Photo by Howard Brainen
Todd Mouton had been writing about southwest Louisiana roots music for years when he hit on the idea of writing a book about the accordionist known as the King of Zydeco, Clifton Chenier. Twenty years later, in 2015, Way Down in Louisiana: Clifton Chenier, Cajun, Zydeco, and Swamp Pop Music was released by UL Press in Lafayette. In addition to four lengthy chapters about Chenier, the book also looks at Louisiana musicians such as Buckwheat Zydeco, Sonny Landreth, Michael Doucet, Steve Riley, Lil’ Buck Sinegal, and Zachary Richard, among others. Designed by artist Megan Barra, it is illustrated with black-and-white and color photos of musicians, show posters, and ticket stubs.
Mouton sums up Chenier in the introduction:
Over the course of his thirty-three-year recording career, Chenier journeyed from the humblest possible beginnings to a pair of Grammy awards, including one for lifetime achievement, and his 1976 Bogalusa Boogie album has been honored with inclusion in the Grammy Hall of Fame collection. He was born on the muddy prairies 140 miles northwest of New Orleans at the dawn of the recording age in 1925, and his story began when south Louisiana was still split in half by the 140-mile-long by 25-mile-wide Atchafalaya Basin swamp, then navigable only by boat. … Chenier and his band invented music that stands starkly apart while still remaining deeply connected to the wellspring of funky sounds emanating from The Big Easy.
(Left: Todd Mouton. Photo by Jason Cohen.)
He also tells how he first came to the project:
"Someone really needs to write a book about Clifton,” my dad said early in [the 1990s], and I emphatically agreed, before realizing he envisioned me as its author. … I took up the challenge and began conducting extensive interviews with the surviving members of Chenier’s Red Hot Louisiana Band. About a decade later I realized that the King’s legacy was perhaps best understood through the diverse work of his many artistic acolytes.
“In 1995, when I started on this book, I was writing other stories about Acadiana music,” Mouton said in a recent interview. He had covered such musicians as Richard and Landreth, writing album and performance reviews for the Times of Acadiana and OffBeat, among other publications. “I didn’t think about putting them together with the Clifton Chenier book at first. That idea came to me in 2003.”
Chenier, who died in 1987 at the age of 62, was well known; but Mouton found that information about him was largely superficial. “The whole writing process was searching for information about him,” said Mouton. “Really very little was known about him. He only did a few interviews in his life despite thirty-three years of recording [from 1954 through 1987]. He managed to fly under the radar. He escaped notice.”
Mouton started the process by talking to the men who had played with Chenier in his Red Hot Louisiana Band: keyboardist Buckwheat, guitarists Sinegal and Jumpin’ Joe Morris, and saxophonist John Hart. The band had traveled from house parties in Opelousas to Carnegie Hall and to Europe.
“The players ended up being the heart of the book,” said Mouton. “They spent the most time with him. The way they approached the music was almost telepathic, listening while playing, a great sense of dynamics. You didn’t know where the song was going next.
“You get a sense of how exotic it was for them to go to Paris or Montreux. They were ambassadors, trailblazers, groundbreakers. These folks were really communing. There’s a lot of theories about culture and folklore. But they weren’t academics. They were just doing it. And they were learning about new cultures. They were all pieces in a much larger story.
“There are a number of conflicting stories and details. The last few years of work on the book, I was helped a great deal by the Internet. You could find some fanatical guy in Germany who had a photo of the B-side of a 45 or 78 on his website.”
Mouton found that interviews with Chenier were scarce. “I thought there were only three,” he said. “But a lot of things have popped up. While the book was being printed, a fourth [interview] walked into the UL archives. It’s in French. Just yesterday somebody sent me an interview I hadn’t seen. So there are five interviews that I know of. But the big mysteries are still there. I don’t know if anybody will ever come up with an interview about Clifton’s philosophy of life and his theories of music.”
Mouton regrets that he never saw Chenier play live. Oddly enough, his one chance came when the Lafayette native was attending Boston College in the 1980s. “I was 19 in 1987, in school in Boston. Clifton played at the Nightstage nightclub in Cambridge in November 1987, and he died on December 12. I went to the [neighborhood] and parked, but didn’t get out of my car and go.”
Why not? “I’ve thought about it a whole lot. I was a college student; I was broke. Clifton was old and sick. He had had two surgeries and eventually lost his right leg. He had complications from diabetes and kidney failure. He was on dialysis.
“By that point I had seen Buckwheat in the same club. He introduced me to his booking agent, and I ended up working as an intern at Concerted Efforts [booking agency] for one semester. I used to stamp the words ‘If you use the word Cajun [to promote the appearance], the gig is off’ on his contracts.”
Photo by Paul Natkin
Mouton has produced concerts, radio shows and records of Cajun, Creole, and other music for more than twenty years. In 1991, he started the radio show Dirty Rice on KRVS 88.7 FM in Lafayette. It is the longest-running show on Louisiana music, still going today, although Mouton moved on in 2001 when he founded the Louisiana Crossroads concert series. “We traveled around putting on about twenty to twenty-five concerts a year,” said Mouton, who left the series in 2011.
Now executive director of Louisiana Folk Roots on the Vermilionville property, Mouton produces several events for the nonprofit organization, including Balfa Week, which offers sixteen hours of instruction and information daily. Named for the late Cajun fiddler Dewey Balfa, it is primarily a music camp for fiddlers, accordionists, and guitarists at all levels. Balfa’s daughter Christine, a member of the group Balfa Toujours, is a staff artist. People from twenty-five states and six countries have traveled there to immerse themselves in Cajun and Creole culture and music.
A second printing of the Chenier book will be released soon, and Mouton will be interviewed on the Music Heritage stage at the Jazz and Heritage Festival in New Orleans this spring.
“When I was doing the final research and writing on the book, I came across a full-length video about Clifton,” said Mouton. “It was previously believed that there was no full-length live performance video of Clifton. This is an hour long and features the band performing thirteen songs at the Kingfish bar in Baton Rouge and two at Jay’s Lounge in Cankton.”
In a video clip Mouton has produced to promote the book, Sinegal talks about the days when the band played two four-hour shows a day on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. “That’s sixteen hours in two days, plus setting up and tearing down,” said Mouton. “At this point, they definitely didn’t need to rehearse.”
Mouton sometimes wonders what might have happened if Chenier had lived “another three decades, like B.B. King did. Imagine the fame, the accolades, and the income!” Instead, Chenier absorbed insults and meager pay while never losing his love for performing. “At Bon Ton Rouley, a white Lafayette club, he wasn’t allowed to use the bathroom. Here’s a guy born into a sharecropping family, speaking French, very likely illiterate, playing accordion. The odds against him doing anything very signficant, much less birthing a genre known worldwide—it’s phenomenal.”
Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.
For more information on Mouton’s book, visit waydowninlouisiana.com.
