You Can’t Take the Country Out of the Cajun : Music: Charles, Terry Boulet left Louisiana 32 years ago, but time can’t dull their love of region’s rhythms. Their band plays in Orange on Friday.

GARDEN GROVE — The air most of us breathe consists of nitrogen, oxygen and a smidgen of other gases, as any scientist worth his sodium chloride can tell you.

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In Southwest Louisiana, they apparently have a different formula--one with molecules of music as the primary ingredient.

That’s about the only credible explanation for the fact that musical aptitude seems as natural as inhaling and exhaling in the region known as Cajun country.

Witness accordionist Charles Boulet and his wife of 40-plus years, singer Terry Boulet, of the Brand-New Old-Time Cajun Band, which plays Friday in Orange.

Though they left Louisiana 32 years ago for Bakersfield, the Boulets never lost an ounce of their love for the music they first heard as kids, both at home and at Saturday night family dance parties.

As Terry recalls, “I hit the ground dancing!”

Even now, she gazes with astonishment, perhaps even a little pity, upon anyone who has never experienced the singular joy of Cajun two-stepping to the twin sounds of pumped-up button accordion and wailing fiddle that define the traditional Cajun sound.

Terry Boulet abandoned a promising career as a singer to raise their children and Charles said they “both regret to this day” that she turned down a recording contract to do so. Nevertheless, Terry looked the epitome of contentment as she sang the traditional Cajun French two-steps and waltzes at a recent Anaheim performance.

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Her husband may be an even more remarkable testament to the music’s power to infiltrate the spirit permanently.

He was a lad of 4 or 5 when he heard Cajun music for the first time, off 78s his brother brought home. It was his first exposure to such pioneering players as Amedee Ardoin, Joe Falcon and Amedee Breaux.

“I was crazy about the accordion,” Charles said during a break in rehearsal at the home of Tina and Ian Bevan, who organize the band’s appearances and teach Cajun dancing at performances.

Boulet attended his first Cajun dance a couple of years later; watching the man regarded as the greatest Cajun accordionist of all, Iry LeJeune, one night in Sulphur, La., left an imprint that has lasted a lifetime.

“I was so fascinated by the man’s playing and singing,” Charles said. “He could bring goose bumps to my arms and tears to my eyes.”

LeJeune, a prolific songwriter and recording artist as well as a dazzling accordionist, died in a car accident in 1955, at age 27. His son, Eddie, is one of today’s leading proponents of traditional Cajun accordion music.

Because Charles Boulet grew up in one of those rare Cajun households in which family members did not speak French, “I didn’t even know what (LeJeune) was singing about--but I knew it was sad. He still does it to me and Tout Toute (Terry) when we listen to his records.”

Though he loved the sound of the accordion and always wanted to play it, Boulet was 40 before he bought a decent instrument. He was 55 before he got serious about learning.

Now, at 63 and retired after having spent nearly three decades working Bakersfield’s oil fields, Boulet is approaching the kind of proficiency of those accordionists who first caught his attention as a boy.

“I really envy those guys that started playing when they were very young,” he said, fingers the size of andouille sausages silently flying over the accordion’s 10 right-hand buttons even as he spoke.

His belated progress had something to do with an adage he heard early on.

“My frustration is that when I was a kid, I always heard that if you ain’t a full-blooded Cajun, you can’t learn the music.”

Coming from a family that was part Cajun, German, Spanish and French, he figured that left him on the outside looking in.

Only much later did he figure out that is nonsense.

“A human being can learn anything he wants to if it’s high enough on his priority list.” (Quipped Terry Boulet: “I’ve got a backpack sitting by the door--if that accordion gets any higher on your list, I’m moving out.”)

In fact, Boulet was almost ready to give up the accordion a couple of years ago. While at work in the oil fields, he slipped on oily concrete, seriously damaging the rotator cuff tendons and ligaments in his right arm. After surgery, two fingers were left partially numb.

“I almost lost hope at that point but found I couldn’t just give up on my lifetime ambition, so I kept on trying.”

Not long after his surgery, he bumped into guitarist and Orange County folk music activist Carolyn Russell backstage at the annual Southern California Cajun & Zydeco Festival in Long Beach. She was then playing with the Louisiana Cajun Trio, whose accordionist, Wilfred Latour, subsequently became too ill to perform regularly.

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At one point, she was in need of an accordionist to play a dance in Culver City, so she called Boulet and asked him to sit in.

Things went well enough that last year she decided to form a new group with Boulet as the linchpin.

Other members are fiddler Tom Sauber, who also played for a time with the Louisiana Cajun Trio, and his 10-year-old son Patrick on triangle. (During the interview, Patrick Sauber busied himself pumping out a lively two-step on one of Charles’ accordions, as if to prove Boulet’s assertion that desire, not bloodline, is the only prerequisite to learning the instrument.)

Though the band has played only a handful of shows, the experience has been as rewarding for Boulet as for Russell.

To hear him tell it, Bakersfield may be the most important hub of country music this side of Nashville, but don’t try to find anyone who knows Cajun music there.

“It’s shocking,” he said. All they want to hear is country music.

“If I had more time, and if I was a younger man, I’d learn to read and write music, so I could teach other musicians where the changes come.”

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Cajun differs from country in subtle, but important ways. Country two-steps usually emphasize the first and third beats in each measure; Cajun puts the accent on two and four, which gives it more of a lilting bounce.

Country and Cajun waltzes are more closely related, but country sticks to a simpler rhythmic foundation.

Whether on one-steps, two-steps or waltzes, Cajun players subdivide beats into peppery rhythms that gave birth to the onomatopoeic phrase “chank-a-chank” to describe the feeling of the music.

Even though Mary-Chapin Carpenter’s Cajun-infused 1991 hit “Down at the Twist and Shout” brought a taste of the music to country radio airwaves, some country-music fans still complain that they find Cajun music difficult to dance to.

Charles Boulet can’t figure that out.

“Cajun music is the best dance music in the whole damn world,” he said.

Tina Bevan said she sees dancers too often try to apply specific country steps to Cajun songs instead of just feeling the spirit of the music and then moving with it.

“I’ve had some people get stuck; they’ll ask, ‘What step should I do, and what beat should we do it on?’ I say ‘I’ll dance--you count.’ ”

Adds Boulet: “I’m not lying when I say that no music compares to Cajun music for dancing.”

The Boulets and Russell are beginning to think the Brand-New Old-Time Cajun Band could become one of the right bands.

Even though it means round trips of a few hundred miles from Bakersfield every time the group rehearses or performs, that’s fine with Charles Boulet.

“I’ll happily spend the rest of my life striving to become a great Cajun accordion player. I want to set that Cajun, who has been locked up inside me for too long, free.”