Sweet Little Toot-Toot

Surprisingly, the word “zydeco” has occupied the last page of Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary only since 1993. It is a young form of music, paradoxically thought to be as old as jazz or blues, that the commercial music business has never paid much attention to--mostly because of its fiercely regional character. But zydeco flourishes in a small French-speaking area of the South (a rectangle with Houston and New Orleans on the short sides, the Gulf of Mexico along the bottom and Louisiana Route 190 on the top).

And it has engendered its own rituals: Fans crown a preeminent accordion-player king, and the king plays to throngs of loyal subjects, the dancers who show up to hear him every weekend. The dancing, fueled by alcohol, crawfish, bonhomie and adrenaline, goes on all night--the reigning accordionist bearing up under his crown and 50-pound bellows until the last dancer has left for home.

Michael Tisserand, a reporter for the Louisiana-based music magazine Offbeat, spent the last few years roaming this territory, talking to musicians, club proprietors, ethnomusicologists, back-room record producers, festival promoters, accordion-playing cowboys and deejays at low-watt radio stations. His book, “The Kingdom of Zydeco,” is an exhaustive history of the music and the black French-speaking culture that created and sustains it. And what makes this book so riveting are the stories Tisserand tells.

For a song to be considered “zydeco” all that’s required is an accordion, a washboard (also called the rubboard or the froittoir), a dash of French and a rhythm so danceable it defies resistance. Sixty years ago, black farming communities came together to can snap beans, listen to accordion and washboard music and shake. “We were snapping snap beans and shaking--but not dancing, because you didn’t have much time to dance,” recalls one farmer. These canning sessions were also dubbed “snap beans” or les haricots, which, in a local accent, sounds more like a single word: zarico, which then expanded to mean any place (church, house, field, club) where an accordion was playing, people were dancing and a washboard was keeping the beat. Haricots transformed into a verb and two nouns, meaning to dance, the music that was danced to and where that dancing was done. As the sound spread, chalkboard signs for “zotticoe,” “zolo go,” “zordico” and “zadacoe” sprang up outside dance clubs. In Houston’s Frenchtown, at the end of the 1950s, musicologist Mack McCormick asked people to pronounce the word: “I would ask them, ‘What? What are you saying? Say it loud and clear.’ ” The proper spelling, McCormick decided, was “zydeco.”

Tisserand is somewhat better at being a reporter than a historian. Zydeco’s etymology is embedded in an opening chapter in which he strives to summarize the region’s racial and musical history in too few pages. This comes after a lengthy, confusing introduction on the difference between Louisiana’s Creoles (blacks of French Caribbean extraction) and Cajuns (whites of French Canadian extraction). Here, brevity would have done the job. And with acknowledgments, a foreword and an author’s note, “The Kingdom of Zydeco” gets off to a slow start. Off the solid ground of the dance floor, Tisserand nearly sinks into a swamp.

But just as this accordion-driven music is easy to dance to, Tisserand’s face-to-face conversations with its practitioners make for irresistible reading. In one interview, the accordionist Rockin’ Sidney Simien tells how he came up with the biggest zydeco hit yet recorded: “Don’t Mess With My Toot-Toot,” an infectious dance tune that kicks off with the lines, “Well, she was born in her birth suit / The doctor slap her behind / Said you’re gonna be special / You sweet little Toot-Toot.” Simien, who purchased two radio stations with his “Toot-Toot” residuals, was inspired by the French expression ma chere tout-toute (“my sweet little everything”). He locked himself in his garage one night in 1985 (the same year Wham! was topping mainstream pop charts), wrote the lyrics, composed the music, played all the instruments and had the song in the can by dawn. “My wife wanted me to come to bed or cut that noise out,” he tells Tisserand. “She’d kind of take my soul away from me, because I’d be in that groove. And that particular night I happened to see her standing with her hand on her hip, watching me. But I just pretended I didn’t. She woke up around six o’clock to make her coffee, and I was playing this song back, and I said, ‘Either that son of a bitch is going to make them knock chairs down to go dance or they’re going to say, “Man, what the hell was he doing?” What do you think?’ She said, ‘I think it’s silly.’ So now every time the check comes in, she’s the first one to go to the box and get the mail, and I say, ‘You still think it’s silly?’ ”

Clifton Chenier (rhymes with “here,” not “cafe”), the first and self-crowned king of zydeco, started playing accordion in refinery workers’ clubs along the Gulf of Mexico, accompanied by his brother, Cleveland, who held a corrugated strip of metal in his lap and scraped it with a spoon. Clifton found that this aspect of zydeco--a player needs to be seated to play washboard--marred their stage presence and was a problem that needed solving. “I went on to a white fellow down there, at the Gulf Oil refinery,” he recalled. “I got down in the sand and I drew that rubboard and I said, ‘Can you make one like that and put a collar to it?’ ” The result (now ubiquitous in zydeco) looked like a plate-mail catcher’s vest. It freed the player to play with both hands, dance, misbehave, jump off the stage and generally stir up an audience.

