History Spices Cajun’s Songs : Music: Zachary Richard will bring a varied menu of rock-flavored zydeco to San Juan Capistrano’s Coach House.

Cajun musicians are commonly assumed to come in one of two stereotypical packages.

There’s the wild man of the swamps epitomized by Doug Kershaw--eyes bugging, feet stomping, voice box yee-hawing as he does his best to come off as a fellow who may at one time have wrassled with alligators.

Then there is the folk-traditionalist, the serious preserver of Cajun songs passed down from people who played on front porches and at community dances.

Zachary Richard doesn’t fit either description.

The singer-songwriter from Scott, La., who leads his band at the Coach House on Wednesday, is serious about being a Cajun and being a musician. He just wants the right to keep some breathing room between those two terms and not be stereotyped as a “Cajun musician.”

As he spoke over the phone recently from a tour stop in Minneapolis, it quickly became apparent that Richard (pronounced ree-SHARD) isn’t your bug-eyed, alligator-wrasslin’ type.

Without sounding pretentious about it, this graduate of New Orleans’ Tulane University who majored in history dropped more erudite references into his spiel than you’re likely to encounter in some college lectures.

Ask about the Louisiana settings and characters that dominate his latest album, “Snake Bite Love,” and Richard lightly comments that it’s “my own Yoknapatawpha County”--the fictitious Mississippi community William Faulkner brought to life in his novels.

Ask about the sources of some of his historically based songs, and Richard will tell you about George Washington Cable, a contemporary of Mark Twain who wrote about the French Creole aristocracy of Louisiana.

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Talk about some of the issues of culture and language that are important to him, and Richard will bring the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville and the aspirations of the French separatist movement in Quebec into play.

If Richard wrestled alligators, he must have done it on the way to the library.

Flip on “Snake Bite Love,” and you’ll soon find that Richard’s sound has little to do with Cajun traditionalism. There’s a flavoring of the traditional Cajun and zydeco strains of southwestern Louisiana in his accordion playing, but the menu features far more steak-and-potatoes heartland rock than file gumbo regionalism. Richard has absorbed the Balfa Brothers, Clifton Chenier and Dennis McGee, but the most common reference points here are Springsteen, Seger and Mellencamp.

If his sound ranges far afield from his Cajun roots, Richard’s lyrics remain anchored in his home state. Even when the songs deal in that universal currency, sex and love, Richard will have his couples couple in a cane field (“Roll Me”) or fall smitten at first sight “down by the muddy river” between New Orleans and St. Joe.

“Cote Blanche Bay” tries to evoke the mystique of Louisiana pirate Jean Lafitte, and “Sunset on Louisianne” recounts the saga of a Cajun who makes a good living at a factory, only to awaken to the fact that its outflow is despoiling the landscape and wildlife he loves.

“One Kiss” tells a common Cajun story: a family’s move to California in search of economic opportunity during the ‘40s and ‘50s, and the consequent sense of cultural dislocation and homesickness.

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“If I have anything to contribute, it’s that my experience has been based in a part of the world that’s exotic,” Richard said. “In a lot of ways, Louisiana is another country, at least culturally. Most of the themes have been exploited--the voodoo and gumbo and the alligators and the swamp things. The challenge is to do it in a way that’s a step above what’s become kind of contrived Louisiana imagery.”

Richard, who specialized in African history in college, says that Louisiana historical lore began figuring in his songwriting after he read a biography of Huey Long about 10 years ago.

“I realized then that in order to understand Huey Long, you had to understand the Civil War in Louisiana. The more I got into it, the deeper I got sunk. It’s like walking in quicksand. I’m just stone hooked on Louisiana history. I started writing these historical songs, and my father was happy because he felt like my college education was finally paying off.”

Richard said he grew up in two worlds at once: one commonplace middle-American, the other uniquely Cajun--the French-speaking culture preserved by descendants of refugees who were exiled from Canada after it fell to the British in the 1700s, and eventually made their way to the French-controlled haven of Louisiana.

Richard grew up speaking English with his parents and French with his grandparents (Richard and his Parisian wife now live on a 20-acre farm that was his grandfather’s, and French remains the household tongue).

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When he fell in love with music, it was the Beatles, the Stones, the Byrds and Bob Dylan, and New Orleans R & B.

