#Zydeco

[ghosthouseart]

peachtober day 18: SNOOZE

[image description: a black and white watercolor painting of two kittens asleep together. one is lying on its back with paws curled in the air, twisted around so its head is tucked against the other one's side. the second kitten is curled up in the top right of the frame. /end i.d.]

[haveyoulistenedtothisalbum-poll]

Tracklist:

The Boy In the Bubble • Graceland • I Know What I Know • Gumboots • Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes • You Can Call Me Al • Under African Skies • Homeless • Crazy Love, Vol. II • That Was Your Mother • All Around the World or the Myth of Fingerprints

Spotify ♪ YouTube

[musictyme]

Mardi Gras Season

[uzumaki-rebellion]

Have I put y'all on to that Willie Jones sound yet? My Black Cowboy playlist is popping this afternoon!

[dyscomancer]

This is a little out of left field, kinda off brand for me and specific to my area, but still. A very, very good person and critical figure in our local music scene was taken from us yesterday. This is really, really devastating for our city.

When these kinds of things happen I like to try and echo the voice of the departed as much as I can. So like if anyone is interested in broadening your musical horizons or hearing what music from my section of the world sounds like, it'd make me happy if y'all pulled up Feufollet's music and let his memory just exist a bit beyond our little corner of the swamp, at least for a bit. Would mean a lot

We often joke that Lafayette has 100 musicians but only 10 bands because everyone plays with each other. He was emblematic of that. Every person who has ever picked up an instrument in this city has an experience with this guy

[naptownblues]

Rosie Ledet and her father at the Western Maryland Blues Festival 2005. My photo

[yen-sids-tournament]

The Princess and the Frog (2009) v The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) v Aladdin (1992)

The Princess and the Frog: Randy Newman, who created the soundtrack, is from New Orleans and used his familiarity with the cultural sounds to really bring this one to life. How many composers at the time would have chosen to be influenced with Zydeco (we wouldn't have, but we are also very far from Louisiana altogether)?

The Nightmare Before Christmas: When Danny Elfman was looking for inspiration for this track list, he looked to the past. He turned to music half to a full century old including, Rogers and Hammerstein as well as Gilbert and Sullivan to name a few.

Aladdin: Alan Menken put a lot of detail into the musical themes for the different characters to make sure their songs gave a fair reflection of their true essence. For instance, the Sultan's has a lot of fanfare but is still on the comic side, and Jasmine's is sweet and sad because she lives a comfortable life yet feels so trapped by it.

[romanchacon]

On June 15, 1939 Zora Neale Hurston recorded "Uncle Bud," a bawdy song found all over the South that went on to become a Cajun-Creole Zydeco classic. Hurston explains, "'Uncle Bud' is not a work song. It is a sort of social song for amusement." One of the first documented instances of the song in print appeared as "O-Bud!" in a Texas Folklore Society publication in 1928, collected in Virginia ca. 1924, but Hurston likely first heard the song from black working men while she was doing folklore field work in logging and terpantine camps in Louisiana. It's an invaluable audible artifact from almost a century ago. And it's quite raunchy to say the least! At the end, either Stetson Kennedy or Hurbert Halpert, the Library of Congress folk collectors in that session, say with an audible grin, "I think that's a very valuable contribution to scientific recording."

[anakinsafterlife]

Music and Arts for Interview with the Vampire and other French-Enjoyers

I am so genuinely excited to find out that Zachary Richard, the Francophone folk singer from Louisiana, has released a novel! The story addresses the concerns of the American Francophonie with the story of a family wracked by politics and violence in the wakr of the American Civil War.

Friends, this the is the first American novel to be published in French since 1894! Although there is still a Francophone community in Louisiana to this day, they have been dealing with forced Anglicization for well over a hundred years, including the forced Anglophone education of Francophone children.

Zachary Richard remains an outlier in an largely English American cultural landscape. He wrote and recorded the majority of his songs in French and is popular in the international Francophone musical community.

