#zydeco'

[stinkyhyena9000]

To celebrate my 2023 playlist reaching 250 songs, I'm gonna do a funny:

Pick a number between 1-250 and I'll give you a song from my playlist!! (You can choose as many numbers as you want)

[ghosthouseart]

peachtober day 18: SNOOZE

[image description: a black and white watercolor painting of two kittens asleep together. one is lying on its back with paws curled in the air, twisted around so its head is tucked against the other one's side. the second kitten is curled up in the top right of the frame. /end i.d.]

[haveyouheardthisband]

[herald-of-aurene]

An art dump of Zydeco's warped limbs after the Thaumanova explosion. The magic of it imbedded their limbs with magic and atrophied them

[haveyoulistenedtothisalbum-poll]

Tracklist:

The Boy In the Bubble • Graceland • I Know What I Know • Gumboots • Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes • You Can Call Me Al • Under African Skies • Homeless • Crazy Love, Vol. II • That Was Your Mother • All Around the World or the Myth of Fingerprints

Spotify ♪ YouTube

[earthgoddessmusings]

Lil' Nathan & The Zydeco Big Timers - Where the Pretty Women At

[Because a mutual (from across the pond) asked me "who" is zydeco 😂, it's a whole genre! Enjoy]

[musictyme]

Mardi Gras Season

[shrinkrants]

Stumbled on this gem while posting "Vigilante Man" yesterday. It is absolute pure joy and celebration! Give a listen. You won't be disappointed.

[dyscomancer]

This is a little out of left field, kinda off brand for me and specific to my area, but still. A very, very good person and critical figure in our local music scene was taken from us yesterday. This is really, really devastating for our city.

When these kinds of things happen I like to try and echo the voice of the departed as much as I can. So like if anyone is interested in broadening your musical horizons or hearing what music from my section of the world sounds like, it'd make me happy if y'all pulled up Feufollet's music and let his memory just exist a bit beyond our little corner of the swamp, at least for a bit. Would mean a lot

We often joke that Lafayette has 100 musicians but only 10 bands because everyone plays with each other. He was emblematic of that. Every person who has ever picked up an instrument in this city has an experience with this guy

[pokemonwearingsportsmerch]

[anakinsafterlife]

Music and Arts for Interview with the Vampire and other French-Enjoyers

I am so genuinely excited to find out that Zachary Richard, the Francophone folk singer from Louisiana, has released a novel! The story addresses the concerns of the American Francophonie with the story of a family wracked by politics and violence in the wakr of the American Civil War.

Friends, this the is the first American novel to be published in French since 1894! Although there is still a Francophone community in Louisiana to this day, they have been dealing with forced Anglicization for well over a hundred years, including the forced Anglophone education of Francophone children.

Zachary Richard remains an outlier in an largely English American cultural landscape. He wrote and recorded the majority of his songs in French and is popular in the international Francophone musical community.

I have been meaning to talk about Richard for a very long time, particular in the context of Interview with the Vampire. There are a good many cultural references in Interview, but unfortunately it seems that the show-runners are not really too informed about historical French arts because there aren't many references to French music or playwriting. Lestat would be more likely to act Moliere than Shakespeare. Louis would be somewhere in between, probably listening to and speaking both French and English songs. Unfortunately, I'm not too familiar with Black Creole musicians, of which there were/are indeed plenty in Louisiana. I've been meaning to educate myself in that area and post a selection along with my favourite tracks from Richard, but life has been very pressing indeed these last few years, so that never happened.

Here, then, are a few of my favourite songs from Zachary Richard and a few brief recordings from Black Zydeco artists, as well as the blurb from Richard's novel.

I didn't include translations, because that would make this long post long indeed, but Richard's lyrics are readily available in any search engine.

The novel:

Summary:

In the disarray that fell on southern Louisiana following the Civil War, André Boudreaux, seventeen years old, discovered life with his grandfather Drozin. This southern veteran, who became a rich man thanks to the arrival of the railway, tries to regain his prestige and his political power. But the sordid murder of André's uncle, the turbulent elections of 1882 and the political aims of his daughter-in-law will turn his world upside down. Les Rafales du carême is the first French-language novel published by a Louisiana author since 1894.

The music:

Dans les grands chemins. (On the big roads). A song about personal history and being drawn away from your place of origin to explore the wider world.

Au bord de Lac Bijou (On the shore of Lac Bijou). One of his bigger songs and very basic of me, but it's beautiful.

Le Ballade de Jean Batailleur. Again, one of his big ones, but it's a ballad about an orphan who grows up to be a criminal and dies alone. Depressing but gorgeous.

