Tracy Schwartz Spent a Buck on Cajun Music and Was Hooked Forever

Southern California is not the most likely place to find a passkey into the world of traditional Cajun music, but life-changing discoveries often happen under unlikely circumstances.

Cajun music is rooted in rural Louisiana prairie towns that couldn’t be more remote in setting or spirit from the hubbub of a metropolis or a music business center. But when Tracy Schwartz came through Los Angeles back in the early 1960s as a member of the New Lost City Ramblers, an influential trio of folk music traditionalists, he had his first profound Cajun encounter.

“At the old Ash Grove (the seminal L.A. folk and blues club), I got an album by (Cajun musician) Austin Pitre for a dollar,” said Schwartz, who will play a solo show Saturday night at the Shade Tree in Laguna Niguel. “It was the best dollar I ever spent. It gave me a real good idea of what traditional Cajun music should sound like.”

For Schwartz, who grew up in New Jersey and Connecticut, that album was the start of a musical love affair from which he has emerged as one of the few players to have made a mark in Cajun music without having been born into the French-speaking Cajun culture.

“The sound of the music was what got me first,” Schwartz recalled in a recent phone interview from Fresno, where he had stopped during his annual West Coast tour. “The songs were in a language other than English, but there was a lot of country music in there, too. These two things that are almost contradictory were mixed in Cajun music, and that’s what got me.”

For Schwartz, 50, those seeming incongruities held unusual interest: Country and Western was his first musical love, and foreign languages were another leading passion (he has studied five, including French and Russian, and he holds a bachelor’s degree in German).

Schwartz’s next step on the road to being certified as an honorary Cajun (an award he received last year from the Louisiana-based Cajun-French Music Assn.) was encountering the music in the flesh at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. The festival marked the first time that traditional Cajun music had ever been played on a prominent, mainstream stage. Schwartz struck up a friendship at the festival with Dewey Balfa, an expert fiddler who would become one of the most effective and engaging ambassadors of Cajun music and culture. He also became Schwartz’s coach in things Cajun.

“Tracy was like a child that sees a toy and he grabs for it and he can’t reach it,” Balfa said over the phone from his home in Basile, La., where he still drives a school bus when he isn’t performing. But with enough patience, Balfa said, concluding the analogy, the child finally gets what he is reaching for.

After a decade of running into Balfa on the folk festival circuit, Schwartz’s involvement in Cajun music deepened in 1975, when, at Balfa’s invitation, he visited Louisiana for the first time. Balfa wanted to record a Cajun fiddle instruction album modeled after the “Learn To Fiddle” instructional LP that Schwartz had released in 1965. He asked Schwartz to produce the record.

“We did it back-porch style,” recording at Balfa’s home on equipment borrowed from the Smithsonian Institution, Schwartz said. Schwartz also took the tape machine out to area dance halls at Mardi Gras, where he captured Balfa and other local players for a second album.

In Louisiana, Schwartz said, he learned to appreciate the cultural attitudes that are an integral part of Cajun music.

“There’s a joie de vivre ,” Schwartz said. “It becomes important (for Cajuns) to go out on a Saturday night after a week of work, get out there and have a good time and let loose and have that as an integral part of your life style. It’s kind of like being a child again in a way. It’s good, and cathartic, and a lot of fun.”

Schwartz and his son, Peter, who also studied under Balfa, have gone on to support Balfa on three albums since 1984. “Souvenirs” was a Grammy nominee in 1986 for best traditional folk recording.

Can Schwartz, who also has taught himself to play Cajun accordion, fiddle Cajun-style as well as the native-born experts? Balfa, noting that he himself can’t play bluegrass as well as a native Kentuckian, said it is probably impossible for an outsider to completely master a traditional folk style. “But Tracy’s close,” he said. “Tracy devoted so much of his time and musical knowledge to play Cajun music. He does a good job.

“A lot of (Cajun) people thought it was not a culture to be proud of,” Balfa added. “Then to find someone who wants to come down and share in your culture, your ideas and your customs--a lot of people appreciate that.”

Schwartz had a large stake in folk music before he spent that buck at the Ash Grove’s record counter. As a student at Georgetown University, he had been caught up in the folk boom of the late 1950s.

“I blundered onto the underground bluegrass scene in Washington,” Schwartz said. “I started going to the hootenannys they were having, and that’s where I met the New Lost City Ramblers.”

The trio, formed in 1958, included Mike Seeger, half-brother of Pete Seeger, and was devoted to preserving old-time Appalachian folk styles. In 1962, after Schwartz had served a hitch in the Army, the Ramblers asked him to fill a slot opened by the departure of one of the original members. The group disbanded after Schwartz had been with it for 17 years. He said the three members still get together for several reunion concerts each year. As a solo act, the Vermont-based Schwartz alternates between Cajun and Appalachian folk styles.

Schwartz, who tours about half the year, said his current goal is to make inroads with a new audience: people confined to nursing homes. Schwartz said that he has tried to make nursing-home managers aware that good, live music is available at a modest price, and he hopes to persuade corporations, especially pharmaceutical concerns, to provide funding to bring musicians into the homes.

“They’re selling them drugs and crutches. They could help with something for their spirit,” said Schwartz, whose interest in the cause was spurred by personal experience with his mother and with one of his sons, a paraplegic who lives and works now in San Diego.

Traditional folk, “this music of feelings, of real life,” as Schwartz puts it, is a medicine he wants to administer to nursing home patients wherever he travels. “You have a healing power when you play this music,” he said. “It encourages them, it picks their spirits up. I can see that when I play.”

Tracy Schwartz plays Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Shade Tree, 28062D Forbes Road, Laguna Niguel. Tickets: $10. Reservations are recommended due to limited seating. Information: (714) 364-5270.