Allons Danser!

John Sharp has lived in Lafayette for nearly fifteen years, but he can still be readily spotted as an outsider. “When people ask where I’m from and I say Lafayette, they say, ‘No, you’re not!’” said Sharp in a recent interview. “If I say I’m from Alabama they say, ‘Roll Tide,’ and I say, ‘No, I’m for Auburn.’ That usually works to my advantage.”

Sharp nonetheless has no trouble fitting in at Louisiana dancehalls, a rapidly disappearing part of the local landscape that he is memorializing in stories, photos, and an hour-long documentary.

“Less than ten percent of the clubs I’ve found are still open,” he said. 

“When I go to dancehalls, I’m usually the observer. I’m standing back. People want to know why I’m not dancing. They are more than happy to dance with you and show you how. It’s very easy, even when I’m outside my element.”

As for his own skills at Cajun and zydeco steps, said Sharp, “I can do it, but I won’t be making an instructional video.”

Instead, he watches others. 

“I like to sit where I can see the band, the dance floor, and the bar. I love what happens when the door opens and everybody turns around to see who’s coming in, especially at La Poussiere in Breaux Bridge on Sunday afternoons. When the door opens, it lets in the light. I feel the connectivity and the camaraderie.” 

Sharp moved here in 2000 when his now-wife Leigh Anne, a wetland scientist, got an assistantship in biology at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. They married in 2003 and now have a four-year-old son. 

Sharp, who has a B.A. from Auburn, studied for a master’s degree in communication with a concentration in folklore, graduating from ULL in 2012. 

That was a busy year for him. He was named assistant director of research at ULL’s Center for Louisiana Studies. He wrote, produced, and photographed the documentary Water on Road, the story of Isle de Jean Charles, a small community made up entirely of members of the Biloxi, Chitimacha, Choctaw, and Houma Indian tribes. He also won a filmmaking grant from Louisiana Economic Development to work on his documentary Dancehalls of South Louisiana. 

His research takes many forms besides hanging out in clubs. Online he found a list of dancehalls that became the nucleus of his project. He started seeking out spots where dancehalls had been. “Sometimes all that was left was a slab and a bunch of pull-tops from beer cans,” he said. Often he’d walk the neighborhood and knock on doors, asking residents if they remembered Guidry’s Friendly Lounge in Lewisburg or Jay’s Lounge & Cockpit in Cankton, where cockfights were part of the entertainment.

Left: This photo was taken in 1949 at the OST club in Rayne during owner Joe LaTour’s birthday. Image courtesy of Johnnie Allan and the Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

“Rural dancehalls had more than one way to make money,” he said. “In Parks, a small town between Breaux Bridge and St. Martinville, the dancehall had a baseball field, a bush track for horse racing, a small grocery store, a barber shop, a liquor store, and an ice-cream store. It was almost like a shopping mall. 

“Parks was a very well known African-American and Creole community. Jazz bands played there at the Dauphine Club, including Oscar ‘Papa’ Celestin and his Tuxedo Jazz Band from New Orleans.”

Born in 1971 in Decatur, Alabama, and raised Baptist, “We didn’t drink or dance,” said Sharp. But his parents were music lovers who heard Jimi Hendrix, the Yardbirds, Ike and Tina Turner, and other acts live. “They were in the lunch room of Calhoun Community College in Decatur in May or June of 1971 to hear the Allman Brothers, the original lineup,” Sharp told an interviewer in 1996. “I was actually in my mother’s womb at the time, but I feel that I was deeply affected by the fifteen-minute version of ‘In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.’ That is what made me wanta rock.” 

At twelve he began playing rhythm guitar, and by the time he graduated from high school he was playing in garage bands. “In 1993 I first toured with the Quadrajets,” he said. “We were very much punk rock—loud, with three guitars, drums, and bass, all electric. 

“In 1999 I spent four or five months as a roadie for a band from Sweden, The Hellacopters. We toured Europe and the U.S. I love music, and I’m pretty familiar with what life is like inside a bar/dancehall type of place.”