And this one gives me chills every time. It's a live rendition of Richard's song "La Promesse Cassee," performed with Celine Dion. This is hands down Dion's best performance ever, imho. Her voice is so nuanced and her expression so powerful, without ever once over-singing. The song's content probably has a lot to do with that. Richard wrote it in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when New Orleans was so utterly devastated, and the US federal government promised aid, which, after days of waiting, never came. "The Broken Promise" is a scathing and haunting commentary on that betrayal.

"Laisse le vent souffler" (Let the wind blow) addresses the same issue, but years later. The singer tells the story of the police arriving to evacuate the community as another hurricaine approaches. He refuses to leave because he has already survived other storms and he has seen how the police have failed to support a scattered community in the past.

Can't believe I almost forgot this one:

Reveille--A powerful song addresses the expulsion of the Acadians, the forced removal (by British/English Canadian forces) of the Acadian French from the Canadian east coast and northern USA east coast. Many of the Acadians were shipped further south or "back" to Europe, where most had never been. Plagued by attendant atrocities of starvation, drowning and disease, thousands of Acadians were killed. Those who survived the journey down the American coast eventually became known by the shortened name of "Cajuns."

There are also a few extra things here from Richard's YouTube, where he highlights other Louisiana French singers and musicians. I've only included a couple, but people writing for Interview might want to explore his page more, since there's some Black Zydeco (Louisiana folk and French) musicians there.

J'ai une chanson dans mon coeur:

I couldn't find anything out about this. A young, Black American girl sings this song in an American school. I think, and hope, that she's another member of the French Louisianian musical community. Very sweet.

Zachary Richard talking about his influences and earlier Zydeco music in Louisiana.

[euclydya]

reasons for Halley:

It is a Jirachi. that's fitting

Reasons for Zydeco:

we are Southern.

[uzumaki-rebellion]

Have I put y'all on to that Willie Jones sound yet? My Black Cowboy playlist is popping this afternoon!

[herald-of-aurene]

Kuda and Zydeco had Widget (then named Kudi) at 16, they were terrified, I mean, they had a BABY at sixteen, they were children themselves! They were terrified that they would ruin her, or hurt her or anything! But Zydeco was terrified of something else, xey were terrified of the inquest using her in an experiment. She had been born with her eyes having developed a rare, and ancient trait Xey knew it was irrational, but they were freaking out so much about so many things that they couldn't control, but they could control this.

So xey begged Kuda for the three of them to run away from the inquest, move to Rata Sum, or Thaumanova (Thauma Sum? Rata Thauma?) somewhere away from the inquest, and live a life with their daughter.

But Kuda refused, she was offended, and downright hurt that xey would even suggest leaving the inquest behind. Her father is an overseer of the inquest, and she had dreams of becoming one too! And so what if they poked at Kudi a little, she won't let them go all out on her, but so what?

So, months and months of trying to convince Kuda didn't work, and Zydeco had gotten to the point where xey began to think of alternatives. That was, until one late night, an older inquest member who had somehow heard about Zydeco's fears went up to xem, Kuda, and the babe, and poked a sharp nail at her. "I heard someone was afraid that someone would take an interest in this little rascal here! How selfish... I think id like to take you off of their hands.. pluck out these unique eyes of yours.." and ended it with a harsh cackle.

Though xey knew he was joking, taunting xem for xeir fears, but it was the final straw for xem. After the man left, Zydeco turned to Kuda, and for a final time for them to leave, to protect their daughter, but once again she brushed xem off.

So that night, Zydeco packed up both xeir and Kudi's stuff, and left a note for xeir beloved.

"I can't stand around and wait for you to change you mind, Kuda. I'm sorry, but i'm leaving... and taking Kudi with me. But, its never too late to join us. Please.

If you ever want to join us, trigger this device, it will send a hologram to my golem for us to talk.

Goodbye,

Zydeco."

The hologram never went off.

(part two)

[romanchacon]

On June 15, 1939 Zora Neale Hurston recorded "Uncle Bud," a bawdy song found all over the South that went on to become a Cajun-Creole Zydeco classic. Hurston explains, "'Uncle Bud' is not a work song. It is a sort of social song for amusement." One of the first documented instances of the song in print appeared as "O-Bud!" in a Texas Folklore Society publication in 1928, collected in Virginia ca. 1924, but Hurston likely first heard the song from black working men while she was doing folklore field work in logging and terpantine camps in Louisiana. It's an invaluable audible artifact from almost a century ago. And it's quite raunchy to say the least! At the end, either Stetson Kennedy or Hurbert Halpert, the Library of Congress folk collectors in that session, say with an audible grin, "I think that's a very valuable contribution to scientific recording."