Jazz, Zydeco, and the Music of Louisiana

If you want to understand Louisiana music, you have to understand that it was never just one thing. The music of this state is a conversation between communities that were legally separated and culturally inseparable. Jazz emerged from New Orleans in the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, drawing on the African musical traditions preserved in Congo Square, where enslaved and free Black people had gathered on Sunday afternoons since the late seventeen hundreds to dance, sing, and play drums in a practice the French and Spanish colonial authorities permitted and the Americans later tried to suppress.

Congo Square is not a myth or a metaphor. It is a documented place, now Louis Armstrong Park, and what happened there fed directly into the syncopated rhythms and blue notes that Buddy Bolden's band was playing in the dance halls of Storyville by around nineteen hundred. Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, the names that opened the century of American popular music, all came out of this city, this culture, this specific meeting of African, Caribbean, French, and Spanish musical sensibilities.

Zydeco developed in the Creole Black communities of southwestern Louisiana, particularly around Lake Charles and the Crowley rice prairie. It is related to Cajun music, both draw on the diatonic button accordion that German immigrants brought to the region in the mid-eighteen hundreds, but where Cajun music developed in white francophone communities, zydeco developed in Black Creole communities, absorbing rhythm and blues and adding the frottoir, the corrugated metal washboard worn as a vest. Clifton Chenier of Opelousas is widely considered the father of modern zydeco.

He recorded his first record in nineteen fifty-four. He won the Grammy for Best Ethnic or Traditional Recording in nineteen eighty-three. The music he makes is still being made, on dance floors in Eunice and Breaux Bridge and Lafayette, every weekend, by people who know exactly where it came from.