Zydeco: Still Cookin’ by Dr. Tsitsi Jaji
Hard times. Lean times. Making a way out of no way, and a celebration out of a hill of beans. Say, if things are so tight you can’t afford to add salt pork to the beans. You lament it, but you boil those beans and share them anyways, make a feast and a poem out of that sorry heap of nothing. “Les haricots sont pas salés.” [Lez aricoh sohn pah saleh]. Say it fast — the beans aren’t even salted. Les haricots, z’harico, zarico, zorico, zodico, zologo, zotticoe, zydeco. This is the music of Black Creoles in Southwest Louisiana, but it is also a music that perfectly reflects what a broader process of creolization as cultural cross-pollination looks, feels, and sounds like. Music of encounter, of intimacy, of shared ideas swapping back and forth, of adding elements that accrete into a rich mix like a deeply layered gumbo. Zydeco was also a code-word for a get-together – using an oblique name meant it was possible to invite only those in the know, the other side of the rent-party coin.
150 miles west of New Orleans, in Lafayette, Opelousa and the swampy surrounds, the music that eventually came to be known as zydeco harked back to influences from a century or more. Black Creole performers like the path-breaking button accordion player Amédé Ardoin (the first musician of color to record ‘French music’) traded ideas with Cajun musicians like his collaborator fiddler Dennis McGee, as can be heard on their 1929 recordings. Some early zydeco musicians preferred the terms French music, Push and Pull, French La la, accordion dance music, juré (solemn vocal music in a sung-spoken voice) or even rock and roll – all attesting to the importance of dancing to the social world the music made.
Zydeco reflects the densely layered linguistic heritage of the region, a unique product of historical displacements. French-based Creole languages show distinct waves of Acadian (Cajun) migrations from Canada following the British conquest of Nova Scotia in the 18th century and Haitian migrations in the wake of the 1791 revolution. And cultural influences on zydeco music came via English- and French Creole-speaking African Americans who had occupied the region since before the civil war (including some land owners), Native Americans, former slaves from the Caribbean and American South, Spanish, French and German settlers and merchants, Anglo-Americans and Cajuns. In fact, it is the diversity of these origins and dislocations that has made the region such a hotbed for musical innovation.
From the beginning, blending musical styles and instruments has been an important part of zydeco aesthetics, part of how a rural music became an urban phenomenon, and perhaps a reason why it invites listeners from so many different backgrounds. Early zydeco flourished in the 1930s after a decade of commercial blues recording, and at a time when jazz was ascendant and some similarities in instrumentation can be seen. One of the first musicians to identify as a zydeco (zodico) artist was Clifton Chenier, and in the instrumentation of his band in the late 1940s we see zydeco’s adaptive genius. Chenier’s virtuosic accordion playing combines with drums, bass, electric guitar, saxophone, and the frottoir (rubboard), a percussion instrument that shows an essential link between zydeco and the early blues. Chenier was responding to Cajun music’s shifts with the influx of hillbilly music in the wake of the oil boom. And he drew inspiration from the barrelhouse and stride piano jazz and rhythm and blues playing on jukeboxes and radios, bringing the virtuosic music of Fats Domino, Louis Jordan, and B.B. King into the soupy mix that would transform les haricots into zydeco. Journalist Ben Sandmel recalls how when blues guitarist Clarence Garlow recorded “Bon Ton Roula” as an R&B song in 1949, its “swirling rhumba rhythm with sensual horn arrangements and an eloquent guitar solo” drew listeners in, while the lyrics offered a window on Creole subculture that was, at the time, all but invisible to mainstream America – out in the country the good times were rolling at a French la-la party called the zydeco.
Zydeco’s recording history parallels those of earlier African American forms and particularly the blues, and the 1950s and 60s saw a great interest in field recordings that sought to capture the music as a folk form. Folklorists like John Lomax and his son Alan who had long collected black music and the market for African American blues music shaped the reception of zydeco. In fact piano accordionist Clifton Chenier’s first exclusive recording contract was with the folk label Arhoolie, which he joined in 1964. And when Chenier first performed in Europe in 1969 he appeared as a member of the American Folk and Blues all-star package tour. For other musicians, local identity and linguistic politics were driving motivations, and French-speaking Cajun and Black Creole communities emphasized the distinctiveness of local culture in the 1970s. Among those working in this vein were Michael Doucet, of the Cajun band BeauSoleil and Nick Spitzer, Louisiana’s first official state folklorist.
If Chenier is remembered for placing zydeco on the international map, Boozoo Chavis, known as the Creole Cowboy, is remarkable for his impatience with the ethos of the commercial music business, and maintained alternative ways to share his sounds. He withdrew from recording a decade after recording zydeco’s first popular single “Paper in My Shoe” and turned to raising race horses, only returning to performance in the 1980s. Boozoo Chavis was committed to live performance instead, preferring to play local venues on the “crawfish circuit” to keep the link between music and dance tight. Today, at a time when African American roots music groups like the Carolina Chocolate Drops have drawn new audiences to the intersection between African American music-making and putatively rural forms like country, Irish, and Appalachian traditions, Boozoo Chavis’s contributions are an especially important reminder of the deep heritage of rural black experience. His cultivation of a local audience and preference for recording entire albums in a single session, and his prodigious gifts as a song-writer all earned him a loyal following.
What has kept zydeco vibrant over the last three decades is the appetite of younger musicians who played with founding figures and forms to keep incorporating new musical styles into their work. Thus, Chenier’s protégé, Buckwheat Zydeco distinguished his own sound by incorporating elements of rock, synthesizers and trumpets and introduced zydeco to new audiences in the film The Big Easy. Rockin’ Dopsie did the same kind of cross-over work by appearing in Paul Simon’s Graceland project, and Beau Jocque perhaps brought the most systematic approach to this blend, studying what would get people on the dance floor most reliably and integrating rock, funk and reggae into his musical language as can be heard on the original “Give Him Cornbread.”
Today’s innovators continue to incorporate other Afro-diasporic musical styles into zydeco. Queen Ida, a long-time West Coast zydeco player, incorporates calypso and Latin conjunto stylings into her music, while Keith Frank and his Soileau Zydeco Band use hip hop and dense references to topical popular culture (using musical quotes to add humor just as the great jazz artists like Ella Fitzgerald used to do, referencing familiar tunes in unfamiliar settings to win a laugh). Frank is part of a generation –along with Rosie Ledet, and Geno Delafose, all born the same year, and each with family ties to some of the founding names in zydeco— of younger artists who show their devotion to the roots of the music through their continued mastery over the accordion while tapping new streams of influence.
While the vibrancy of younger artists speaks to zydeco’s bright future, its staying power is rooted in its links to the broader African diaspora. The importance of the dance, a core feature of black music since the early ring shouts Samuel Floyd describes in The Power of Black Music, remains unbroken, and the accordion unique sound is the common sonic thread woven into the multiple dialects of zydeco as its audience continues to expand. Black musics in the Americas have always valued what Floyd called a “heterogeneous sound ideal,” savoring the way that diverse timbres, rhythms and melodic lines contrast rather than just blending into each other. Musical creolization is an endless process that has melded jazz with influences from Afro-Cuban, Latin, R&B, fusion, Classical Indian, West African and more, and we can be confident that new flavors will continue to enrich the stew of sounds that make up zydeco.