How a Housewife Became Queen Ida, Evangelist of Zydeco

Ida Guillory remembers the day her mother brought the accordion home, even though it wasn’t meant for her.

Today, Guillory is Queen Ida, a folksy, robust woman of 58 with a rich, hawing laugh, six grandchildren and a secure domain: In the world of the pulsing black Cajun dance music known as zydeco, she is one of the most prominent bandleaders.

Back in the late 1940s, she was Ida Lewis, a San Francisco teen-ager, the fourth of seven children in a family that recently had pulled up its Louisiana roots to seek a better living in California.

Ida’s mother brought back the accordion after visiting her kin in Louisiana’s Cajun country. To Elvina Lewis, the gift from back home, with its double row of buttons for squeezing out notes, wasn’t just a plaything for her kids. It was, she hoped, a musical link to rural traditions that her family had left half a continent behind.

Actually, as Guillory recalled recently in an interview from her home in Daly City on the San Francisco Peninsula, her mother was counting on the boys in the family to learn the old songs and uphold the heritage of Louisiana’s French-speaking blacks. “Don’t let it die,” she told them.

But it was Ida who--in an improbable, late-blooming rise--took up the accordion in her 30s, performed in public for the first time at 44 and won instant acclaim as Queen Ida, the first female regent of the zydeco accordion. The attributes of this queen include a rough, amber voice, a simple but sprightly instrumental style and a personality that projects easy good spirits.

So far, they have brought her a 1982 Grammy award for best ethnic/folk album, appearances on “Saturday Night Live” and in the film “Rumblefish” and a touring itinerary that keeps her on the road half the year (Friday night, she’ll be the Forum Theater in Yorba Linda).

Guillory has helped fulfill her mother’s wish that Cajun roots might take hold in faraway soil--and then some.

When Guillory was a girl in Lake Charles, La., Cajun and Creole songs were as much a part of her home life as the kitchen table. Uncles would come over to play waltzes and two-steps; Ida’s mother would sing along and sometimes tap out a tune of her own on the accordion.

For the children, Guillory recalled, the accordion was an object of mystery rather than a device for mastery. “We’d pick it up when they’d put it down, and try to find out what’s happening. ‘What’s making this thing sound so good?’ We pulled and pushed, but the way we were pulling and pushing, there was nothing coming out of it except one ugly note.”

Nobody in the family tried to lead her beyond aimless tugging at the buttons and bellows. “My mother didn’t encourage the girls to play the accordion. We were brought up very sheltered, very ladylike and very formal.”

When her mother brought the accordion to California, Ida was still intrigued by it, enough to take it down to the basement when nobody was around, in hope of coaxing out a tune. It came as a surprise when she discovered that her mother knew what she was up to.

“One day she said, ‘How you doing?’ I said, ‘Not very well.’ She said, ‘Come downstairs and give it to me.’ She started to play a little melody. I looked at her and said, ‘Mom, how do you do that?’ ”

Ida, still in her teens, got her first lesson then, and her first encouragement to learn music. She also picked up pointers from her younger brother, Al, the natural musician in the family. But it was a false start.

“I didn’t last very long. I couldn’t get very far, and I’d get discouraged.”

Her main goal at the time was a career in nursing. Later, she would marry Raymond Guillory and raise three children. Her favorite music at the time was as far removed from the rowdy, rough-hewn Cajun tradition as you could get: Guillory liked the pop crooning of Perry Como and Andy Williams.

When all her children had reached school age, Guillory said: “It was very quiet. It was too quiet. It was just a daily routine. Every day, nothing different, except weekends, when we’d go out and hear Al and his little group.”

Before long, Guillory had picked the accordion back up and was practicing again, alone in her house. “I seemed to do better alone because I wasn’t afraid of anybody listening, hearing me make mistakes. It started coming to me.”

In 1969, a song by Creedence Clearwater Revival sharpened Guillory’s resolve.

“One day I heard ‘Bad Moon on the Rise’ (the actual title of the hit, written by John Fogerty, is “Bad Moon Rising”). That sound coming over the radio was so different from anything I’d heard. Creedence had brought some vibe, some rhythm from Louisiana that I had not heard in the Bay Area. To me, that rhythm was Louisiana style. It motivated me. ‘Wow! It’s coming! That sound is in San Francisco!”

