Zydeco music is a type of folk music that originated in the late 1800s in the United States. It began as a way for French-speaking Creoles and free people of color in southern Louisiana to socialize. It’s important to remember that zydeco’s mixture of influences comes from the melting pot of cultures in southern Louisiana in the late 1800s and early 1900s if you want to understand what it is.
Louisiana at the time had a large population of Acadians who had been expelled from Nova Scotia, Canada a century before. Cajun music, also known as la-lamusic, is a type of French folk music that has been influenced other European countries. Immigrants from the West Indies and freed slaves from West Africa lived in Southern Louisiana prior to the Louisiana Purchase. The exact extent of other cultures’ influence on zydeco music is unknown. The most straightforward way to comprehend zydeco is to consider the influence of Creole music on Cajun music.
Dance hall dances or dance houses were the primary form of entertainment for rural Creoles during this time. At these dances, the Creoles played la-la music. The Creoles gave the French-influenced la-la music a blues and R&B twist, and it became known as zydeco music. Clifton Chenier, the King of Zydeco, embodied the music best.
Chenier was born in 1925 in the rural Creole community of Opelousas, Louisiana. In 1958, he relocated to Houston, Texas, where local blues music influenced his music. The King of Zydeco recorded on the same label as well-known artists like Sam Cooke and Little Richard, which helped to popularize zydeco music. Chenier is also credited with popularizing the term “zydeco” associating it with a number of his songs.
The name zydeco comes from a French phrase that means “salt-free snap beans.” The word “haricots” (snap beans) is pronounced “lay-zydeco.” The phrase serves as a metaphor for adversity. Traditionally, Creoles used salted mean to season their food, including their snap beans. Salted meat became prohibitively expensive during hard times, which explains why “the beans aren’t salty.”
Although zydeco music can include a wide range of musical instruments, the accordion and the frottoir, a special type of washboard also known as a rubboard invented Clifton Cheier, are the most common. Other instruments such as electric guitars, fiddles, and horns were added to the standard instruments plus a bass and drums throughout the twentieth century.