Zydeco

Zydeco is the dance music of the French-speaking Black Creole community of southwest Louisiana. Bands typically center on a piano-key (or triple-row chromatic) accordion rather than the diatonic button accordion of Cajun music, paired with the frottoir — a corrugated metal washboard worn over the chest and played with bottle openers or spoons. Electric guitar, bass, drum kit and occasionally horns or fiddle round out the ensemble. The groove leans on a shuffled or straight 4/4 backbeat at 100-180 BPM with a more pronounced blues feel than Cajun music. Vocals, in Creole French or English, alternate with call-and-response chorus lines, and the audience is expected to dance.

Zydeco evolved in the early 20th century as Black and Creole musicians in Louisiana folded blues, R&B and rural French dance music together. The form was codified in the 1950s by Clifton Chenier — widely called the King of Zydeco — who replaced the diatonic accordion with the louder piano-key model and put a drum kit behind it, making the music club-ready. Buckwheat Zydeco, Boozoo Chavis and Beau Jocque expanded the audience through the 1980s and '90s; today players such as Keith Frank, Nathan Williams and Chubby Carrier carry the style forward. The 1990s world-music boom brought zydeco to European festivals and helped the form survive shifts in regional radio.

The frottoir does the work of a hi-hat: its dry scrape on every offbeat is what locks the dance floor together. Listen for how the accordion riffs interact with electric guitar comping — call-and-response between the two is constant. The vocals often switch between Creole French and English mid-song, and lyrics frequently reference specific towns (Lafayette, Opelousas, Mamou) by name. Zydeco is also more harmonically blues-based than Cajun, with frequent dominant-seventh chords on what would be major triads in a Cajun two-step.

Start with Clifton Chenier's 'Bogalusa Boogie' (1976), an unbroken hour of dance hall classics. Buckwheat Zydeco's 'On a Night Like This' (1987) is the polished crossover sound, and Beau Jocque's 'Pick Up On This!' (1994) shows the harder, bass-heavy 'nouveau zydeco' of the 1990s.

The genre's name is most likely a phonetic spelling of 'les haricots,' as in the Creole expression 'les haricots sont pas salés' — 'the snap beans aren't salted,' a euphemism for being too poor to afford salt pork. Clifton Chenier won the first Grammy ever awarded for a Cajun or zydeco album in 1983.