Just Say Yes

Bravery positions Yvette Landry for breakout success

by

Visual & Performing Arts

Flying to Maine for a solo performance a couple of years ago,  Yvette Landry found herself accosted by two young boys as soon as she got off the plane. “Hey Asian lady—are you coming to our house with us? Hey Asian lady!” 

She said to her host, their father, “Why are your kids calling me Asian lady?”

He said, “I’ve been telling the boys for the last month that the Cajun lady was coming to stay at our house, and they have no idea what a Cajun is, so they just think you’re Asian.” 

As soon as they all arrived at the home where Landry would be staying, one of the little boys immediately needed to go to the bathroom—but he refused to go unless the Asian Lady accompanied him and told him a story about Asian Land while he did his business: “So I’m sitting on the floor of the bathroom,” recalled Landry, “and he’s sitting on his little pot, and I just made up this story about an old oak tree deep in the swamp that turned disobedient little boys into stone and devoured them.”

Three days after returning home to Breaux Bridge, Landry had written down the tale, hired an illustrator, and found a publisher for The Ghost Tree, her first children’s book. Along with her second book, Madame Grand Doigt, The Ghost Tree now resides in the Special Collections of the Library of Congress. 

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This is how things generally seem to work in Asian Lady Land—Landry combines her inspirational bursts with a sense of humor and a willingness to try anything—and some kind of musical or literary goodness almost always ensues. She toured Russia as a cultural ambassador for the Library of Congress and performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in 2016. In May, she will perform at New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival for the fourteenth consecutive year—though it’ll be the first with her current band, The Jukes. 

When we met, Landry was just back in town after spending the previous weekend in Austin at the SXSW Music Festival, where she performed at Antone’s, with Marcia Ball, undisputed keyboard queen of the Austin blues, and with two-time Grammy nominee and Jukes bandmate, Roddie Romero. Her 1 am set was rhapsodically received, with one reviewer waxing that her song “Friday Night Special” was the “arguably best single of the entire festival.”

Praise like this for Landry’s music has become so customary over the past several years that it is hard to remember that she did not begin seriously playing music until 2004 when, in despair over a failing marriage and her father’s battle with brain cancer, she walked into a music store and bought a bass guitar. “I didn’t buy a bass guitar because I was going to play Cajun music. I wasn’t even going to play music. I just felt like buying a bass guitar that day. Plucking on that bass was just something I wanted to do at home to take my mind off what was going on in my life.”

Yvette Landry was born and raised in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. She grew up hunting and fishing with her father and indulged her intense competitive streak playing sports. Her parents filled the house with music—classic country, swamp pop, big band jazz, “and, of course, Cajun music,” recalled Landry. “One of the earliest childhood memories I have was going with my parents to hear Zachary Richard. He was bigger than life, and that night was really my introduction to Cajun music.”

But the possibility of a career in music had never occurred to her. “A friend had told me about a weekly Cajun jam session that took place in the back room of a local business. When I opened the door, there was this glassed-in back porch, and there must have been sixty people in there, from two years old to ninety. And everyone was playing music and everyone was happy. It was people like me, my people, playing our music. I learned that day that this is how our music is passed down.” 

“My motto in life is simple: if someone asks you to do something, just say yes, even if you don’t know how.”—Yvette Landry

Landry was instantly hooked and became a regular at the weekly session. “It’s not like I set out to play Cajun music. To this day I say if someone had sent me to a blues jam, I’d have been a blues artist.” Barely four months after Landry walked into that first session, she found herself jamming with the Lafayette Rhythm Devils, one of the premier Cajun bands in the state. Frontman Randy Vidrine called her the next day with an offer to join them. “I wanted to get her before another big time Cajun band picked her up.”

She proved to be a quick study. “It worked out great,” said Vidrine. “She’d make a few mistakes every night and I’d turn around and glare at her, and she’d kind of cringe a little. But after about four months, I never had to turn around.”

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Vidrine also discovered that Landry was adaptable. “I’ve seen her do some amazing things with people she’s never played with, or even styles she’s never played. I think it was at the Chicago Folk Festival where she got roped into playing with this Gospel lady—Geraldine Gay—whose bass player had gotten sick. The lady said to Yvette, ‘God sent you, you’re my angel—I heard you during sound check.’ At first, Yvette told her she really couldn’t do it, but the lady just looked at her and said, ‘We go on in five.’ So Yvette went on with her, and they sounded like she had been in the band forever. We were watching backstage, just amazed. When Yvette got home she looked the lady up, and it turned out that she had recorded with Elvis.” 

Reminded of this story, Landry said, “My motto in life is simple: if someone asks you to do something, just say yes, even if you don’t know how.”

Landry didn’t restrict herself to just playing the bass. She learned the guitar and the accordion, and she found her voice. It is a siren’s instrument—plaintive, seductive, startlingly powerful. Landry can go from tender and earnest to predatory snarl on a dime. Her harmonies—particularly with Roddie Romero—are achingly gorgeous.

Since her stint with the Lafayette Rhythm Devils, Landry has honed her craft in a variety of bands and musical partnerships. She was serving as bass player in Cajun roots band Bonsoir, Catin, when the band was nominated for the album Light the Stars in 2014.

