Boozoo Chavis
Today, there are zydeco music festivals in Gloucester, England, Raamsdonkveer, Holland and on Beale Street in Memphis, Tenn. Each November, a week-long zydeco cruise sails the Caribbean with stops in Mexico, Belize and Honduras. Tickets start at $504.
As zydeco enjoys such festive and luxurious surroundings, one can easily forget that $504 was once a year’s wages for the music’s originators, the French-speaking sharecroppers of southwest Louisiana. In the early 1900s, these black Creoles, former slaves and descendants of slaves, escaped the troubles of the day with a “La La,” rural house parties when furniture was placed outside so music and dancing could take place inside.
In the 1950s, when those acoustic sounds of the accordion, fiddle and washboard were combined with the electric rhythm and blues creeping in from the radio and jukeboxes, zydeco was born.
This DVD, “From La La to Zydeco,” allows the musicians to tell that story with every squeeze of the accordion and every scratch on the rubboard. Robert Willey of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette has assembled snippets of live zydeco on its home turf, where pioneers and a new generation keep the tradition alive at various festivals and informal home gatherings.
The DVD contains many selections from the Original Southwest Louisiana Zydeco Music Festival, the first-ever such event that started in 1982 in a soybean field in the tiny community of Plaisance, La. A mere 400 showed up at the first festival to hear a handful of musicians play on a flatbed trailer. The crowd jumped to 4,000 the following year as thousands continue to attend an annual event that is now imitated across the globe.
Through the years, engineer Karl Fontenot of KRVS Radio kept a video archive of the Plaisance festival, segments he helped produce for the Acadiana Open Channel, a public access TV outlet in Lafayette.
Willey, along with students from UL Lafayette and South Louisiana Community College, used camcorders and a digital audio recorder to capture performers in their homes or at other festivals. Documentary footage from Les Blank and Dan Hildenbrandt was also used.
Their collective effort here provides much to enjoy and savor for history. A young, comical Clifton Chenier, the heralded King of Zydeco, is captured playing on the farm as his fingers effortlessly glide across his piano accordion’s keyboard.
There is also the sick, frail Chenier, playing, just a few months before his death, at the 1987 Plaisance festival. Chenier’s youthful grin is gone, but his zydeco has grown into an orchestrated, Grammy-winning groove that includes trumpet and saxophone.
Boozoo Chavis, who penned zydeco’s first commercial recording, “Paper in My Shoe,” plays “Johnny Billy Goat,” a much-imitated hit that would inspire a new generation of young Creole musicians to follow in the footsteps of their ancestors.
Zydeco’s rich family traditions are followed with the Ardoin family and patriarch Alphonse “Bois Sec” Ardoin, a cousin of accordion legend Amédé Ardion, the first Creole to record. Bois Sec’s grandsons, Chris and Sean Ardoin of the Double Clutchin’ Band, along with Dexter Ardoin, all show off the family’s talent.
Preston Frank and his uncle, fiddler Carlton Frank, go back to the La La days as they stand in a field playing “Pointe aux Pines.” Preston’s son Keith, a modern zydeco icon, along with his brother Brad and sister Jennifer, display zydeco’s modern influences with an accordion-driven version of the R&B standard, “Sweet Soul Music.” The entire Frank family, along with fiddlers Ed Poullard and Kevin Wimmer, pool their talents with a performance of “Tracks of My Buggy” at Festivals Acadiens.
Jude Taylor plays “Hassle in My Castle,” at home. His son, Curley, follows with “Monkey and the Baboon” at Festival International.
Other performers include Rosie Ledet, the Creole Zydeco Farmers, Zydeco Joe, Nathan and the Zydeco Cha Chas, Thomas “Big Hat” Fields, BeauSoleil, Geno Delafose, Corey “Lil Pop” Ledet and more.
As you watch this treasury of live performances, notice the everyday people dancing, smiling, working hard to shield themselves from the brutal Louisiana sun yet unable to stop moving to the beat. Just as in the old La La days, zydeco remains a music of the people, a chance to escape the blues of the day.
Chenier, Chavis, Carlton Frank, John Delafose, and other zydeco pioneers have died since these recordings were made, leaving many to question the music’s future. But as long as someone is playing “Johnny Billy Goat” on an accordion or dancing a two-step in Plaisance or Raamsdonkveer, Holland, the spirit of La La’s pioneers remains alive.
In this DVD, Chenier addressed premature rumors of his death with the declaration, “I’m in the B Class. I’m a be here.” Zydeco will always be here, too.
Herman Fuselier is the entertainment editor for the Lafayette (La.) Daily Advertiser newspaper and a music columnist with The Times of Acadiana in Lafayette and Offbeat Magazine of New Orleans. He broadcasts Louisiana music shows on KRVS 88.7 FM in Lafayette and KDCG-TV 22 in Opelousas.
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