OK, for those of you who may not know me, I am Karl Fontenot, and I am chief engineer of KRVS FM. At the time a lot of this Zydeco was done I worked for KUCG television in Opelousas. I first got involved in documenting some of the Zydeco in 1987, the first year that they actually brought a video truck out to Plaisance and three camera production on it. And I must give thanks to Buddha (Dan Hildenbrandt). Dan Hildenbrandt was the professor of television at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, or USL at that time. He's from Kentucky, and he just fell in love with Zydeco music. So that's the person who got all us students involved in helping him with television production. That's how I first got involved in helping him document Zydeco. And then after he left, I sort of took it over, and just began documenting everything I could.
Now it all started in 1987 when we did that truck shoot where we used three cameras to mix, and that's what you saw in the Clifton footage. and it brought back a lot of memories seeing that for me, because I haven't seen it very often. Although I have a lot of the master tapes, I don't look at them. And all of the close-up shots you see of Clifton Chenier just this big, you know Dan Hildenbrandt was directing it, and he just kept telling me in my ear, "Stay on Clifton, Stay on Clifton." And I kept moving the camera back to Sherman Robinson on the guitar, because he was doing such great guitar solos. But I guess we wouldn't have all of this great footage today of Clifton if Dan Hildenbrandt wasn't there, saying "Stay on Clifton, Stay on Clifton." Another interesting thing I saw in that video clip was, there always seems to be someone at Clifton's shoulder, during the entire performance. Most of the time it was two people standing there. On that song we saw just one. That person was J. J. Kanye. The other person who stood at his shoulder was sheriff Albert Zerangue. Now what they were doing there, I'm not certain, but they stood at his shoulder seemingly through the entire performance. They helped him on the stage and helped him off the stage. About an hour before Clifton performed at that festival, he was sitting in a recliner chair under the stage. We brought a fan from the video truck, and plugged in a fan to blow the cool air on him for that day. It was quite a historic day for that production. Now a lot of the other video production you'll see on this was done at the original southwest Louisiana Zydeco music festival in Plaisance. That's where for many years I acted as the producer—I would organize the crew, I would get the people, I would get the equipment. The zydeco festival would pay for the rental of the truck from Acadiana Open Channel. So we used exclusively, AOC's equipment for, I think, the first 6 or 8 years. And that's why we used three or four cameras to document everything at that festival. Now in the mid to late 90's, Paul Scott and I collaborated on shooting some documentary footage and a lot of the stuff you'll see on here that's documentary, for example, that Carlton and Preston Frank, I shot that with one camera on the gravel road in front of Preston's house. We were there to do an interview with Preston as well as Paul Frank, and Carlton Frank. And as we walked from Preston's house to Carlton's house, they carried their instruments. So we just had the idea, "Why don't you guys play something right now, while we're on the gravel road," and that's how that happened. I was standing there with one camera and shotgun microphone, and we captured that so that's one of the great moments that we found through all the footage from all the years of shooting.
So it had gone about 12 years that I had been involved in documenting some of this, and I really had no plans for what I was going to do with this footage, until we ran across Robert Willey, who was starting to compile stuff, and since he had facilities at the University and had the inspiration to do it, then I turned over all the footage I had towards this project. And this is what has come of it. I need to say thanks to Robert Willey for having the inspiration, compiling this, and completing it. Also, thanks to the Zydeco festival of Plaisance—Paul Scott in particular—for helping do all this stuff. Paul was there every year saying, "Let's get it done, let's do it", and I was there saying ,"OK! Let's get it done." That's how we continued it. And so to see this come to this end is incredible. It makes me proud, I'm glad to see it, and I'm glad to be a part of it. Thank You.
Karl's other production comments on DVD