Excerpted from Way Down in Louisiana: Clifton Chenier, Cajun, Zydeco, and Swamp Pop Music by Todd Mouton, copyright © 2015 by the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press. Used with permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reprinted, reproduced, posted on another website or distributed by any means without the written permission of the publisher.
BeauSoleil’s Bayou Boogie: How the Cajun Dance Band Went From Pastime to Full-Time
February 1997
Before 1986, there was no such thing as a full-time touring Cajun band. South Louisiana’s vibrant musical traditions were bright threads in the fabric of the region’s culture, but the guardians of the flame all held day jobs or played most of their gigs close to home.
Then BeauSoleil avec Michael Doucet recorded four albums in one year. Allons à Lafayette is a stripped–down collection featuring the late Creole fiddler Canray Fontenot and resonator guitarist Sonny Landreth. Christmas Bayou is the ensemble’s rootsy seasonal disc. Bayou Boogie, a third artifact from this dynamic period, is an adventurous album featuring co-producer Sonny Landreth on electric slide guitar and co-producer Steve Conn on piano and organ. Belizaire The Cajun, a poetic suite of traditional songs, is the soundtrack to the motion picture of the same name.
And when BeauSoleil took the plunge, the nation followed. Chef Paul Prudhomme burned a redfish, The Big Easy hit the big screen, and the Cajun craze was born. Cajun burgers, Cajun pizza, and Cajun potato chips seemed to come out of nowhere.
And the Cajun house band – an alternately traditional and progressive Lafayette, Louisiana, ensemble named after an Acadian freedom fighter – became the band to follow.
From Johnson Bayou to the Seine, BeauSoleil has carried their unique sound farther than any other Cajun group. The band has performed and recorded with many since–departed masters of Louisiana French music, and its members’ side projects include a rootsy children’s album and appearances on “Down At The Twist And Shout,” a Grammy — winning single by country artist Mary Chapin-Carpenter. In January 1997, Chapin-Carpenter and members of BeauSoleil performed the song on national TV during the Super Bowl pregame show.
Beginning with the band’s first American release, 1978’s The Spirit of Cajun Music, BeauSoleil has mixed the spontaneous energy of innovation with the visceral power of tradition. The group’s first Grammy-winning album, L’amour Ou La Folie [Love or Folly], which was being readied for release when this story first appeared, incorporates swamp pop, folk rock, Caribbean jazz, and early Cajun and Creole classics. The disc matches originals, including the romantic, floating “Charivari” and the reflective waltz “Ma vie s’est arrêtée,” with a medley of peppy Lawrence Walker dancehall tunes from the 1950s and ’60s. Numerous guest instrumentalists including Richard Thompson, Augie Meyers, Michael White, and Harry Simoneaux are featured on the collection’s 14 tracks.
A metaphor for the band’s career, the album adds influences like building blocks to create a driving dancehall sound unlike anything else on the planet.
Bandleader, fiddler, and vocalist Michael Doucet is a product of the 1960s, and that era’s spirit of rebellion fueled his quest to preserve his musical heritage.
A college instructor dismissed Cajun and Creole music as little more than translations of Anglo-Saxon material around the time the young musician suffered a near-death experience in a car wreck, and those two episodes inspired Doucet’s focus on his musical roots. When he and his third cousin Zachary Richard visited France in the early 1970s, Doucet experienced a third revelation.
“We could speak French to peers, and the peers were like our grandparents’ generation as far as their philosophy,” Doucet explained at the kitchen table of his one-hundred-seventy-five-year-old Cajun home. “It’s so different. And their folk music is so special. But their folk music is not music that was recorded ten years ago. Their folk music goes back hundreds of years. Which it does here, but it didn’t have that lineage, per se, I mean the knowledge of it. So that really turned my life completely around. I said, ‘Oh, man, I know exactly what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna go back and find these roots in Louisiana, ’cause they exist.’”
The spirit of the American folk music revival of the 1960s had only grazed rural south Louisiana after pioneering Cajun musicians including Dewey Balfa and Bois Sec Ardoin were invited to play the Newport Folk Festival. “In France, it was like ten years later,” remembered Doucet. “They were having their French folk revival, and we were there. We were all playing on the same stage.
“And it was a very unique camaraderie, because of course France, which is surrounded by other countries, it’s a little island, a lot like Louisiana is to the rest of the United States. So it was a very tight–knit group. It was a very unique time that everybody remembers.”
