival (Plaisance, La.), see

Original Southwest Louisiana Zydeco Music Festival (Plaisance, La.)

Zydeco Force, 186Zydeco Gumbo, 17, 182Zydeco Legend!, 179

Zydeco Shoes: A Sensory Tour of Cajun Culture, 69

“Zydeco Sont Pas Salé,” 71, 73, 94, 101, 105, 149, 174

Zynn (record label), 91-3ZZ Top, 78

This book is about the mysteries of soul—and the magic born when you make music from your heart. With Clifton Chenier’s amazing life and career as the centerpiece, this collection of profiles gathered across two decades unites some of the world’s most innovative creative forces.

The propulsive, soulful sounds of Buckwheat Zydeco, the virtuosic blues-rock of Sonny Landreth, and the accordion-and-fiddle-driven bayou backbeat of BeauSoleil were all birthed in Cajun and Creole country, a place where tradition and innovation rub against one another from the kitchen to the festival stage.

Singer-songwriter, poet, and activist Zachary Richard; traditionalists-turned-innovators Steve Riley & The Mamou Playboys; and cross-genre artists Roddie Romero & The Hub City All-Stars are among the many gifted players spearheading their cultures’ ongoing reinventions. In words, images, and music, the lives of these artists and culture-bearers speak volumes about the power of identity, influence, perseverance, and triumph. From Lil’ Band O’ Gold to Bonsoir, Catin and beyond, these artists make music that resonates in the hearts of listeners everywhere.

These are their stories.

Documents

Clifton Chenier & The Red Hot Louisiana Band