Queen Ida Packs Up All Cares, Woes : The zydeco monarch, now in her 60s, puts on a joyous show that has Saddleback College audience rocking in the aisles.

The Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon may have stopped about 600 miles short and 400 years too soon in his quest for the Fountain of Youth.

Judging from Queen Ida and her Bon Temps Zydeco Band’s zestful, life-affirming concert at Saddleback College Saturday night, the secret to remaining perpetually young and vigorous may lie not in Florida where De Leon searched fruitlessly in the 16th Century, but in the bayou country of Louisiana where the joyous, blues-inflected variation of Cajun music known as zydeco was born.

Talk about rejuvenating powers: Ida Guillory did not even start playing professionally until she was well into her 40s. Now over 60, she put on an energetic two-set, 30-song show that would bring many a young rock hero staggering to his knees from exhaustion.

Her calorie expenditure was probably on a par with that of a college basketball player as she danced, sang and pumped her accordion practically nonstop all evening. Her only break came late in the second set when she stepped off stage briefly while her son, Myrick (Freeze) Guillory, took over on accordion and lead vocals for a couple of numbers.

It wasn’t just what zydeco has done for Queen Ida that makes a case for bottling the music and marketing it in health food stores. Consider what Queen Ida did for the crowd: Just a few bars into her first number, the sold-out room already was clapping along furiously. By the second song, everyone was up and dancing.

By the third number, Ida’s raucous “Hey Negress,” the crowd was appropriating the decorative balloons from the walls and ceiling. And by the start of the second set, the audience had coalesced into a long conga line, circumnavigating the room to the infectious zydeco beat.

The captivating rhythm fused together a crowd made up of all sorts of folks, from toddlers to senior citizens. It was almost like a scene from “Cocoon” as oldsters forgot their aches and pains to frolic on the dance floor with little kids up way past their bedtimes. It didn’t matter if you were too young, too old, too tired, too sad, too sick, too worried or too inhibited. Queen Ida made you forget all your cares and dance the night away.

Ida and her five-piece, aptly named Bon Temps Zydeco Band kept the beat cranking at a driving pace but added enough variety and contemporary touches that the music never became repetitious.

In each of her hourlong sets, Ida interspersed such pure zydeco numbers as “Zydeco” and “La Bas 2 Step” with more rhythm and blues-oriented material such as “Tyrone” with its heavy backbeat, and “Sad, Lonesome and Blue,” a soulful blues ballad. She even included a Cajun-influenced rock classic, Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising,” and Hank William’s countrified ode to the bayou, “Jambalaya.”

Her son Freeze’s brand of zydeco took the music one step further into the mainstream. Still, his most effective numbers Saturday were those like “Gator Man” and “New Kid From the Bayou,” which stuck most closely to the zydeco beat.

Even though Ida sang many songs such as “Chere Duloone” and “Bonjour Tristesse” in the French Cajun dialect, she usually offered at least one verse in English so the audience could understand the meaning of the lyric. And she seemed pleased by the way the crowd got into the spirit of it all. She smiled approvingly at the dancing children and recalled the way she used to dance to zydeco when she was just a little tot in her native Lake Charles, La.