Spotted by a talent scout, Chenier went on to have some commercial success recording blues in the ‘50s, touring with a teenage backup singer named Etta James. But in the ‘60s he returned home and formed his Red Hot Louisiana Band, the most influential group in zydeco history. They crisscrossed the country, taking zydeco everywhere from a women’s prison in San Francisco (“He was making that accordion smoke,” his bass player recalls. “When he started playing . . . them ladies started fighting.”) to Carnegie Hall. It was there, in 1979, that he shared the bill with the blues legends John Lee Hooker and Lightnin’ Hopkins. He didn’t go on until after midnight. “People were snoring,” says one witness. “Then Clifton walks out on stage, he’s got his accordion strapped to his chest, he’s got this crown on his head, and he has his arms outstretched, and he looked like a god. He looked huge. . . . And the minute he started playing, the house erupted.”

Chenier played the biggest accordion ever made, the piano-key, which provides the widest, bluesiest range of tones and the heaviest load on the shoulders. “I used to drink hard. Most of the musicians got to drink to hold that up,” another piano-key player tells Tisserand. “Standing up four hours, in one place there, with fifty pounds on that shoulder. That’s a punishment, man.” After years of playing packed dances in between kidney dialysis treatments, Chenier died in 1987 at 63--no stranger to punishment.

Chenier is to zydeco what Robert Johnson is to the blues. The scope of his influence, Tisserand writes, “may be the only thing that nearly every zydeco musician can agree on,” and he devotes the heart of his book to the pioneering accordionist’s career. However, some extraordinary facts--Chenier forced his sick brother to clean up his own vomit in front of a packed hall, and he never allowed players to leave the stage to go to the bathroom--are mentioned by Tisserand but never discussed or examined (presumably out of respect). The result of such brief allusions is that they float in the narrative as unexplained pieces of the musician’s character, at the expense of a more nuanced portrait. Since Chenier isn’t around to tell his own story, Tisserand errs on the side of hagiography. But a bit more focus on the dark side would have added to the book’s texture.

There have been two zydeco kings since Chenier. The first was Rockin’ Dopsie, who played accordion on Paul Simon’s “Graceland” album and once passed up an invitation to do “Saturday Night Live” because he’d agreed to play a church dance the same night. Dopsie wore the crown till he died in 1993. The current king is Boozoo Chavis. Chavis, who recorded one of zydeco’s first hits--”Paper in My Shoe”--in the 1950s and then took a long hiatus to train racehorses, continues, at the age of 68, to play weekend dances, release songs (some, like “Boozoo’s Blue Balls Rap,” with pornographic lyrics) and participate in “zydeco battles” against the young accordionists of the next zydeco generation, with their eyes on his crown. “They look at my fingers and I tell them when to pull and when to push,” says Chavis.

Recently, in an effort to capture some of Rockin’ Sidney’s success, zydeco has put itself through some strange contortions. Struggling to push into the mainstream, musicians fused zydeco with disco and funk in the ‘70s and ‘80s and bass-heavy rap in the ‘90s. While confessing his enjoyment in turning young musicians on to different sounds, Scott Billington, a producer for Rounder Records, an excellent traditional music label, tells Tisserand about his reservations in recording young zydeco artists who combine their music with dance mixes or rap. “It’s a little scary to be part of that process. Sometimes I worry that all music is just moving toward this universal commercial standard, where everyone is aspiring to be a pop artist based on something they see on MTV, instead of following something more personal or tied to their culture.” In response, a young musician asks: “How can you draw a line and say, ‘This is going overboard with it?’ It’s music. How can you go overboard with music?”

But it is alarming to see how this young music--its biggest hit recorded in the last decade and most of the best players still performing--is itching to go mainstream. For now, at least, zydeco is keeping its regional roots and integrity. It’s still essentially zydeco because accordion, rubboard and dancing remain in the mix. And you still don’t applaud a zydeco band, you get out in front of it. When Chenier played Carnegie Hall, the New York Times said he was the only performer “with a lively vital relationship to [his] home audience.” The same can still be said of zydeco: The sound may be changing, but the essence of the music is ingrained in the geography. Tisserand provides invaluable, candid material about how music is made, danced to and melded with the identity of a place. When he drives the back roads and sits down with the people who make zydeco happen, they talk back with feeling and in the present tense.

“The zydeco community is like a close-knit family,” one player on the contemporary scene asserts. “The fans got to love you personally, and they got to love what you’re doing. They got to enjoy dancing to your music, and feel like you’re one of the family.” “The Kingdom of Zydeco” is a back-road trip well worth making, especially now, since the music soon may disappear on its own journey into the mainstream.