I have been meaning to talk about Richard for a very long time, particular in the context of Interview with the Vampire. There are a good many cultural references in Interview, but unfortunately it seems that the show-runners are not really too informed about historical French arts because there aren't many references to French music or playwriting. Lestat would be more likely to act Moliere than Shakespeare. Louis would be somewhere in between, probably listening to and speaking both French and English songs. Unfortunately, I'm not too familiar with Black Creole musicians, of which there were/are indeed plenty in Louisiana. I've been meaning to educate myself in that area and post a selection along with my favourite tracks from Richard, but life has been very pressing indeed these last few years, so that never happened.

Here, then, are a few of my favourite songs from Zachary Richard and a few brief recordings from Black Zydeco artists, as well as the blurb from Richard's novel.

I didn't include translations, because that would make this long post long indeed, but Richard's lyrics are readily available in any search engine.

The novel:

Summary:

In the disarray that fell on southern Louisiana following the Civil War, André Boudreaux, seventeen years old, discovered life with his grandfather Drozin. This southern veteran, who became a rich man thanks to the arrival of the railway, tries to regain his prestige and his political power. But the sordid murder of André's uncle, the turbulent elections of 1882 and the political aims of his daughter-in-law will turn his world upside down. Les Rafales du carême is the first French-language novel published by a Louisiana author since 1894.

The music:

Dans les grands chemins. (On the big roads). A song about personal history and being drawn away from your place of origin to explore the wider world.

Au bord de Lac Bijou (On the shore of Lac Bijou). One of his bigger songs and very basic of me, but it's beautiful.

Le Ballade de Jean Batailleur. Again, one of his big ones, but it's a ballad about an orphan who grows up to be a criminal and dies alone. Depressing but gorgeous.

And this one gives me chills every time. It's a live rendition of Richard's song "La Promesse Cassee," performed with Celine Dion. This is hands down Dion's best performance ever, imho. Her voice is so nuanced and her expression so powerful, without ever once over-singing. The song's content probably has a lot to do with that. Richard wrote it in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when New Orleans was so utterly devastated, and the US federal government promised aid, which, after days of waiting, never came. "The Broken Promise" is a scathing and haunting commentary on that betrayal.

"Laisse le vent souffler" (Let the wind blow) addresses the same issue, but years later. The singer tells the story of the police arriving to evacuate the community as another hurricaine approaches. He refuses to leave because he has already survived other storms and he has seen how the police have failed to support a scattered community in the past.

Can't believe I almost forgot this one:

Reveille--A powerful song addresses the expulsion of the Acadians, the forced removal (by British/English Canadian forces) of the Acadian French from the Canadian east coast and northern USA east coast. Many of the Acadians were shipped further south or "back" to Europe, where most had never been. Plagued by attendant atrocities of starvation, drowning and disease, thousands of Acadians were killed. Those who survived the journey down the American coast eventually became known by the shortened name of "Cajuns."

There are also a few extra things here from Richard's YouTube, where he highlights other Louisiana French singers and musicians. I've only included a couple, but people writing for Interview might want to explore his page more, since there's some Black Zydeco (Louisiana folk and French) musicians there.

J'ai une chanson dans mon coeur:

I couldn't find anything out about this. A young, Black American girl sings this song in an American school. I think, and hope, that she's another member of the French Louisianian musical community. Very sweet.

Zachary Richard talking about his influences and earlier Zydeco music in Louisiana.

[dirtylowdown2]

All Night Long · Clifton Chenier

from Bayou Blues   ℗ 1971 Specialty Records

[mudwerksredux]

(via Paper in My Shoe - Boozoo Chavis (1990)

[randomvarious]

Today's compilation:

Cajun Spice 1989 Cajun / Folk / Zydeco

Well, folks, it looks like our first comp of this new year is taking us on a trip down to southern Louisiana, aka Acadiana, where Cajun music, in some form or fashion, has been a fixture of the region's culture since the latter part of the 1700s. And if you've ever wondered why Cajun people are called Cajuns in the first place, it's because they originally hailed from Acadia—what are now parts of maritime Canada, Québec, and northern Maine—and if you chop off the front 'A' from 'Acadian' and then say the remainder of the word quickly enough, what you'll inevitably end up saying is 'Cajun.' Simple as!

