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The Cajuns are descendants of the Acadians, a band of French colonists who founded "l'Acadie" in 1624 in what is now Nova Scotia. Expelled by the British in 1755 -- an event still remembered locally as the "Grand Darangement" -- they eventually wound up in the isolated, rural southwest of Louisiana. There, sharing space with African Americans, many descended from French-speaking Creole "free men of color," they evolved their unique musical language.
The preservation of a folk tradition that nearly expired during the region's Americanization in the 1950s owes much to accordionist Savoy, 54. The godfather of the Cajun revival, he hosts a weekly Cajun jam session in the front room of the music store he has operated since 1966 in Eunice, a small town (pop. 11,000) northwest of Lafayette. A master craftsman who builds 75 to 100 accordions a year, some of them costing up to $1,400, Savoy is a purist who prefers French to English, forbids amplification at his jam sessions and plasters the walls of his workshop with chauvinistic folk homilies ("Some Cajuns are turning their back on a hot bowl of gumbo for a cold, tasteless American hot dog").
The accordion may bring to mind visions of polkas and Lawrence Welk, but to the Cajuns it is the cornerstone of their distinctive sound. First introduced into Louisiana in 1850, the diatonic Cajun accordion has 10 melody buttons (instead of the more familiar piano keys) on one side and two bass accompaniment buttons on the other. "The Cajuns liked the accordion for two reasons," says Savoy. "No. 1, you could break half the metal reeds and it would still play. And No. 2, it was loud."
That, according to Beausoleil's Doucet, accounts for the striking vocal style that marks Cajun music: a high tenor that must strain to be heard over the roaring accordion and droning fiddles. The protean Doucet, 43, is a virtuoso violinist, accordionist and singer who gleefully punctuates the French lyrics with the traditional shouts of "Oh, ya, yaie!" He is also an accomplished composer and scholar who has tracked the Cajun style from its origins in northern France through the songs of such 20th century Cajuns as Amada Ardoin and Iry Lejune. Together with his brother David and some friends, he cut the first Beausoleil record in 1975 in Paris; by 1986 the band was playing full time, and Doucet has never looked back. "It's not us," he says of the band's popularity. "It's the music."
If Cajun is the raucous, slightly tragic musical memory of a people, then Zydeco is its ebullient younger cousin. The name is the phonetic rendering of the first two words of the French phrase "les haricots sont pas salas," which means "the snap beans aren't salted," a traditional indicator of hard times. But there is no misery here: while Cajun's intrinsic melancholy can be heard in its grave waltzes, Zydeco is almost nothing but upbeat two-step rhythms. Audiences show their appreciation not by applauding but by getting up and dancing.