Zydeco Fever In Lafayette
May 30, 2004
Submitted by Aaron Latham
New York Times
The horse picks its way slowly across the dance floor. On its back sits a very small black boy with a huge straw cowboy hat. The dancing couples gracefully dance out of the beautiful animal's path. The grass is bright green beneath the dancers' feet and the horse's hooves. Spanish moss hangs from the ancient overarching trees that provide a roof for this outdoor dance hall. Rows of okra grow nearby. I am deep in bayou country at a combination trail ride and zydeco hoedown. O, body swayed to music, O, brightening glance, how can you tell the dance floor from the cow pasture? In Louisiana, you can't always. Watch out, here comes another stallion.
I have come to this storied piece of Louisiana because I love zydeco music with its driving, insistent, you-have-to-have-a-good-time beat. But I've never visited its birthplace, namely Lafayette, and the constellation of small towns that surround it. I am looking forward to my first face-to-face encounter with zydeco, but I am also a little worried. I feel as if I am about to meet a childhood idol: excited but at the same time afraid of being disappointed. My hope is that live zydeco will be even better than the amateurish recordings I treasure. And live zydeco is blasting from an outdoor bandstand, scaring the horses and revving up the dancing bodies:
Don't mess with my toot toot.
Don't mess with my toot toot.
The dancers, many wearing spurs, are intertwined like nasty snakes curling around cypress trees. The dance ''floor'' is getting muddy: Dirty Dancing in the mud.
The party, this zydeco trail ride, is a regular Sunday event, which is equally about horses and accordions, saddles and rub boards, pounding hooves and dancing feet. The accordion -- but it's not your daddy's polka accordion! -- is one of the defining instruments in a zydeco band. The other is the rub board, which started out as a washerwoman's board but has evolved into a corrugated breastplate that suggests a zydeco knight. Or perhaps the Tin Man playing his own metal rib cage with spoons.
The accordion player and leader of the band is Chris Ardoin, a descendant of Amédé Ardoin, the best player who ever squeezed a box until he was tortured by racists on his way home from playing at a white house party. They ran over his throat with a wagon wheel so he could never sing again. Chris Ardoin is carrying on the name and the tradition. A little boy climbs up on the bandstand and starts beating out a rhythm on a glass pop bottle. He is probably an Ardoin, too.
There are two white people present. My friend Dickie Landry, a legendary Lafayette saxophonist, and me. Nobody cares. Nobody even notices. I count more than 150 horses, many with fancy tack, and two tackless mules. The riders have their own tack: cowboy hats, cowboy boots, spurs, and the air of latter-day knights. Lots of riding clubs are represented. Their names are emblazoned on their cowboy shirts or their T's. I see Brick Layer Riders (with a picture of a horse made out of bricks), also the Cow Lane Riders, the Irvin Cowboy Riders (suggesting puns), the Solomon's Riders and the Good Ol' Boyz Riding Club. At first, all these riders appear to be wearing six-shooters on their belts; then I realize they are actually cellphones in holsters. When the trail ride moves out, the zydeco band follows, set up on a zydeco wagon pulled by the two mules.
The live music is great. Even better than I had hoped.
Zydeco is a descendant of traditional Cajun music. Wanting to trace that intoxicating Z music back to its roots, I go looking for a Cajun band. And I find one at, of all places, a bed-and-breakfast. It is called the Blue Moon Guest House and is in downtown Lafayette. The Blue Moon looks like any other quaint B&B, with Victorian furniture and lots of quirky gables. Yes, it looks like all the others, from Maine to New Orleans, but it doesn't sound like the others. Approaching this bespectacled granny of a building, I hear a squeeze box screaming, fiddles freaking.
After paying a $5 cover, I circle behind the B&B and find the band in the backyard, set up on a small stage. The dancers prance on a small wooden deck beneath a sign that proclaims RINKY DINK DANCE HALL. (Sorry, no room for horses.) By now, many of these dancers have kicked off their shoes and are dancing barefoot.
Another sign quotes a line from a popular country song: I'M GONNA HIRE A WINO TO DECORATE MY HOME (to keep my honky-tonk hubby at home). Which seems to be what the Blue Moon has done out here in the backyard. There are colored lights and beer signs. I ask who stays here and am told itinerant daredevil underwater welders working for oil companies and French Canadians -- the Evangeline connection -- who come for the music. I also notice some elderly women watching TV in the Victorian parlor.
