Photo by Gabrielle Savoy
Ann Savoy
In 1985, a journalist at the Washington Post described Ann Savoy’s 445-page anthology of Cajun music and musicians as: “perhaps the most comprehensive and stunning portrait of this music ever written.”
Part of a tradition in which transplants become so transfixed by Louisiana culture that they become its bearers, the Richmond, Virginia native has spent the last forty-plus years fully immersed in its music, language, and traditions. Taking up music herself as part of her husband Marc’s Savoy Doucet Cajun Band and jamming away with the region’s best inside his Eunice music store—boudin in hand—Savoy’s fresh eyes and ears have absorbed the most intimate and intricate parts of this world. And she felt the calling, the compulsion, to share it.
[Read our reviews of two other books on Louisiana French music here.]
Published in 1984, Cajun Music: A Reflection of a People held stories of and interviews with twenty-two of the most iconic Cajun and Creole musicians of the twentieth century, along with treasured and often-rare photographs and over one hundred songs—French lyrics, phonetic guides, chords, English translations, and all. The book won the Botkin Book Award from the American Folklore Society, as well as acclaim across the nation.
Taking up music herself as part of her husband Marc’s Savoy Doucet Cajun Band and jamming away with the region’s best inside his Eunice music store—boudin in hand—Savoy’s fresh eyes and ears have absorbed the most intimate and intricate parts of this world.
But it wasn’t even finished. “Before I finished Book One, I had already started on Book Two,” said Savoy. “The book was already massive. There was no way I could fit everything I had into it.” But, between raising her family and touring with her music—“I was just so burnt out. I put it all in a big box, thought, ‘Maybe my children will complete this.’”
Her children didn’t do it for her, but they and their friends—part of a new generation of Cajun musicians—got the ball rolling. “They said, ‘If you get it out of the boxes, we’ll help you finish it.’”
[Read Jordan LaHaye Fontenot's story about The Holiday Lounge in Mamou here.]
This month, thirty-seven years after Volume I was published, Cajun Music: A Reflection of a People Volume II will be released into the world, completing Savoy’s vital contribution to the memory of “a past world that in part no longer exists,” as she puts it in the book’s introduction.
Picking up where she left off, Savoy’s Volume II dives in among the bare bones of our regional musicology, starting with the Cajun accordion, with its early iterations in China and its official birth in Germany, crossing the ocean to the Louisiana prairies where it joined the fiddle in creating a new, distinctly American sound for the Acadian people. This chapter ends in Savoy’s husband Marc’s hands, where Cajun accordions have been formed in Louisiana for over fifty years now, and are today exported to Germany, where German folks are learning to play Cajun music. The book includes one of the earliest Acadian accounts of Cajun dancing by fiddler Dennis McGee, who describes the contradances, waltzes, galops, valsouviennes, two-steps, and marche de la noces of the early Cajun balls.
Holding so very much, these pages use the power of oral and written histories to engage their readers in memories both quiet and monumental, building our culture’s musical icons into know-able people.
And then there are the interviews. In conversations transcribed in French and translated to English, song collector Edius Naquin tells of his grandfather who, goblet in hand, would sing “Ca case la guile a quinze pas” : “I am gray, hurry and fill my glass, then the more I see and the more I drink the more this wine alters me.” Naquin’s songs, passed down from his grandmother and preserved in his own musical abilities, are published in the pages to follow. Dewey Segura recalls his first accordion, which was actually his sister’s—purchased by his mother with the money she earned picking cotton—and sings “Jolie Blonde” and “Les maringouins a tout mange ma belle” (“The Mosquitos Ate My Sweetheart”). Preston Frank tells of the days when his son, the now-popular zydeco musician Keith Frank, would sleep on the table during gigs. Interviews with family and friends paint a picture of the turbulent life of fiddler Douglas Bellard, the first African American to record a Creole French 78 record in 1929, beating Amédé Ardoin by three months. Speaking of Amédé—an extremely rare photo of the legendary accordion player is included in the tome, given to Savoy by Ardoin’s muse, the supposed subject of songs like “Valse Des Opelousas,” Mazie Broussard.
Holding so very much, these pages use the power of oral and written histories to engage their readers in memories both quiet and monumental, building our culture’s musical icons into know-able people. And though so many of them are gone now, we can still know their music.
Cajun Music: A Reflection of a People, Volume II is available for $45 at annsavoy.com and savoymusiccenter.com. A special edition run of two hundred first edition hardcover books will be available for $70.
