It began at a dance in a rented American Legion Hall in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. The music was advertised as zydeco. Zydeco? What kind of music was this?
On the stage a five-piece black band was hammering out exuberant, syncopated dance music with an irresistible beat. The lyrics were in French, or something that sounded like it. The band leader, dressed in white boots and suspenders, played an accordion. Another musician clanged spoon handles up and down a washboard-like metal vest hung over his shoulders. And interspersed with blues and boogie beats were waltzes and a sort of exotic, catchy two-step.
Wherever did this music come from? I asked drummer Nathaniel Jolivette, when the Buckwheat Zydeco band took a break. ”Lafayette, La.,” he announced proudly. I looked blank. ”You never heard of Lafayette?” he asked incredulously, and began enumerating the many charms of his hometown in Cajun country.
As he described it, the area was the fountainhead of unique music and food from two French-speaking cultures found only in south Louisiana, the white Cajun and the black Creole, whose music is called zydeco. Jolivette himself, a husky man of about 40 with a mane of black hair, did not learn English until he started school.
”Why don`t you come on down?” Jolivette encouraged, flashing a big grin as he returned to the bandstand. ”You won`t find what we got anywhere else.” Well, why not? I thought. My family (including three grown children) had never visited the South, and we all liked to delve into ”roots” music. Thus began our pilgrimage to a musical source in a remote spot near the Gulf of Mexico, and to a ”foreign” culture little known to tourists yet only a three-hour drive from New Orleans.
Driving west along Int. Hwy. 10 what we saw was mostly the poor, rural, hard-scrabble land of the region, punctuated by the tanks and towers of oil refineries at Baton Rouge on the Mississipppi. Scarcely a pillared veranda or magnolia tree here, but rather the weathered frame shacks and rusting trailer homes of farmers, sharecroppers, mechanics and others who struggle to survive in the area since the oil boom went bust a few years ago.
As we approached Lafayette, the unofficial capital of Cajun country, we turned on the radio and bounced to sometimes rollicking, sometimes plaintive Cajun tunes sung in the local patois. The words were a mystery. My husband speaks serviceable French, but what was he to make of a song like ”Tee Beck Doo” (which turned out to be about a ”sweet little kiss”)?
Lafayette itself is a city of 80,000, seemingly an expanse of shopping malls and fast-food eateries. There were Cajun-style restaurants, to be sure, and a re-created ”Acadian Villa” that offered a look back at 19th Century life when the Acadians (softened to Cajuns) regrouped in south Louisiana after being deported from Nova Scotia by the British in 1755.
We were interested primarily in the descendants of the French Acadians and their home-grown music, only recently ”discovered” and popularized by the likes of Paul Simon and Emmy Lou Harris and by the soundtrack of the film, ”The Big Easy.” The places to hear Cajun music at its most genuine, we were told, were the outlying dance halls. They dotted the roadsides of the 22 parishes of Acadiana along the southern coast, many of them in a 50-mile radius around Lafayette.
Even with directions to a rural dance hall, you can easily miss it. It is likely to be a slightly derelict warehouse-like structure with scarcely an identifying sign and possibly cows grazing nearby.
Had we spent our week in an ordinary motel, we might never have
”discovered” the area. Fortunately, we had chosen to stay at `Ti Freres
(little brother`s), a charming, 100-year-old bed and breakfast on the outskirts of Lafayette. There we had the benefit of tips from owners Peggy Moseley, a public school teacher, and her husband, George, a petroleum engineer.
Mrs. Moseley knew where to find a strange and bearded semi-hermit who claimed to dwell in the murky Atchafalaya swamp among the alligators and bullfrogs and would guide visitors on a ”personalized” swamp tour.
As a result, we were taken on a Sunday ”trail ride,” where we followed hundreds of spirited horses and their riders down miles of rural roads, then celebrated with a feast and dance in a ”cowpatch.” Mrs. Moseley was also a bit irreverent. The ”Civil War bullet hole” in the door of a nearby plantation house had not been there 10 years earlier, she revealed.
As for our musical quest, she recommended that we start with Lafayette`s new upscale type restaurant/dance halls which began featuring Cajun music when the style, long regarded locally as passe, started to be perceived by outsiders as trendy.