I begin comparing this Cajun band, the Bluerunners, with the zydeco band at the trail ride, ticking off differences. The zydeco band was all black. The Cajun band is mostly white. Zydeco bands have rub boards. Cajun bands have tinkling triangles instead. But both zydeco and Cajun bands have one thing in common: the accordion, the star instrument, their musical sun. This is not a big, heavy, piano-key, polka-playing accordion, but the push-button squeeze box, which is smaller and sexier and usually worn low at the crotch.
Cajun music is mostly sung in French. Today's zydeco is mostly English. Cajun music, like the French language, does not have much of a beat, not many stressed syllables. Zydeco, on the other hand, has a heavy American rock 'n' roll beat. It is fast, high-energy dance music.
Cajun music has lyrics like this:
Jambal-lie and a crawfish fry
and be gayo?
Son of a gun, gonna have big fun
on the bayou.
Zydeco songs have lyrics like this:
I'm a hog for you baby,
I'm gonna root around your door.
My friend Melinda Roy waits in a line to dance with the best male dancer on the Blue Moon dance floor. I am surprised that she is so good-humored about having to line up for a turn with John Hebert, the local acupuncturist. After all, she is a former star of the New York City Ballet, having danced for Balanchine and Robbins. When she finally reaches the head of the line, the ballerina and the needle man make a great couple. He adds extra moves, extra steps, extra variety, extra energy. The dance is a hybrid of the Lindy and, yes, Dirty Dancing. Dare I say it is hot as Tabasco, which is brewed nearby? Unfortunately, Melinda the professional, the ballerina, the Tony-nominated choreographer, loses her balance and falls on top of the accordion player.
I drive to nearby Eunice to attend a Louisiana tradition: a three-hour Cajun jam session in the Savoy Music Center. Jamming is in progress when I walk in. Listeners are busy eating sausagelike boudin and fried-pigskin cracklin's. And they are drinking beer and tequila right there in the music store. There is a custom: If you don't play an instrument, you are supposed to bring food or drink to the jam session.
There are perhaps 15 musicians jamming together. There is a single triangle and one piano. All the other instruments are doubled or quadrupled (four guitars) or sextupled (six fiddles). There are even three accordion players, which is almost sacrilege. There is always only one sun, one leader, one guy who thinks he is better than everybody else in the world. All those egos, and yet the Savoy music store doesn't explode.
''How many accordion players does it take to screw in a light bulb?'' asks Wilson Savoy, the accordion-playing son of the owner of Savoy Music.
''I don't know,'' I admit.
''It takes two. One to screw it in and the other to say he could have done it better.''
People are dancing right there in the store. What more do you need in this life? Today, Cajun music and its descendant, zydeco, compete in a kind of family feud, and the kid is winning.
Hungry to hear more zydeco, I drive to the Café des Amis in nearby Breaux Bridge. It features a zydeco breakfast with a zydeco band. There are lyrics like this:
Everything on the hog,
Everything on the hog is good.
Except the eyes, baby, the eyes ain't no good.
Down here in this bayou backwater, live music is everywhere and at all hours. Later, back in Lafayette, I stop in at a hotdog stand that has its own band and lots of customers. Moving on, late at night, I pop in at a reggae concert featuring my friend Dickie Landry on sax, held in an alley decorated with old tires and mop buckets. With dancers dancing up a storm on gravel.
Lafayette reminds me of Nashville. It reminds me of Rio. These are music-mad, music-saturated cities. In Nashville, they say the way to find a song writer is to order a pizza. In Rio cafes, everybody is beating out rhythms with spoons or shaking matchboxes. In Lafayette, everybody has two identities: insurance salesman/bass player, auto-repairman/accordion player, plumber/drummer, washerwoman/rub-board rubber. In this swampy corner of Louisiana, you are always your everyday self and your better self simultaneously.
On a Saturday night, I go to hear a band called Zydeco Trouble at the Hamilton Club. This club sits on a working farm in the middle of the city of Lafayette. The club earns enough money to make the farm solvent and to keep the developers at bay. I park along with a thousand others in a cow pasture.
