POP MUSIC REVIEW : Eddy Raven Fails to Do Justice to His Bayou Country Heritage

The exact heart of Louisiana’s Acadian community may be Mark Savoy’s accordion shop, situated on a rural route amid the state’s bayous and crawfish paddies.

Both the premier player and maker of the traditional Cajun button accordion, Savoy has long been a defender of his endangered culture. The walls of his shop are covered with hand-lettered signs bristling with Biblical-grade “woe-onto-him” injunctions against abandoning one’s culture; those are joined by more recent signs railing against scoundrels who are only claiming their heritage now that “Cajun” has become trendy.

Which brings us to Eddy Raven, who, with the world finally made safe for Cajun potato chips, was singing all about “Bayou Boys” and a “Zydeco Lady” in his show Saturday at Anaheim’s Celebrity Theatre. Though Raven was born and raised in Louisiana’s bayou country, one suspects the Bee Gees could have brought more authenticity to the music than he and his synthesizer-happy six-piece band did.

Raven’s Cajun-cum-disco fling occupied only three of the 21 songs he performed, but its rootless, music-in-a-vacuum quality was indicative of the rest of his material.

His greatest-hits set, including “Shine, Shine, Shine,” “Sometimes a Lady,” “Right Hand Man” and “I Could Use Another You,” owed more to the innocuous pop music of the early ‘60s than to anything that has grown out of the country tradition. Like such pre-Beatles B-team hits as “Handy Man,” many of Raven’s songs were catchy and pleasant, but none anything you’d want placed in a time capsule.

Where “Zydeco Lady” and other songs were pure Velveeta, Raven did work some emotion into his strong vocals on “ ‘Til You Cry” and “Joe Knows How to Live.” Practically the only other place where he displayed much personality was in his between-song discourses, though his band evidently wasn’t very fond of those. No sooner would Raven get on a roll about duct tape (and he clearly had a lot to say on the subject) than his band would cut him off by launching into the next song.

The Forester Sisters opened the show with their richly woven vocal harmonies in a 14-song set that was engagingly varied from their performances earlier this year at the Crazy Horse in Santa Ana. Their cover of the McGuire Sisters’ “Sincerely” and the melancholy “You Love Me” and “Letter Home” showcased the special gift for harmonizing that families can have.

Between songs, the sisters took several good-natured shots at the Judds, who aced them out at the Grammys this year. While the Foresters might out-power the Judds with their harmonies, the sisters significantly lack the singularly emotive solo voice the Judds have in Wynonna Judd.

But one thing the Foresters do share with the Judds is a disarming candor in discussing the quirks of their home life. Though Naomi Judd may talk about killing possums and picking her nose, she’d have to go a ways to match the tale Kim Forester told Saturday of the sisters’ youth in Lookout Mountain, Ga., where the four would watch the Lawrence Welk show on Saturday nights wearing panties on their heads.