While she was still performing with Bonsoir, Catin, Landry began writing and singing her own country-inflected songs, evident on her solo albums Should Have Known (2010) and No Man’s Land (2013). The two albums charted her steady growth as a writer and singer in the competitive genre. Me And T-Coe’s Country, her collaboration with the exceptional pedal steel guitar player Richard Comeaux, was released to enthusiastic reviews in 2014. The album is pure whiskey-sodden honky-tonk, the grooves filled with jeremiads to faithlessness, drinking, and retribution, along with a version of ‘Tennessee Waltz” that could reduce a sociopath to tears. 

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Comeaux went to high school with Landry, but the two had fallen out of touch. During the recording of Bonsoir, Catin’s first album, Blues à Catin, the band needed a steel guitar player for one of the tracks. “I got a phone call one day from [musician] Dirk Powell,” said Comeaux. “[He said] they’re doing a record for this all-girl Cajun band and they want a pedal steel on it. I walk in the studio and there’s Yvette. We hadn’t seen each other in years, and that was the beginning of Yvette and I.”

Landry and Comeaux soon established an ongoing Thursday night residency at Buck & Johnny’s Restaurant, in Breaux Bridge, which continues to this day. “Yvette is so amazingly percussive on that guitar, she sounds like a drummer,” said Comeaux. “We recorded Me & T-Coe’s Country in one night, no overdubs. I bought a twelve-pack of beer and said ‘Let’s go!’ We recorded it in two or three hours, one take.”

“Her soul has taken over, the confidence is there, she’s got it. If the door opens, she’s going through it.”  —Richard Comeaux

One Thursday evening in 2017, Landry and Comeaux were playing their regular gig at Buck & Johnny’s. Landry looked out the window and saw a group of older men walking to the door, one of whom she recognized as swamp pop legend Warren Storm. 

“Until 2017, I’d never met Warren Storm—he was larger than life to me. So when I saw him through the window, I grabbed Richard by the arm and said, ‘Oh my God, Warren Storm’s about to walk in here!’ And Richard said, ‘Yeah, I invited him.” That’s when it clicked with me, Warren and Richard had played together for years in Lil’ Band o’ Gold.”

Storm, a member of the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame, is best known as the “Godfather of Swamp Pop.” The musical genre, indigenous to Louisiana, integrates R& B with early Louisiana rock n’ roll influences, particularly Fats Domino. Storm achieved popularity in the mid-1950s with a couple of hits that charted nationally. Though Storm sold 250,000 copies of his first record, the recording contract he signed excluded him from receiving any royalties from his work. Storm supported himself through the years living and performing on the road. Now 82, Storm lives alone in a small apartment in Lafayette on a modest income.

A few days after Storm’s appearance at Buck & Johnny’s, Landry invited him out to lunch and gave him one of her CDs. She offered Storm a ride home, and he invited her in to see some of his professional history. “So I go in and Warren starts pulling out all of this stuff—reviews, articles, photos,” remembered Landry. He brings in this big container and he starts pulling out all of these photos—and there’s one of Warren with Elvis, and another of Warren with Willie Nelson, and another of Warren with George Jones. I knew Warren as the Godfather of Swamp Pop. I did not know this side of Warren Storm. He told me stories of Elvis, Willie, Bocephus [Hank Williams, Jr.]. I was enthralled.”

When Landry got home that evening, she was bubbling over with excitement as she described the contents of Storm’s reliquary to her husband, Luke. Her husband told her, ‘Alrighty then, I think I know what your next project is. Warren is at home by himself all day, every day. You enjoy hearing his stories—why don’t you write a book about Warren—and you can call it Taking The World By Storm.’”“So the next day, I called the University of Lafayette Press,” said Landry, “completely thinking they’d have to take it to an editorial board or something—I mean, it’s an academic publisher. I told them about my idea about writing a book about Warren Storm, and they said, ‘When can you start?’”

Since last summer, she has visited Storm once a week as they work together on the book. He spent Christmas with her family. “Warren told me not long ago, ‘Yvette, you saved my life. I had absolutely nothing to live for.’”

The biography is only half of the project. Landry and Storm are currently recording an album of Storm’s songs on a 2-track at Dockside Studio in Maurice, Louisiana. The album, which features Marc Broussard, Sonny Landreth, and other Louisiana luminaries, will be printed on vinyl and available on CD and digital download. All proceeds from the book and album sales will go to Storm.  

There are multiple facets to Yvette Landry—performer, educator of thirty years, published author, musical historian. “I call her Wonder Woman,” said Storm. “She’s a teacher, she writes songs, she plays multiple instruments, and she puts her heart and soul into every song. She could be a giant.” 

Richard Comeaux agreed. “Her soul has taken over, the confidence is there, she’s got it. If the door opens, she’s going through it.”  

yvettelandry.com.

Catch Yvette Landry and Richard Comeaux together every Thursday evening, 7 pm–10 pm, at Buck and Johnny’s (100 Berard Street) in Breaux Bridge, La.