Most American pop music can trace its roots to folk music from many cultures. Zydeco music amalgamates aspects of French, Native American, German, African, and Caribbean musical styles into a unique new whole. It emerged in Southwest Louisiana as a separate style in the 1940s, but it owes much to the Creole and Cajun music that came hundreds of years earlier.
Creoles are French-speaking blacks from Louisiana. Creole music was played on fiddle and accordion. Cajuns descended from French settlers —the Acadians—who came to Canada in the 1600s. These pioneers sang old French folk music. When the British forced the Acadians out of Canada in 1755, many moved to Louisiana. Cajuns, as they became known, settled in the swampy delta. They eked out meager lives fishing and logging.
Clifton Chenier, the late King of Zydeco, coined the term zydeco. Les haricots, pronounced “lay-zariko,” is the French word for green beans. An old French saying, “Les haricots sont pas salées” (the beans aren’t salty), referred to times when people were so poor they even had to abstain from using salt pork to flavor their beans. Circumstances may have been difficult, but the mood certainly wasn’t glum! Families would gather for a “La La” (house dance) to celebrate a harvest, a wedding, or any other event. One couldn’t help but be responsive to the peppy music played on spoons, fiddles, accordions, washboards, animal bones, and triangles. Adults and children danced and celebrated long into the night.
Zydeco accommodates old Cajun and Creole dance tunes and homey instruments, but was transformed by the post-World War II elements of rhythm and blues. Chenier introduced the use of drums and guitars. Zydeco now borrows from country-western, disco, hip-hop, and reggae. Lyrics now include English along with, or instead of, French. As Zydeco musicians say, “Le bons temps roulez,” or “Let the good times roll!”