In a coastal Louisiana watering hole fifteen miles west of Holly Beach, the seeds of BeauSoleil began to take root. Doucet, Bessyl Duhon, and Kenneth Richard were given a warm welcome at The Bon Ton Roulet bar in Johnson Bayou, and the group was christened BeauSoleil in 1976, the year of the United States’ bicentennial.
“The ideal of BeauSoleil from the ‘blue album’ [The Spirit of Cajun Music] on, [has been] to show the entire gamut of French music in southwest Louisiana, which is not just two–steps and waltzes, but the different artists and individuals who created those songs and different styles,” Doucet said.
“We did some things that were unusual in American music at the time,” percussionist Billy Ware recalled. The blond, pony-tailed musician shares responsibility for the band’s dynamic, heavily rhythmic sound with drummer Tommy Alesi. Over the years, Ware has incorporated the ’t-fer, frottoir, conga, timbale, vibraphone, cowbells, and shakers into the BeauSoleil repertoire.
“I collect rhythms,” Ware added. “It’s how I expand my knowledge of rhythms from other cultures, [and] that’s how I rehearse hand drums.” During a BeauSoleil rehearsal at Ware’s home, his computer’s rhythm library provided the basis for the multi–part percussion arrangement heard in “Danse Caribe.”
That song, and another on L’amour Ou La Folie, “C’est un péché de dire un menterie (It’s a sin to tell a lie)” feature traditional New Orleans jazz clarinetist Michael White.
Doucet and White first met two decades ago, and both men share a passion for early jazz. “We got together in the late ’70s to do this recording,” remembered Doucet. The eight-song session for Northern California’s Arhoolie Records, which featured the late Crescent City jazzman Danny Barker, remains unreleased. The musicians were trying to “meld the bayou sounds with, you know, the missing link,” said Doucet.
Ninety years ago, continued Doucet, New Orleans and the French Antilles had a lot in common. “They were playing traditional French songs—mazurkas, contradanses, exactly what we were playing here—but with a different rhythmic texture. The instrumentation included clarinet and violin, but it was the same source [for] the music.
“So Michael [White] and I are like a new generation of that. There’s a certain style of music that was created in Martinique around the turn of the century. And then in the ’20s, some of these people migrated to France. And one of the biggest proponents of that was a guy by the name of [Alexandre] Stellio and they call this music stellio. And so I wrote one and I asked Michael [to play on it] … So we’ve been planning to do this for years, and it just worked. And we played together at the [New Orleans] Jazz Festival last year and people just went crazy.”
Doucet connected another link in the Cajun-jazz chain while visiting ninety-something-year-old accordionist Octa Clark. The influential Judice, Louisiana, musician had seen legendary jazz man Bunk Johnson perform, and he played a tune from the early jazz band’s repertoire, “The Black Eagle Two–Step,” for Doucet.
“It was a lifetime quest,” said Doucet. “I was looking for the link[s] of the music. There was never a network drawn. In the ’70s, you could tell who was playing fiddle, where he was from, it was very obvious. And the connection was Lionel Leleux, because he repaired fiddles. The accordion [connection] was Marc Savoy [who plays, builds, and repairs accordions]. And you have to go through these people, and from that you find it. And that’s what I did. I went out to find the essence of French fiddling. The first grant I got, I mean, is from Bébé Carrière to Calvin Carrière to Dennis McGee. From Hector Duhon to Varise Conner to The Alley Boys to Lionel Leleux to Rufus Thibodeaux. [I wondered] where did these people learn? Where did the blues come into our music? Who put [in] the country? I had some great people pushing me, but it was because I had a vision of what this thing is, the ultimate understanding of our music, which I’m still looking for.”
“Michael’s the leader,” said multi-instrumentalist Al Tharp, who joined the band in the late 1980s. “But it’s not like he’s Guy Lombardo up there calling out parts.”
Tharp was the first non-native player in BeauSoleil, though the banjo player, fiddler, guitarist, and bassist is certainly a kindred spirit. “When I first heard BeauSoleil,” Tharp said, “I was attracted to them because the band had this kind of hard, in–your–face and, in a way, sort of older, pre–country feel to it.” The group’s sound, he said, had “a more modal, archaic edge that makes it sound more modern even though the roots were really older.”