''Big crowd,'' I tell the man directing traffic in the cow lot.
''This is nothing,'' he says. ''You should have been here last week when we had Keith Frank. We lost two cows.''
''What?''
''Yeah, the crowd was so big, nobody noticed somebody loading two of our cows into a truck and driving off.''
Inside the club, we find not Keith Frank but Curley Taylor, bandleader, who used to be a drummer but figured out that the accordion player got all the girls and glory. This is his first gig fronting a band and the joint is packed. It doesn't hurt that his father is the famed zydeco singer and accordion player Jude Taylor.
Zydeco tends to be a family affair. These bands are like family farms where the kids are put to work as soon as they can hoe a row or shake a tambourine. Cuts down on overhead.
Papa Jude introduces Zydeco Trouble. He is proud to have two sons in the band, one on accordion, the other on bass. He is even proud of the drummer: ''They say he's from me, too, but I just call him my cousin.'' Really a family affair.
I love the band and so does the crowd. They dance with such energy that the floor of this cracker-box building bounces alarmingly up and down. I reach up and press my palm against the ceiling as if I am Samson and can keep the whole place from falling down. The building survives.
The crowd is primarily black (many in cowboy hats), but there are whites, too. I notice an incredibly fat white man dancing with an incredibly fat black woman. I notice a black woman with no legs sitting in a wheelchair having a great time, always clapping. I even notice my friend Melinda once again losing her balance and falling on top of the wheelchair-bound woman with no legs. The ballerina turns out to be a bigger menace on the dance floor than horses.
Leaving the zydeco club, I know, one way or another, I'll be back.
Where to find les bon temps
To find out about zydeco trail rides, which always end in dances (you don't have to ride to dance) visit www.opelousas.info (click on Events) or www.theadvertiser.com/news (click on Aujourd'hui).
The Blue Moon Guest House is at 215 East Convent Street, in downtown Lafayette; (337) 234-2422 or (877) 766-2583; www.bluemoonhostel.com. Rates range widely, from $15 a person in a six-guest bunkhouse to $40 for a single in the Cowboy Room to $55 for two in the Bois Sec Room.
In the saloon out back, domestic beer is $2, imported $3, drinks around $4, with a $5 cover charge when a band is playing (a Cajun jam every Wednesday at 8 p.m. is free).
The Savoy Music Center, 4413 Highway 190, (337) 457-9563, in Eunice, www.savoymusiccenter.com, offers free Saturday morning Cajun jam sessions, 9 to noon. It is on Highway 190 between Eunice and Lawtell -- ''Just look for 40 cars lined up on the side of the road.''
Café des Amis, 140 East Bridge Street, Breaux Bridge, (337) 507-3399 (B&B) or (337) 332-5273 (cafe), www.cafedesamis.com, has zydeco breakfasts. About $8 to $10 for breakfast, plus drinks (bloody Marys, mimosas, about $4.50). Dates include the following: June 5, Curley Taylor and Zydeco Trouble; June 12, Lil' Nathan and the Zydeco Big Timers; June 19, Corey Arceneaux and the Hot Peppers.
The back alley where Dickie Landry sometimes plays is behind the Renaissance Club, at 425 Jefferson Street, in Lafayette.
For the Hamilton Club, 1808 Verot School Road, in Lafayette, take Evangeline Thruway (Highway 167) south from I-10; turn right on Pinhook; cross the Vermilion River bridge; go through three lights; turn right at the fourth light, on Verot School Road; go about 1.8 to 2 miles; Doug Ashy Lumber Company will be on the left, then a curve. Hamilton's is on the right (there's a lighted sign in front); $5 cover. (For information on what bands are booked when, check the local newspaper or Web sites above.)
Other clubs in the area worth looking into are El Sido's, Grant Street, Randol's, King's Ranch, La Poussiere, Whiskey River Landing, Slim's Y-Ki-Ki, Richard's Club and Frank's Ranch. Directions to all these can be found at www.arnb.org/Directions.html.
AARON LATHAM is a screenwriter, playwright and novelist.