In high school, Richard teamed up in his first band with his buddy, Michael Doucet. Doucet is now an esteemed Cajun fiddler, one the leading keepers and extenders of Cajun music tradition. In those days, Doucet only played rock guitar.

“We were covering Rolling Stones songs,” Richard recalled. “We were 14 or 15, and we wouldn’t have known Cajun music if it came up and bit us.”

Richard began to get serious about music when he went to Tulane.

“I had given up the dream of my parents of being a lawyer or doctor or whatever. I was in school because I didn’t want to go to Vietnam. I began writing songs in 1969-70.” Richard followed a girlfriend to New York City, started playing folk-rock in clubs and got discovered by Elektra Records.

“I got the advance money” to make an album that, as it turned out, was never released, “and I bought a Gibson and a Stratocaster.”

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There was some money left over in his instrument budget, and Richard decided to use the rest of it for a traditional button accordion built by Marc Savoy, a noted Cajun accordionist and accordion-maker.

“I hadn’t heard any (Cajun) music. It was just, ‘Hell, I’m a Cajun, let me get an accordion.’ It wasn’t any militant devotion to the culture or the music. I was just intrigued, and it was going to be part of my education as a musician. I was looking for a musical identity, and this whole general back-to-the-roots thing was going on in the early ‘70s.”

A coincidence that took place half a continent away, in Rochester, N.Y., led to Richard’s entrance into the world of ethnic music.

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One of his cousins picked up a hitchhiker there, a French tourist who happened to be a cog in the French folk scene. It came up that cousin Zack, professional recording artist, was beginning to dabble in Cajun accordion music.

“At the time (the tourist) didn’t even know there were French people in Louisiana. He showed up at my house, and ended up getting me all these festival bookings in France in 1973.”

Richard took along his bandmate Doucet. “We were Crosby, Stills & Nash wanna-bes.” After playing big folk festivals, they returned enamored of things French.

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Doucet set off on a path that would spread Cajun music far beyond Louisiana. His band, Beausoleil, served as both the inspiration and backing ensemble for Mary-Chapin Carpenter’s breakthrough hit, “Down at the Twist and Shout.”

Richard wound up in Montreal, where he lived for six years and established a career singing in French. He also lived for a time in Paris. In all, Richard released eight French-language albums in Canada and France during the ‘70s and ‘80s.

“I was very stricken by the political consciousness, the (French) nationalism that was rampant in the mid-’70s in Quebec,” Richard recalled. “I was able to ply my craft in French and discover this heritage. It was the passion of the newly converted. I was going to be a French singer, and I was off to the races.”

Richard said his passion for the French language got him into trouble back in Louisiana when he played at the annual Cajun festival in Lafayette in 1974 and used the stage as a forum for his new political views.

Richard urged that French be recognized as an official language in Louisiana, to be given equal status with English, allowing citizens the option of speaking either language in their transactions with the courts and other government agencies.

“I’ve been called ‘The bad boy of Cajun music,’ and that’s where it came from,” Richard said. “I was banned from that festival for three years. I was trying to import the French Canadian (platform), but I was the only person in Louisiana that believed any of this stuff. Cajun people have been good Americans since 1804. They have always considered themselves to be Americans, and very proud of it.”

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By the mid-’80s, Richard had returned from France (where he and his wife still have an apartment), and rethought his musical direction.

He began to blend his interest in Cajun music with his teen-age roots in rock ‘n’ roll--first on two albums for the independent Rounder label grounded mainly in Cajun tradition, then on two more for A&M; that are geared toward a mainstream rock audience.

“It’s ultimately a rock ‘n’ roll album, as opposed to Cajun,” he said of “Snake Bite Love.” The new album is the first he has released in the United States that does not include any songs sung completely in French.

“Part of my task as a singer and a songwriter is to get past that Cajun-ness,” he said. “It’s a calling card, but also a category that’s difficult for me to get beyond. The tendency is to associate me with Cajun and zydeco, which is unfair to Cajun and zydeco, and ultimately to me.”

Richard is hoping the Louisiana flavor that remains in his music will appeal to fans of Cajun music, even as he tries to reach audiences that may not know zydeco from xylophone.

“We’ll touch those (Cajun music fans) because there’s enough of that in what we do. Hopefully, if they come to see that, we can show them a whole other universe of songwriting and storytelling and performance. I think it transcends the ethnic niche that ‘Cajun music’ describes.”

* Zachary Richard plays Wednesday at 8 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $15. (714) 496-8930.