Tharp had taken a similar approach to Appalachian fiddle music as a member of the Virginia band Plank Road. With BeauSoleil “it was a new batch of material,” explained Tharp. “But it had the same kind of feel and energy — it felt very familiar.”
The traditional musician both Tharp and Doucet hold above all others is Cajun fiddler Dennis McGee. “He came from another century,” Doucet said. “One conversation we had, I was writing this down, I said, ‘Hey Dennis, when’s the first time you saw a lightbulb?’ ‘When’s the first time you saw a car?’ ‘When’s the first time you saw an airplane?’ ‘When’s the first time you saw a woman in pants?’”
McGee and Doucet were close friends, and along with his longtime twin-fiddling partner Sady Courville, McGee played numerous gigs and recorded with BeauSoleil. “His playing is what I love the most about Cajun music, bar none,” said Tharp. “Dennis’s playing was just over the top. It was so wild.”
Longtime BeauSoleil accordionist Jimmy Breaux is another musician whom Tharp is amazed by. “Jimmy plays in ways that you think you hear notes that you’re not hearing,” said Tharp. Breaux gets lots of sounds out of his single- and triple-row diatonic button accordions by playing trills and numerous melodic embellishments. “It’s a technique that I’m totally stunned by.”
But the band’s career and the Cajun renaissance weren’t always glowing success stories. “The low ebb, to me, came about 1979,” remembered Doucet. “It was just crashing. You were hearing different kinds of music, it was not directed. Everybody was getting older, and Rodney and Will [Balfa] died tragically [in a car wreck] on February 6, 1979.
“Even the state’s history books were so bad — Acadians have one paragraph. Dewey and I had been working the schools together since 1977. We had this National Endowment [for the Arts] grant. And we had some principals that just refused to have us in their schools.”
But just fifteen years later, in theaters, barrooms, and concert halls, BeauSoleil became widely heralded as “The World’s Greatest Cajun Band.”
“I think we all kind of blanch when we hear that,” said Tharp. “If BeauSoleil has a trick, it’s because it’s all very organic. There’s nothing artificial about it. It’s just a bunch of guys getting up there and playing how they feel. It’s not a matter of being ‘best,’ it’s just a matter of being honest. For me, that’s what communicates the energy to people.”
David Doucet by © Terri Fensel
Michael’s brother David is the sixth musical innovator in the group. The first lead guitarist in acoustic Cajun music, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist David describes his influential approach in simple terms. “It just adds another dimension to BeauSoleil,” he said. “And it makes the songs longer for the dancers.”
Band alums like accordionist Errol Verret, accordionist and saxophonist Pat Breaux, bassist and mandolinist Tommy Comeaux, and others have continually driven the group forward.
BeauSoleil has opened for The Grateful Dead and played the Carter and Clinton inaugurations as well as about a dozen foreign countries and every state in the union. The group typically plays more than a hundred shows a year, but they seldom tour for more than ten days at a time.
“Maybe that’s why we’re still doing it,” commented stalwart drummer Tommy Alesi, “’cause we’re not burnt out.”
And L’amour Ou La Folie shows just how much creative energy the band still possesses. “This one goes way far back,” Michael Doucet explained. “And at the same time, it’s very progressive. It’s basically to show, again, how elastic this music is. I think everybody [in the band] had a chance to speak [on this record].”
“This is a wonderful time for Cajun music,” he continued. “You have so many young people who are interested in music. You have so much reinforcement of speaking French, of playing French music. It’s cool. And when we were doing this thing, man, it was like, ‘not cool.’ But that was perfect for us. Because I don’t think I would have done it if it was cool.”
But is the trailblazing fiddler and vocalist ready to be an old-timer? “Noooo,” he said with a hearty laugh. “We were always the rebellious ones. And I think we will always be. We can’t become complacent, it’s not in our nature. I’ll let somebody else do that.”
BeauSoleil by © Terri Fensel
Postscript
BeauSoleil has released several albums since this story first appeared, joining forces with the likes of Natalie Merchant and John Sebastian for 2009’s Alligator Purse. The band also picked up a second Grammy award for their Live at the 2008 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.
The ensemble continues to tour and record with bassist and fiddler Mitch Reed, who replaced Tharp, and sans accordionist Jimmy Breaux, who leads his own group. Musician and longtime touring sound engineer Bill Bennett regularly cameos on bass as well, and squeezebox duties are often handled by special guests including Jo-El Sonnier, or shared by band members Michael Doucet, David Doucet, and Mitch Reed.