May 30, 2004
Submitted by Aaron Latham
New York Times
 |
| Curley Taylor and Zydeco Trouble CD Release Party and Debut Performance at Hamilton's Place in Lafayette, Louisiana. (www.CurleyTaylor.com) Photo Credit: Liz Hernandez. Courtesy of the Zydeco Historical & Preservation Society, Inc. |
I have come to this storied piece of Louisiana because I love zydeco music with its driving, insistent, you-have-to-have-a-good-time beat. But I've never visited its birthplace, namely Lafayette, and the constellation of small towns that surround it. I am looking forward to my first face-to-face encounter with zydeco, but I am also a little worried. I feel as if I am about to meet a childhood idol: excited but at the same time afraid of being disappointed. My hope is that live zydeco will be even better than the amateurish recordings I treasure. And live zydeco is blasting from an outdoor bandstand, scaring the horses and revving up the dancing bodies:
Don't mess with my toot toot.
Don't mess with my toot toot.
The dancers, many wearing spurs, are intertwined like nasty snakes curling around cypress trees. The dance ''floor'' is getting muddy: Dirty Dancing in the mud.
The party, this zydeco trail ride, is a regular Sunday event, which is equally about horses and accordions, saddles and rub boards, pounding hooves and dancing feet. The accordion -- but it's not your daddy's polka accordion! -- is one of the defining instruments in a zydeco band. The other is the rub board, which started out as a washerwoman's board but has evolved into a corrugated breastplate that suggests a zydeco knight. Or perhaps the Tin Man playing his own metal rib cage with spoons.
The accordion player and leader of the band is Chris Ardoin, a descendant of Amédé Ardoin, the best player who ever squeezed a box until he was tortured by racists on his way home from playing at a white house party. They ran over his throat with a wagon wheel so he could never sing again. Chris Ardoin is carrying on the name and the tradition. A little boy climbs up on the bandstand and starts beating out a rhythm on a glass pop bottle. He is probably an Ardoin, too.
There are two white people present. My friend Dickie Landry, a legendary Lafayette saxophonist, and me. Nobody cares. Nobody even notices. I count more than 150 horses, many with fancy tack, and two tackless mules. The riders have their own tack: cowboy hats, cowboy boots, spurs, and the air of latter-day knights. Lots of riding clubs are represented. Their names are emblazoned on their cowboy shirts or their T's. I see Brick Layer Riders (with a picture of a horse made out of bricks), also the Cow Lane Riders, the Irvin Cowboy Riders (suggesting puns), the Solomon's Riders and the Good Ol' Boyz Riding Club. At first, all these riders appear to be wearing six-shooters on their belts; then I realize they are actually cellphones in holsters. When the trail ride moves out, the zydeco band follows, set up on a zydeco wagon pulled by the two mules.
The live music is great. Even better than I had hoped.
Zydeco is a descendant of traditional Cajun music. Wanting to trace that intoxicating Z music back to its roots, I go looking for a Cajun band. And I find one at, of all places, a bed-and-breakfast. It is called the Blue Moon Guest House and is in downtown Lafayette. The Blue Moon looks like any other quaint B&B, with Victorian furniture and lots of quirky gables. Yes, it looks like all the others, from Maine to New Orleans, but it doesn't sound like the others. Approaching this bespectacled granny of a building, I hear a squeeze box screaming, fiddles freaking.
After paying a $5 cover, I circle behind the B&B and find the band in the backyard, set up on a small stage. The dancers prance on a small wooden deck beneath a sign that proclaims RINKY DINK DANCE HALL. (Sorry, no room for horses.) By now, many of these dancers have kicked off their shoes and are dancing barefoot.
Another sign quotes a line from a popular country song: I'M GONNA HIRE A WINO TO DECORATE MY HOME (to keep my honky-tonk hubby at home). Which seems to be what the Blue Moon has done out here in the backyard. There are colored lights and beer signs. I ask who stays here and am told itinerant daredevil underwater welders working for oil companies and French Canadians -- the Evangeline connection -- who come for the music. I also notice some elderly women watching TV in the Victorian parlor.
I begin comparing this Cajun band, the Bluerunners, with the zydeco band at the trail ride, ticking off differences. The zydeco band was all black. The Cajun band is mostly white. Zydeco bands have rub boards. Cajun bands have tinkling triangles instead. But both zydeco and Cajun bands have one thing in common: the accordion, the star instrument, their musical sun. This is not a big, heavy, piano-key, polka-playing accordion, but the push-button squeeze box, which is smaller and sexier and usually worn low at the crotch.
