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Overview
There’s a musical kingdom in the American South that’s not marked on any map. Stretching from the prairies of Louisiana to the oil towns of East Texas, it is ruled over accordion-squeezing, washboard-wielding musicians such as Buckwheat Zydeco, Nathan Williams, Keith Frank, Terrance Simien, Rosie Ledet, and C. J. Chenier. Theirs is the kingdom of zydeco. With its African-Caribbean rhythms, Creole-French-English lyrics, and lively dance styles, zydeco has spread from its origins in Louisiana across the nation, from Back Bay to the Bay Area. It has influenced the music of Eric Clapton and Paul Simon and been played at Carnegie Hall.
In this remarkable and engrossing book, Michael Tisserand reveals why zydeco’s identifiable and unforgettable blend of blues and Cajun influences has made the dance music of Louisiana black Creoles so popular and widespread. Zydeco’s appeal runs deeper than the feel-good, get-up-and-dance reaction it invariably elicits and is intertwined in the music’s roots and rhythms, handed down from generation to generation. Here is the story of zydeco music. Tisserand goes on the zydeco trail to meet the major artists; he reconstructs the legends behind the music’s beginnings, offering complete biographies of pioneers such as Amédé Ardoin and Clifton Chenier; and he takes you into the dance halls and onto the front porches where zydeco was born and continues to thrive. More than a book on a musical style, The Kingdom of Zydeco is an exploration and a celebration of a distinctive American culture.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781628727999 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Arcade |
| Publication date: | 11/22/2016 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 416 |
| File size: | 19 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Buckwheat Zydeco is the stage name of Stanley Dural, Jr, an American accordionist and zydeco musician. His band, Buckwheat Zydeco and Ils Sont Partis Band, has performed with a large number of famous musicians from Eric Clapton (with whom he also recorded) and U2 to the Boston Pops, and they have appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman, CNN, The Today Show, MTV, NBC News, CBS Morning News, and NPR’s Weekend Edition.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Whats in a Name
On a June evening in 1934, as the day's lingering heat drifts through a pale-board Baptist church in Lake Arthur, Louisiana, a thundering music resounds off wooden walls and Into a microphone; it is sent in lines of cable through the door to a parked Model A Ford with its backseat removed and replaced with five hundred Pounds of recording equipment. In the car, powered by two giant Edison batteries, a weighted needle sculpts a groove in a spinning aluminum disc, The machine is recording a song about snap beans.
Engineering the recording is a Texas college student named Alan Lomax who, with his Is father, John Lomax, is braving the punishing heat of a Southern summer to increase the holdings of the new Archive of Folk Song in the Library of Congress. By this time, the elder Lomax has already made his name as a folklorist: his 1910 book Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads introduced such standards as "Home on the Range." In 1932, with support from the Macmillan Company, the Library of Congress, and the American Council of Learned Societies, he set out on a sweeping project of collecting more than ten thousand recordings of folk songs, many performed by Southern blacks. In 1934 alone, John estimated that they traveled thirty-two thousand miles in nine Southern states and recorded about six hundred songs.
Southwest Louisiana has not been an easy stretch, as John Lomax would admit in his annual report. The recording machine is always malfunctioning. Someone steals the tires from their car. Then they overturn their customized Model A and drench their clothes in battery acid. Alan Lomaxwould later recall that his father decided to stay in their hotel room in Jennings and work on his next book, allowing his son to test his fieldwork skills and college French among the Cajuns and Creoles of Louisiana,
But on this evening in Port Arthur, the church session is on the verge of completely derailing. The aluminum disc spinning, a group of young Creoles form couples and dance around in the church, and a man named Jimmy Peters sings a mournful tune about a woman whose man has not returned home before sundown—an ominous absence, considering the curfew that blacks once had to observe in the area. He walls, "Mon negre est Pas arrive"—"my man is not home" -accenting the negative Pas, heightening the sense of despair. It is a thrilling performance, but after Peters repeats that the soled apres coucher—"the sun is setting"-for the eighth time, the other singers in the church start to get restless and begin talking. One launches into a new song, and others soon join in. A nail is scraped across a rusty slice of metal, and the group launches into a giddy tune about wanting to marry but having no shoes and no money. Peters tries to finish his lament, then he gives up in disgust. Perhaps forgetting that the Library of Congress is recording his words, he starts yelling at his friends. "As it happened," Alan Lomax would later write In his Is notes for a reissue of the recordings, "a fight broke out at the peak of the session, and I had to pick up my machine and leave hastily, and thus was unable to find out more about this remarkable music at the time."
But before Lomax packs up and leaves the church, Peters manages to perform a song in an a cappella style today known as jure (from the French for "testify") or bazar (probably named for the church social where the music was often made). Against a fantastic background of howling vocals and sharp hand claps, he sings of a man who wanders the land with a ruined hat and a torn suit, too poor to see his woman. His lyrics date back to an old Acadian French folk song, but Peters adds a new phrase that will resonate for generations:
0 ye yaie, les haricots sont pas sales.
0 ye vale, the snap beans are not salty.
Peters doesn't explain what he means, but the Lomaxes will learn a possible source when they hear the line again in New Iberia, where a worker named Wilfred Charles performs an unusual song about sick Italians, and concludes with:
Juste des haricots dans la chaudiere,
Les haricots sont pas sales.
0! 0 negre! Les haricots sont Pas sales.
Put no meat, nor nothing else,
Just snap beans in the pot,
The snap beans are not salty.
0! 0 negre! The snap beans are not salty!
There is no salt meat to put in the pot with the snap beans. Like early blues musicians throughout the South, the Creoles in Louisiana are singing about poverty.
Many themes in contemporary zydeco lyrics are first heard in the remarkable performances recorded by the Lomaxes. On their journey in Louisiana they meet Paul Junius Malveaux and Ernest Lafitte, who play harmonica and sing "Bye-bye, bonsoir, mes parents" ("Good Night, My Parents") and imitate a dog in the song "Tous les samedis" ("Every Saturday"); today numerous zydeco songs include choruses of "bye-bye" or dog barks. Also in Jennings, Cleveland Benoit and Darby Hicks sing a haunting blues similar to the song Jimmy Peters couldn't get through, "La-bas chez Moreau" ("Over at Moreau's"). Their...
Table of Contents
MAP,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
FOREWORD,
PREFACE,
AUTHOR'S NOTE,
INTRODUCTION: Creoles and Cajuns,
1 WHAT'S IN A NAME,
2 SATURDAY NIGHTS DON'T COUNT,
3 THE CREOLE CROSSROADS,
4 LE GRAND CHEMIN D'AMÉDÉ ARDOIN,
5 A WALTZ CAN TURN TO THE BLUES,
6 THE KING OF ZYDECO,
7 CARRYING ON,
8 A ZYDECO SUCCESS STORY,
9 THE ONE-STOP,
10 THE HOUSE THAT "TOOT-TOOT" BUILT,
11 GULF COAST WEST,
12 CORONATION BLUES,
13 DOG HILL DAYS,
14 TRAIL NOUVEAU,
15 RIDING LOW AND ROLLING HIGH,
16 IT TAKES A WHOLE LOT OF CLIMBING,
17 RUNNING AGAINST THE FIELD,
18 THIS IS THE SOUND,
19 CONQUERED AND CONVERTED,
20 A NEW STAGE,
KEYS TO THE KINGDOM: Further Listening, Reading, Viewing, Dancing,
PHOTO AND LYRIC CREDITS,