In the early ‘70s, Guillory got her first exposure to the authentic zydeco sound when she attended a Bay Area performance by Clifton Chenier, the accordionist hailed as zydeco’s founding father and master performer. In 1973, she got up the nerve to ask whether she could sit in with her brother’s band in practice. The following year, when Al Lewis’ Barbary Coast Good Time Band landed a spot on the bill at a combination Mardi Gras party and church benefit, he asked his sister whether she would join them for a few zydeco tunes.

“He felt I could do it. I didn’t feel I could do it. Al laid a real trip on me. ‘It’s a benefit. It’s for the church.’ I looked up at my husband, and he said, ‘Go ahead and do it.’ ”

Ida got through her set of three or four songs, including the staple Cajun waltz, “Jolie Blon” and heard the cheers. On the spot, the promoter dubbed her Queen Ida, queen of the Mardi Gras.

“Right away, I felt a self-satisfaction somehow. Never thinking of doing this (professionally), but I was pleased with myself that I was able to deliver something people appreciated.”

Still, she said: “It was a one-night stand, in my mind: ‘I lived through it. I hope it doesn’t happen often.’ ”

But a reporter and photographer from one of the San Francisco newspapers had covered the festival, and the ensuing article centered on Guillory’s big moment--and created an instant demand for further engagements by the Mardi Gras Queen. Ida demurred. Brother Al insisted. Husband Raymond--later to become Queen Ida’s manager--encouraged. An act was born.

An early rite of passage came when Guillory returned to Louisiana in 1976 on her first tour outside the Bay Area. In Cajun country, she said, “the music has always been performed by men--publicly, that is. I wondered, ‘How am I going to be accepted?’ But, to my surprise, I was very well accepted.”

Another test of credentials came within a year or so of that first tour, when Al invited Clifton Chenier to share a bill with Queen Ida and the Bon Temps Zydeco Band at a Bay Area nightclub.

“He sat there in front of the bandstand the whole time, and he was in smiles the whole time. It made me nervous, though. Here’s the king of this music--the real king--and what am I doing? But he praised me. He said, ‘You’re a little lady and you’re playing that music. It’s fascinating.’ He encouraged me. He said, ‘Hang in there.’ ”

That music’s niche has been growing. Paul Simon’s umpteen-million-selling “Graceland” album included tracks that featured zydeco by Rockin’ Dopsie and his band; another act, Buckwheat Zydeco, just became the first zydeco band to sign with a major record label.

“I still feel that zydeco could go another step or more,” Guillory said, “especially if the younger musicians, the rock ‘n’ roll musicians as well as the zydeco musicians, will incorporate it with what they’re doing.”

But she isn’t banking on zydeco turning into the music industry’s next big growth sector. She’s happy to be preparing to record her eighth album and to be working on a combination memoir and Cajun-Creole cookbook featuring her mother’s recipes.

“It didn’t make me rich, but (zydeco) has provided a good living for me, to where my husband was able to leave his job and join me as manager. I don’t need a larger house.”

What Guillory does need is a sense that zydeco will continue as a tradition in her family when her days as a bandleader are over. To that end, she has recruited her oldest son, Myrick (Freeze) Guillory, into her band as percussionist and No. 2 accordion player. The six-piece Bon Temps Zydeco Band also includes Queen Ida’s older brother, Wilbert Lewis, on rubboard, a metal-ridged rhythm instrument that the player wears like a vest. Al Lewis--who was guitarist, co-vocalist and musical arranger in the band’s early years--left after the Grammy award to front his own band, the Zydeco Express.

Freeze, nicknamed when his Uncle Al detected a touch of stage fright during his fledgling days with the band, is the queen mother’s designated heir. “It’s a music that is passed on from one generation to another,” Guillory said. “I told this to Freeze. ‘I’m not telling you to do so (commit to playing zydeco), and I’m not pushing you, but it would be nice.”

Which is exactly what Elvina Lewis had in mind when she lugged that old accordion all the way from Louisiana in the first place.

QUEEN IDA AND THE BON TEMPS ZYDECO BAND

Friday, 8 p.m.

The Forum Theater, 4175 Fairmont Blvd., Yorba Linda

$10.

Information: (714) 779-8591.