But why the Acadians didn't end up staying in Acadia was because of a terrible war, namely the Seven Years' one, whose resolution saw the French-speaking territory left in the hands of the British. The British then forced the Acadians into exile and a lot of them ended up migrating all the way down south to lower Louisiana, where, despite France having ceded the land to Spain by that point, they were still welcomed anyway.

So the reason why Louisiana has the most French speakers out of any other state in the Union, rather than the states that border the French-speaking provinces of Canada itself, is pretty much because of that period of Acadian migration. Pretty interesting, no?

But now we forge on to more modern times:

Although Cajun music predates Louisiana's admission into the Union, it didn't really gain much in the way of a national traction until the middish-1980s, which was a time that had also seen America writ large develop a fixation with Cajun food as well. And if you're going to really try to enjoy the cuisine, what better ambiance to pair it with than that same culture's music, right?

Which brings us to this little late 80s comp from roots and world music label Rounder Records here, who, in the earlier part of the decade, had really started to develop their own Cajun stable of artists. Rounder had released a few comps that consisted purely of both Cajun music and its sister genre of zydeco before this one, but all of those releases had originated from the 70s, and almost all of them also consisted of only two or three acts each. This 1989 release, on the other hand, Cajun Spice, was the first one from Rounder to be issued since Cajun music had really started to draw interest in the US outside of Louisiana, and the list of musicians on it was far lengthier too.

But now here's the bad news: it took until getting a few songs deep into this comp for me to finally realize, that out of every instrument that I've ever heard in my life, the one that I might have a most visceral dislike for is the accordion. And that might make my German ancestors furiously turn over in their own graves, but there is just something about the type of sound that emanates out of those strange contraptions that feels so extremely lame and corny to me. And I know that I'm probably not alone in feeling this way, but guess what the lead instrument in Cajun music happens to be. Yep, that's right. The accordion! 😩

Now, I'm sure it's one thing to actually go down to Acadiana and immerse yourself in the culture for a night of good fun, which would include getting down to this unique form of folk-dance music that's found a way to keep on existing, but outside of a setting like that, I don't think I wanna hear much in the way of accordion-led music ever again. At the very least, I've definitely had my fill of it for this year alone 😅.

But with all of that said, and despite my personal distaste for this stuff in general, I can still tell that the tunes on this album are very well-made. The musicians are clearly gifted and what they're playing is definitely infectious...if you can find a way to stand it, which I really can't. But if you're way more tolerant of a prominent accordion than I am, or if you already like Cajun music, or if you're just interested in hearing it for the first time, then I definitely recommend this album. AllMusic gave it four and a half out of five stars and I can definitely see why, because all of it is clearly quality stuff.

No highlights.

[mudwerks]

2:14 / 3:47 Queen Ida

(via Queen Ida - Bad Moon Rising)

[midnight-roses-candy]

TIL that there is a musical instrument called a vest frottoir and I cannot read the name normally.

Who wants to frot wearing the vest frottoir?

[lisamarie-vee]

[dopeboybluez]

Temple Theater of Performing Arts, Meridian, MS : DopeBoyBluez Lights camera action by A J Via Flickr: Dastranger - Dope Boy Bluez #louisiana #musicvideo #sircharlesjones #tksoul #kinggeorge #pokeybear #jeterjones #lebrado #Jwonn #dopeboybluez #kingrussell #darkangelproject #batonrouge #new #wendellb #adraingagher #omarcunningham #jefffloyd #tucka #wyldkyle #jaggededge #nubluez #SouthernsoulAwards