Although he had a nodding acquaintance with Cajun and zydeco music and was a fan of New Orleans’ Professor Longhair, Sharp only began to study regional music when he moved to Louisiana. “I was faced with new music from a culture previously unknown to me,” he said. “I spent a lot of time at the Blue Moon Saloon in Lafayette listening to bands like the Red Stick Ramblers, Feufollet, and Bonsoir Catin. I really liked their immediacy. I liked the raggedness, that raw early sound.”

The idea of making a documentary was sparked by “wondering where the names of the songs came from. ‘Hick’s Wagon Wheel Special’ is a Cajun song. Chris Segura [archivist at ULL’s Archives of Cajun and Creole Folklore and a fiddler with Feufollet and the Lafayette Rhythm Devils] told me that Hick’s Wagon Wheel was the name of a club in Ville Platte. A lot of these places had songs written about them.

“Hick’s was a club in the Forties. I went online and tried to find some pictures and then just started looking for old clubs. I was trying to find the stories, owners, time periods. It wasn’t easy. I was surprised that information was so hard to come by. Then I realized that the information is out there, but it’s not on the Internet. 

“A lot comes from beating the streets. Any time I meet somebody older I ask where they’re from, if they danced, and where. 

“I found a list online of 125 clubs in a 1998 article in the Lafayette Daily Advertiser. Readers had sent information to reporter Jim Bradshaw.”

Some entries consisted of just a name and a town, but others were detailed, such as this one about the Boundary Club:

Until [recently], everything in Lafayette closed at midnight on Saturday, but clubs in St. Martin Parish did not have to close. Pierre LeBlanc built the Boundary Club on the Breaux Bridge highway just across the parish line in the early 1940s. Jules Savoy from New Orleans was a popular singer there . . . .  A Miss Trahan cooked gumbo each weekend. Shorty Johnson ran gaming tables.

“This list really made me go, ‘Whoa!’” said Sharp. “I had an original list of 150 to 200 clubs. Then I met a guy in Texas who gave me a list of another 150. I thought, Omigod this is getting out of hand. I read books about Cajun and zydeco music and found more names of dancehalls. I looked at city directories, old telephone books. 

“The African-American or Creole experience is not as well documented, but I found The Negro Motorist Green Book online, which had a list of places where black people could eat, drink, and dance in the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties.”

Sharp has tried to redress that lack with fieldwork. “I’ll go to St. Martinville, to a black neighborhood, and the police will stop me and say, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ I’ll walk up to people’s houses and knock on their doors, and ask them about the dancehalls they remember. I’m trying to document that history while it’s still there to get. 

“I know enough to know that I don’t know very much. One of my more effective interview techniques is to admit that I know nothing. With dancehalls you’re talking about happy times. People met their spouses, they courted there.

“The down side: I’ll have the name of a club and all I’ll know is that it was in Donaldsonville. I’d like to know the time frame, owner, type of music, and general area where it was. Some of this stuff is hard to find because the landmarks are gone. And people tended to be drinking when they went there. They’ll say, ‘I’m not sure where it was, but my car knew the way home.’”

Gathering information through research and oral history is one thing. Gathering images is quite another. “I use a Canon HDV camera for interviews and action shots for the documentary,” he said. “I use my Olympus Tough to capture still images of the buildings and the GPS coordinates for the website and mapping purposes. I also use my iPhone to take pictures for the Facebook page and the website when I don’t have my Olympus.”

So far he has amassed about fifty hours of high-definition video and six hundred stills. He has also drawn on collections already in the archives, including 2,671 photographs donated by musician and writer Johnnie Allan. 

Sharp hopes to have the dancehall documentary completed in 2015. Meanwhile, the work feels more like fun. “I’m from story-telling people,” Sharp said. “That’s always been a big part of my life. So to go to school and study it was great, and to work with it is a real honor.” 

Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net. For more information about John Sharp’s dancehalls project, go to facebook.com/LouisianaDanceHalls.