His Swing Shift Really Does--to a Cajun Beat

Most Cajun musicians get the luxury of making music only when the real work of the day is done. For some it can be backbreaking work in the rice fields, for others arduous labor on the oil rigs that dot the southwestern Louisiana landscape.

So it was no surprise earlier this week that singer and accordionist Walter Mouton was focused more on buying a new rig for the trucking business he’s starting than on his appearances this weekend at the annual Southern California Cajun & Zydeco Festival in Long Beach.

“I have no idea what I’m going to be doing when I get there,” Mouton, 55, said with a laugh in a phone interview from his home in Scott, La. “I just have my airplane ticket, and I’ll do whatever they’ve got scheduled for us.”

For the record, “whatever” includes afternoon performances Saturday and Sunday at the festival proper, held in Rainbow Lagoon adjacent to the Long Beach Convention Center. Then on Saturday night, Mouton and his band, the Scott Playboys, also are scheduled to headline the festival’s first evening dance, which will be held in the Convention Center’s ballroom.

His primary order of business this week, however, was taking delivery on a truckfor his new business, which he is starting more out of necessity than desire. The trucking firm that employed him as a driver the last four years, the Missouri-based Churchill Truck Lines, went out of business in April, leaving Mouton and 2,200 others without jobs.

It’s ironic, since Mouton had decided long ago not to try to earn a living through his music because of the notorious lack of job security for musicians.

“Playing music has always been a supplement, something to help put bread on the table,” he said. “But I didn’t like the insecurity of playing music for a living. I got married young, had a family, and I’ve always been scared that (if I depended on music gigs), somebody would tighten up on that faucet and the water would come down to a drip.”

So instead, Mouton worked in the oil fields for 14 years, then took up as a truck driver by day. On weekends, he performed near his home in Scott, just a freeway exit west on Interstate 10 from Lafayette, known as “the Capital of Cajun Country.”

In recent years he has ventured out of Louisiana to play Cajun or folk festivals in Rhode Island, New York and Tennessee. His band makes its West Coast debut this weekend.

“Franklin (Zawacki, producer of the festivals in Rhode Island and Long Beach), he got me to go to Rhode Island three years straight,” Mouton explained. “I knew he put this one on too, so I said, ‘Hell, I want to go to California next year.’ ”)

His presence in the Long Beach lineup brings an aspect of Cajun music that hasn’t been represented here before: the Cajun-country music hybrid that developed in the wake of the discovery of oil in Louisiana in the 1930s.

Once the oil business brought high-paying jobs, workers from surrounding states flooded into the previously isolated region. With them came steel guitars and other elements from string-band music that quickly found a place alongside the fiddle and single-row button accordion that characterize traditional Cajun music.

The Hackberry Ramblers, still playing after nearly a half-century together, and Mouton’s group are probably the best-known exponents of the country-Cajun hybrid.

“We do not incorporate too much of the hillbilly style in our songs,” Mouton said. “Some players use a double-neck steel and put a whole lot of the country sound in. But the guy I’ve got (Randall Foreman) is special. He doesn’t use the pedals to come up with country-music licks; he uses them to create our Cajun dance music.”

Integral to that music are the traditional Cajun two-steps and waltzes, dances that are similar to their country-music cousins, but generally more fluid and lilting.

When it comes to dancing, Mouton has seen some significant changes in the 42 years he’s been fronting his own band.

“Years ago we used to have dances six nights a week in this neck of the woods. Nowadays, there’s not as many dance halls as there used to be. The restaurants took over, and now every restaurant’s got a Cajun band and a little dance floor where people try to dance.”

Like most Cajuns, Mouton loves eating as much as he loves music and dancing. He just believes that, as with chain-saw juggling and brain surgery, there are some activities that shouldn’t be performed simultaneously. Consequently, he still prefers the atmosphere of the old-time dance hall.

“I still don’t feel comfortable set up in a restaurant. In a real dance hall, you become part of the situation,” he said. “You know the people come to listen to your music and to dance. At a restaurant, their first intention is to eat; they don’t leave their homes just for the music. It gives me satisfaction that people come to listen and to dance in the places where I go.”

Chief among those is La Poussier, a dance hall in Breaux Bridge, not far from the more famous Mulate’s Restaurant, which hosts many of the top Cajun bands. Mouton’s band has been playing La Poussier for 30 years, every Saturday night for the last 10 of those.

Mouton started playing the accordion early.

“I’ve always loved music and fortunately I was musically inclined. My daddy played, and he was my biggest influence. Of course, I did listen to (Cajun accordionists) Aldus Roger, Lawrence Walker and Iry LeJeune. I still listen to other people, and if I hear something I like, I might incorporate it into something I do.”

He formed his first band when he was 13, yet in all his years of playing, he has been in a recording studio exactly once, almost 30 years ago. That session produced just one 45-r.p.m. single.

The reason?

“When we did record that rascal, the guy that sang it was pretty well polluted. . . . We stood him up by a boom mike and he kept fading in and out--he couldn’t stand up straight. Then we set him on a stool, but he still did the same thing,” he said. “It gave me a bad taste that stayed with me.”

Beyond that, Mouton seems to get everything he needs from music playing at La Poussier and the occasional trip to an out-of-state festival. Fame doesn’t appear to enter the equation.

“I’ve never been one for all that publicity. I just love to play that music on weekends. . . . It’s like they say: We don’t mind working hard all week, and come Saturday night, we love to play hard. . . . I look forward to playing on Saturday nights, more or less just to let out some feelings. And the people who come to see us, I like to be a part of their evening,” he said.

“I don’t want to start traveling. I don’t say that possibly after my working days are over I may travel a bit more. I’ve made three trips this year, and we’re going back to New York in July.”

Mouton and his wife have two sons and a daughter (all now in their 20s) none of whom have followed in his path as a musician. “They play the radio-- loud ,” Mouton said, sounding less like one of the revered proponents of a vital strand of indigenous American folk music and more like Everyfather.

“I wished that they would have picked it up,” he said. “We always had a guitar, fiddle and accordion in the boys’ room. But I was always one who took care of an instrument.

“I still don’t like seeing guys pulling an accordion from both ends like they’re trying to make it come apart. An accordion is made to be played, not abused. So I think I carried that thought back to them, and if they’d take a chance where they might break something, I’d get all over them.”

Although the urge to play Cajun music may not extend to his own children, the appreciation for it has spread far beyond the 22 Louisiana parishes of Acadiana, or “Cajun country.”

“It’s going like wildfire,” Mouton said, his voice filled as much with awe as with pride. “Just in the few places I’ve been and seen what happened. They ask you for songs by name--they really know the music. Normally you wouldn’t expect something like that.”

* The Southern California Cajun & Zydeco Festival takes place Saturday and Sunday at Rainbow Lagoon, Shoreline Drive and Linden Avenue, Long Beach. Gates open at 11 a.m. Per day: $17.50, adults; children under 10, free. Walter Mouton & the Scott Playboys and Nathan & the Zydeco Cha-Chas headline a dance Saturday in the Long Beach Convention Center Ballroom, 300 Ocean Blvd., Long Beach. $10. (310) 427-3713.