Clifton Chenier and the King of Zydeco

Clifton Chenier was born on June twenty-fifth, nineteen twenty-five, in Leonville, Louisiana, near Opelousas, and he grew up speaking Louisiana French as his first language. His father played single-row diatonic accordion. His uncle played fiddle. The music was in the household before Clifton could name it.

He began playing accordion around nineteen forty-seven. By nineteen fifty he was performing with his brother Cleveland, who played the rubboard. His nineteen fifty-four recording, known as Cliston Blues, launched his career, and by nineteen fifty-five he had signed with Specialty Records and was touring nationally alongside Ray Charles, Etta James, and Chuck Berry.

What Chenier built was something distinct from both Cajun music and the blues that influenced him. Zydeco, the name likely derived from the French phrase meaning the green beans are not salted, an old idiom for hard times, blended the Creole musical tradition with rhythm and blues, with jazz, with gospel. It was the music of Black French-speaking Louisiana, and it had its own instruments. Chenier himself is credited with redesigning the washboard into the vest frottoir, a wearable chest-mounted instrument his brother Cleveland played, which became central to the genre's percussion.

He won a Grammy Award in nineteen eighty-three for the album called I'm Here, and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in twenty fourteen, twenty-seven years after his death. He died on December twelfth, nineteen eighty-seven, in Lafayette, Louisiana, the city that had become the capital of the culture he helped define.

His son C. J. Chenier carries on. So does the music, in clubs and kitchens and roadhouses across Acadiana, still rolling on accordion and rubboard, still rooted in what his father built.