Opelousas: The Zydeco Capital
Near Lafayette, Louisiana
Opelousas has been a meeting place for a very long time. The Opelousas Indians had lived here for generations when the first French traders came through in the seventeen forties, paddling into the bayou country southwest of the Mississippi to trade. The French established an official post here in seventeen sixty-four, with Louis Gerard Pellerin as commandant. Within a year, a Catholic church stood at the edge of the settlement.
Then came the Acadians, French-speaking farmers expelled from Nova Scotia by the British in seventeen fifty-five, scattered across the Atlantic world, slowly making their way to southern Louisiana. By the seventeen eighties and nineties, they were filling the parishes south and west of Opelousas. Spanish colonists had also left their mark, and free people of color had built a community of their own here, the gens de couleur libres of the Creole world, owning land and operating businesses in a social order of startling complexity.
From that layering, French, Spanish, Acadian, African, Native, came the music.
Clifton Chenier was born near Opelousas on June twenty-fifth, nineteen twenty-five. He had grown up hearing the old Creole accordion music, the two-steps and waltzes of the boucheries and Saturday night dances. In the nineteen fifties he took that music, plugged it into rhythm and blues and soul, and called it zydeco. He toured relentlessly, cut records, and became known simply as the King of Zydeco. He won a Grammy in nineteen eighty-three.
In two thousand, the Louisiana State Legislature made it official: Opelousas is the Zydeco Capital of the World.
Every September the Zydeco Festival draws thousands to this small city. But on any given weekend, the music is already here. In the dance halls, the church parking lots, the family gatherings where an accordion comes out after supper and the old Creole French floats over the table alongside the crawfish etouffee. Opelousas is the place where a three-hundred-year cultural collision produced something that sounds like nowhere else on earth.
