Clifton Chenier is called the “King of Zydeco.” Although he did not invent zydeco, the black dance music related to Cajun music, he was certainly responsible for popularising the style and for taking it far beyond southwest Louisiana and east Texas.
Chenier was heavily influenced by Amadé Ardoin, the first black Creole musician to play blues on the accordion professionally. In the 1930s, Ardoin was performing dance music, adding blues to French dance tunes that had been around for more than two centuries. Chenier further embellished the music with elements of rhythm and blues (R&B), country, and rock’n’roll. Other musicians that were major influences were accordionist Sidney Babineaux and bluesman Lowell Fulson.
Chenier was born on June 25, 1925, near Opelousas, Louisiana. He and his older brother Cleveland grew up working in sugar, cotton, and rice fields with their sharecropping family. In the evenings the brothers went along with their father, John, when he played the accordion at dances and house parties in the surrounding area. It was his father who gave Chenier his first accordion, and his first lessons on it.
When Clifton and Cleveland left home in 1942 they started playing their music in local dance-hall shacks around St. Charles, Louisiana—Clifton on accordion, Cleveland on the washboard. During the mid-1940s, Chenier lived in New Iberia, Louisiana, and cut sugarcane for a living. He moved to Port Arthur, Texas, in 1947. There, for the next seven years, he drove a truck for an oil company during the day, while at night Clifton and His Hot Sizzling Band were storming the dance halls of Texas and Louisiana.
By the time he first recorded on a Los Angeles label in 1954, Chenier had become a well-established regional performer. His first release, “Eh, petite fille,” was a national hit for Specialty Records, and by 1956 he had become a full-time musician. Having given up his day job, Chenier was able to move to Houston, Texas, in 1958, and this proved to be a good base from which to tour all around the Southern states. The popularity of rock’n’roll in the late 1950s dwarfed ethnic and regional styles, and for a time Chenier turned to the guitar (on which he was also proficient) and earned a good living as an R&B guitarist.
Chenier returned to zydeco for good when he signed a contract with Arhoolie Records in the 1960s. By the end of the decade, he was touring throughout Europe. Later, he recalled a gathering of what he estimated to be some 500 accordion players: “They was giving away a king hat, and I won it.” He was never to relinquish the crown.
Clifton was a euphoric singer and accordion player, favouring the piano accordion rather than the button accordions of the Cajun players. Cleveland was just as flamboyant on the metal rub-board (similar to the washboard, but worn as a waistcoat). The Chenier brothers surrounded themselves with a guitars, basses, and saxophones to produce an electrifying sound.
Chenier was increasingly plagued by failing health. He had diabetes and kidney failure, which led to part of his foot being amputated in 1979. In the last years of his life his contracts always included a rider that he would only play in locations where he could receive kidney dialysis. Nevertheless, he continued to be a vibrant performer almost until his dying day, on December 12, 1987.
Stan Hieronymus
SEE ALSO:
CAJUN; COUNTRY; ROCK’N’ROLL.
FURTHER READING
Ancelet, Barry Jean. The Makers of Cajun Music (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1984);
Govenar, Alan. Meeting the Blues (Dallas, TX: Taylor Publishing, 1988).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
Live! At the Long Beach and San Francisco Blues Festivals;
Sixty Minutes with the King of Zydeco; Zydeco Blues and Boogie; Zydeco Dynamite: The Clifton Chenier Anthology.