Tisserand, Michael The Kingdom of Zydeco ISBN 13: 9780380732388

The Kingdom of Zydeco - Softcover

9780380732388: The Kingdom of Zydeco
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A rich history of zydeco music spans the prairies of Louisiana to the oil towns of East Texas, searching for the origins of this uniquely American blend of African-Caribbean rhythms, Creole-French-English lyrics, and intoxicating dance beats. Original.

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About the Author:
Michael Tisserand's work has appeared in Offbeat, Musician, Down Beat, The Oxford American, and The Washington Post. An associate editor of New Orlean's Gambit Weekly, he has written liner notes for several zydeco albums, and contributes a zydeco column to Living Blues.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

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 Lomax would 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 mam, mais donnez-moi les haricots.
0 ye yaie, les haricots sont pas sales.

Oh Mom, give me the snap beans.
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:

Pas mis de la viande, pas mis a rien,
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...

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  • PublisherSpike
  • Publication date1999
  • ISBN 10 0380732386
  • ISBN 13 9780380732388
  • BindingPaperback
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages469
  • Rating

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