Though not as pristine as the down-at-the-heels roadhouses, the restaurant/dance halls offer top-notch local performers on weekday evenings along with typical Cajun dishes. Best known is Mulate`s, off the highway to Breaux Bridge, a few miles east of Lafayette.
Within its cozy, down-home confines-red-and-white checkered cloths on long, family-style tables-we heard venerable accordionist Octa Clark and fiddler Hector Duhon, looking like someone`s grandfathers, crank out exuberant two-steps and lilting waltzes as they have been doing together for 55 years.
The rhythm was unmistakable. It was no effort to swing around the dance floor with the crowd, a zestful, even raucous group who took to heart the Cajun motto, ”Laissez les bons temps rouler” (”Let the good times roll”). Entire families were munching on fried catfish and stuffed crab, washed down with cold beer. Conversations were an animated jumble of patois and English.
Another of the weekday shows was at Randol`s in Lafayette, a greenhouse during the day and dance hall at night. There we sat at tables covered with butcher paper and sucked the juicy tailmeat from spicy boiled crawfish-the
”mudbug” of the bayous-served up in 3 1/2-pound portions.
A little girl bounced in a tricky two-step with her father as we listened to the infectious music of the Cankton Express, another basic Cajun band consisting of wheezing squeezebox accordion, keening fiddle, guitar and triangle.
Sterling Richard, 27, sang in the characteristic high-pitched, anguished nasal wail known as the Cajun holler. When we asked the intense young man why Cajuns adopted that style, he explained, ”We have so much sorrow we just have to holler.”
Indeed, except for the years of the oil boom in the 1970s, life has been a hard existence in the prairies and bayous of south Louisiana. For 200 years the French Catholic refugees from Nova Scotia have lived an impoverished and isolated life in the backwater of this former French colony. Until recently, they were scorned by Louisiana`s Anglos as country bumpkins, and Cajun children were forbidden to speak French dialect in the schools.
The black French-speaking inhabitants of the area share a tragic heritage: Their ancestors were torn from homes in West Africa and sold as slaves to Louisiana plantation owners. Zydeco-the musical form developed by the black Creoles-has in common with Cajun music the accordion, the waltzes and two-steps and the French dialect, but there the similarity ceases.
Zydeco, according to Stanley ”Buckwheat” Dural Jr., leader of the Buckwheat Zydeco band, is ”a little blues, a little rock `n` roll, a little jazz, mixed all together in a gumbo.” The word zydeco is thought to be a corruption of ”les haricots,” as in the old song, ”Les haricots sont pas sale”-the snapbeans aren`t salty, meaning there was no money for salt pork to cook with them.
In Louisiana, blacks and whites do not usually patronize each other`s night spots, but we were resolved to hear zydeco on its own turf. After having driven past without noticing it for days, we saw a sign with movable orange plastic letters-the kind used to advertise cockfights and used furniture-on a garage-like structure up the road from `Ti Freres. The locale was Hamilton`s Place, and Sampy and the Bad Habits was performing Saturday night.
A big boxy roadhouse, set on stilts to keep it off the swampy ground, Hamilton`s Place was pretty much a bare hall, but at the door they were charging $5.50 a person admission. Perhaps because of this, the patrons were mostly middle-aged and well-dressed. The women wore satin and ruffles, and many of the men had on cowboy boots and hats.
Sampy`s was a big band: several drummers, two guitars, a bass and plenty of amplification, in addition to the accordion and metal rub-board. The music was very fast and syncopated.
No one paid much attention to us nor appeared to note our failure to master the intricate steps being executed on the dance floor. That we were, in fact, noticed was made clear at the following day`s trail ride. There some weekend cowpunchers assured us that we`d kept good time with the music and expressed delight at my husband`s ”Parisian French.”
Times are changing in Cajun country. In the months since we heard Buckwheat Zydeco at a rented hall, the band has started performing in some of the nation`s hippest clubs and put out an album, ”On a Night Like This,”
rated among the top 10 by a New York reviewer.
Louisiana tourism officials are starting to display the formerly reviled local culture like a once-buried treasure. But despite the thriving Cajun pride movement, south Louisiana is still basically uncommercialized and unspoiled. Seeking out its native music is likely to be an adventure for some time to come.