Cajun music is mostly sung in French. Today's zydeco is mostly English. Cajun music, like the French language, does not have much of a beat, not many stressed syllables. Zydeco, on the other hand, has a heavy American rock 'n' roll beat. It is fast, high-energy dance music.
Cajun music has lyrics like this:
Jambal-lie and a crawfish fry
and be gayo?
Son of a gun, gonna have big fun
on the bayou.
Zydeco songs have lyrics like this:
I'm a hog for you baby,
I'm gonna root around your door.
My friend Melinda Roy waits in a line to dance with the best male dancer on the Blue Moon dance floor. I am surprised that she is so good-humored about having to line up for a turn with John Hebert, the local acupuncturist. After all, she is a former star of the New York City Ballet, having danced for Balanchine and Robbins. When she finally reaches the head of the line, the ballerina and the needle man make a great couple. He adds extra moves, extra steps, extra variety, extra energy. The dance is a hybrid of the Lindy and, yes, Dirty Dancing. Dare I say it is hot as Tabasco, which is brewed nearby? Unfortunately, Melinda the professional, the ballerina, the Tony-nominated choreographer, loses her balance and falls on top of the accordion player.
I drive to nearby Eunice to attend a Louisiana tradition: a three-hour Cajun jam session in the Savoy Music Center. Jamming is in progress when I walk in. Listeners are busy eating sausagelike boudin and fried-pigskin cracklin's. And they are drinking beer and tequila right there in the music store. There is a custom: If you don't play an instrument, you are supposed to bring food or drink to the jam session.
There are perhaps 15 musicians jamming together. There is a single triangle and one piano. All the other instruments are doubled or quadrupled (four guitars) or sextupled (six fiddles). There are even three accordion players, which is almost sacrilege. There is always only one sun, one leader, one guy who thinks he is better than everybody else in the world. All those egos, and yet the Savoy music store doesn't explode.
''How many accordion players does it take to screw in a light bulb?'' asks Wilson Savoy, the accordion-playing son of the owner of Savoy Music.
''I don't know,'' I admit.
''It takes two. One to screw it in and the other to say he could have done it better.''
People are dancing right there in the store. What more do you need in this life? Today, Cajun music and its descendant, zydeco, compete in a kind of family feud, and the kid is winning.
Hungry to hear more zydeco, I drive to the Café des Amis in nearby Breaux Bridge. It features a zydeco breakfast with a zydeco band. There are lyrics like this:
Everything on the hog,
Everything on the hog is good.
Except the eyes, baby, the eyes ain't no good.
Down here in this bayou backwater, live music is everywhere and at all hours. Later, back in Lafayette, I stop in at a hotdog stand that has its own band and lots of customers. Moving on, late at night, I pop in at a reggae concert featuring my friend Dickie Landry on sax, held in an alley decorated with old tires and mop buckets. With dancers dancing up a storm on gravel.
Lafayette reminds me of Nashville. It reminds me of Rio. These are music-mad, music-saturated cities. In Nashville, they say the way to find a song writer is to order a pizza. In Rio cafes, everybody is beating out rhythms with spoons or shaking matchboxes. In Lafayette, everybody has two identities: insurance salesman/bass player, auto-repairman/accordion player, plumber/drummer, washerwoman/rub-board rubber. In this swampy corner of Louisiana, you are always your everyday self and your better self simultaneously.
On a Saturday night, I go to hear a band called Zydeco Trouble at the Hamilton Club. This club sits on a working farm in the middle of the city of Lafayette. The club earns enough money to make the farm solvent and to keep the developers at bay. I park along with a thousand others in a cow pasture.
''Big crowd,'' I tell the man directing traffic in the cow lot.
''This is nothing,'' he says. ''You should have been here last week when we had Keith Frank. We lost two cows.''
''What?''
