AN APPRECIATION : Wilfred Latour: His Music Really Was a Gift : With his death, we have lost one of the last living links to the pioneering players who created the Cajun sound as we know it.

Don’t look for any glitzy TV movies or quick-turnaround biographies tobe published about the life of Wilfred Latour, the Louisiana-born accordionist who died last week, at 72, of congestive heart failure.

He wasn’t a millionaire, he didn’t socialize with the rich and famous, he doesn’t have a star on Hollywood Boulevard, even though he spent the last decade of his life performing around the Southland.

Most people won’t even recognize his name. But he was a key player in the Southern California Cajun-zydeco music scene, and his death removes one of the last living links to the pioneering players who created Cajun music as we know it.

For his role in helping perpetuate that unique, regional style of American folk music, he was awarded a California Arts Council Master Musician grant in 1989.

But he was an unlikely looking champion.

The first time I saw Latour play, in 1987, he was seated on a folding chair on a small stage overlooking the linoleum floor at the Masonic Temple in Culver City. With his thick glasses, heavyset build and genial demeanor, he seemed less like a bandleader than someone you’d expect to see in a white apron and a paper hat, weighing out a pound of ground chuck at your grocery store.

But when he sang in heavily accented Louisiana French and dancers filled the floor doing lilting two-steps and waltzes, that temple suddenly felt like a bar somewhere near Basile, La., where he was born in 1921.

Latour’s wife, Elvina, usually cooked up a batch of her tasty gumbo and jambalaya and other Louisiana specialties and served them from the temple’s kitchen while her husband played.

The son of a Creole sharecropper, Latour weathered a hard life common in the Cajun and Creole communities. And at the end of a hard week’s work, there was only one way to cap it.

“People working on farms didn’t worry about going to no movies, because they were silent--you didn’t hear anything,” he told The Times in 1991. “You’d work in the field six days . . . and when you’d get out of the field Saturday evening, all you’re looking for is ‘Where’s the dance going to be tonight?’

“I’d work all day in the field, come back to get my accordion and go out and play all hours at night. And I kept doing that week after week, year after year.”

Though his father had played the fiddle, Latour was attracted to the accordion. Not surprising, because among the neighbors and family friends who played the instrument and who coached the boy were such legendary Creole accordionists as Amedee Ardoin and Adam Fontenot.

*

Honoring those mentors, Latour remained one of the very few Creole musicians who still played that early style on the single-row Cajun button accordion. He started sitting in with Adam Fontenot’s band when he was 12, and a couple years later was playing dances on his own.

Like so many younger musicians who took up music in the wake of “King of Zydeco” Clifton Chenier, Latour also mastered the piano accordion and the punchier, zydeco style that Chenier made famous.

When he wasn’t working on farms, Latour worked in the state’s oil business. After he retired, he moved to Southern California in 1984. Two years later, he formed the Louisiana Cajun Trio with fiddler Edgar LeDay, a fellow Louisianan, and Garden Grove folk music enthusiast and promoter Carolyn Russell on guitar. When LeDay died in 1990, the group continued with fiddler Tom Sauber.

“Wilfred has an unerring sense about dancers,” Russell said in 1991. “He can read the dance floor like nobody I’ve ever seen. He can shake people up when he has to.”

Of the trio’s 1992 self-produced album “Homage,” The Times’ Mike Boehm nailed it when he wrote that Latour’s “voice is as sturdy and coarse as a burlap sack. He sounds as if he’s 70--a vital 70. So does every other Cajun singer worth his gumbo, regardless of chronological age.”

Latour once said that playing music was as fundamental to him as breathing.

“It’s what I’ve been doing since I was 7. So I can’t say I’m going to quit, not as long as I’m able to do it. And there’s something about it that’s good for you. It keeps you going.”

True to his word, he continued a regular schedule of performances in and out of the Southland. As leader of both the Louisiana Cajun Trio and the Zydeco Goodtime Aces, Latour toured far and near in his later years, the most extensive of which was a 17-day concert tour of England in 1992.

It was only in the last year or so that health problems forced him to cut back his public performances at the monthly dances in Culver City, another series in Anaheim and appearances at the annual Southern California Cajun & Zydeco festival, among others.

What made Latour’s performances special was the emotion with which he always infused heartfelt tales of lost love or those bouncy numbers that simply celebrated being alive.

“Amedee and Adam taught me the scales and that, but music really is a gift,” he said. “It’s a feeling, and they can’t teach you that. It has to come from inside. Something has to be in you. If you’re not relating what you feel, you’re just wasting time by trying to play. You’re only making noise.”

A rosary for Latour will be recited at 7 p.m. Tuesday and a Mass will be offered at 10 a.m. Wednesday at St. Philip Neri Catholic Church, 4311 Olanda, Lynwood.