''Yeah, the crowd was so big, nobody noticed somebody loading two of our cows into a truck and driving off.''
 |
| Curley Taylor and Zydeco Trouble CD Release Party and Debut Performance at Hamilton's Club in Lafayette, Louisiana. (www.CurleyTaylor.com) Design Credit: Robert Ricks (www.RobertRicks.com). Courtesy of the Zydeco Historical & Preservation Society, Inc. |
Zydeco tends to be a family affair. These bands are like family farms where the kids are put to work as soon as they can hoe a row or shake a tambourine. Cuts down on overhead.
Papa Jude introduces Zydeco Trouble. He is proud to have two sons in the band, one on accordion, the other on bass. He is even proud of the drummer: ''They say he's from me, too, but I just call him my cousin.'' Really a family affair.
 |
| Curley Taylor and Zydeco Trouble CD Release Party and Debut Performance at Hamilton's Place in Lafayette, Louisiana. (www.CurleyTaylor.com) Photo Credit: Liz Hernandez. Courtesy of the Zydeco Historical & Preservation Society, Inc. |
I love the band and so does the crowd. They dance with such energy that the floor of this cracker-box building bounces alarmingly up and down. I reach up and press my palm against the ceiling as if I am Samson and can keep the whole place from falling down. The building survives.
The crowd is primarily black (many in cowboy hats), but there are whites, too. I notice an incredibly fat white man dancing with an incredibly fat black woman. I notice a black woman with no legs sitting in a wheelchair having a great time, always clapping. I even notice my friend Melinda once again losing her balance and falling on top of the wheelchair-bound woman with no legs. The ballerina turns out to be a bigger menace on the dance floor than horses.
Leaving the zydeco club, I know, one way or another, I'll be back.
Where to find les bon temps
 |
| Curley Taylor and Zydeco Trouble CD Release Party and Debut Performance at Hamilton's Club in Lafayette, Louisiana. (www.CurleyTaylor.com) Photo Credit: Liz Hernandez. Courtesy of the Zydeco Historical & Preservation Society, Inc. |
To find out about zydeco trail rides, which always end in dances (you don't have to ride to dance) visit www.opelousas.info (click on Events) or www.theadvertiser.com/news (click on Aujourd'hui).
The Blue Moon Guest House is at 215 East Convent Street, in downtown Lafayette; (337) 234-2422 or (877) 766-2583; www.bluemoonhostel.com. Rates range widely, from $15 a person in a six-guest bunkhouse to $40 for a single in the Cowboy Room to $55 for two in the Bois Sec Room.
In the saloon out back, domestic beer is $2, imported $3, drinks around $4, with a $5 cover charge when a band is playing (a Cajun jam every Wednesday at 8 p.m. is free).
The Savoy Music Center, 4413 Highway 190, (337) 457-9563, in Eunice, www.savoymusiccenter.com, offers free Saturday morning Cajun jam sessions, 9 to noon. It is on Highway 190 between Eunice and Lawtell -- ''Just look for 40 cars lined up on the side of the road.''
Café des Amis, 140 East Bridge Street, Breaux Bridge, (337) 507-3399 (B&B) or (337) 332-5273 (cafe), www.cafedesamis.com, has zydeco breakfasts. About $8 to $10 for breakfast, plus drinks (bloody Marys, mimosas, about $4.50). Dates include the following: June 5, Curley Taylor and Zydeco Trouble; June 12, Lil' Nathan and the Zydeco Big Timers; June 19, Corey Arceneaux and the Hot Peppers.
The back alley where Dickie Landry sometimes plays is behind the Renaissance Club, at 425 Jefferson Street, in Lafayette.
For the Hamilton Club, 1808 Verot School Road, in Lafayette, take Evangeline Thruway (Highway 167) south from I-10; turn right on Pinhook; cross the Vermilion River bridge; go through three lights; turn right at the fourth light, on Verot School Road; go about 1.8 to 2 miles; Doug Ashy Lumber Company will be on the left, then a curve. Hamilton's is on the right (there's a lighted sign in front); $5 cover. (For information on what bands are booked when, check the local newspaper or Web sites above.)
Other clubs in the area worth looking into are El Sido's, Grant Street, Randol's, King's Ranch, La Poussiere, Whiskey River Landing, Slim's Y-Ki-Ki, Richard's Club and Frank's Ranch. Directions to all these can be found at www.arnb.org/Directions.html.
AARON LATHAM is a screenwriter, playwright and novelist.
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