Cajun and Zydeco Dance Music in Northern California: Modern Pleasures in a Postmodern World (review)

By 1992 Washington D.C.-based singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter was sitting on top of the musical world. That year she won a Grammy Award for her Louisiana-themed “Down at the Twist and Shout.” The recording, highlighting musicians from the Cajun band Beausoleil, interjected Cajun music into the national musical discourse. “When I first heard ‘Down At The Twist And Shout,’ it was performed live at a dance circa 1992–93 in Berkeley, California, by a local ‘swamp boogie’ band, Tee Fee” (3), remembers ethnomusicologist Mark F. DeWitt. The experience piqued his curiosity and ultimately sustained his dissertation research on Cajun and Zydeco music in the San Francisco Bay area.

Creoles of color—French-speaking Afro-Catholics from south Louisiana and east Texas—and, to a lesser extent Cajuns, migrated westward by the hundreds in search of work beginning around World War II. These transplants helped root aspects of their Gulf Coast heritage in and around San Francisco Bay. In this milieu, individuals like “Queen Ida” Guillory and Danny Poullard emerged as stalwarts of Louisiana French culture in dance clubs and jam sessions that grew exponentially in proportion to the influx of Louisiana expatriates. Today, DeWitt’s first monograph, Cajun and Zydeco Dance Music in Northern California, stands as the definitive book on Cajun and Creole music beyond south Louisiana. In delimiting his topic, he explains, “In a region triangulated by Santa Cruz and Sonoma Counties along the coast and Sacramento to the east, dances to live Cajun and/or zydeco music have been held roughly four times a week since the early 1990s when I began my field research” (4). This interdisciplinary study combines elements of oral history, ethnography, and ethnomusicology to contextualize and historicize the nationalization of Louisiana musical culture. DeWitt focuses on the “Cajun music and zydeco scene in northern California with a dual emphasis throughout: the scene as a unique and significant development within the history of Louisiana French music, and the scene as a microcosm for the reception of the music and dance in popular culture at national and even international levels” (242–43). Cajun music and Zydeco’s influence on the West Coast, he argues, created an interactive space for the construction of a collective postmodern identity shared by both Louisiana expatriates (“community members”) and non-Cajun/Creoles (“revivalists”) who play and/or dance to Louisiana French music.

Cajun and Zydeco Dance Music in Northern California is organized into three essential parts: a theoretical discussion of Louisiana French music’s sociocultural contexts; descriptive oral histories of the main actors in the Northern California scene; and appendices that include a discography and filmography. In the first section of the book, DeWitt weaves an ethnographic narrative with a level of theoretical sophistication that Cajun and Zydeco music scholarship has not yet seen. By deploying assorted perspectives from the social sciences and cultural studies across these first three chapters, DeWitt constructs a sturdy theoretical scaffolding that elucidates the varied meaning of Louisiana French music’s reception outside of the Gulf Coast. In chapter 2, for instance, he tackles identity politics with the help of James Clifford and Stuart Hall, while using Robert Cantwell’s formulation of modernity in American folk music as points of departure to discuss the broader meaning of the northern California Cajun/Zydeco scene. Paramount are the ramifications of the emic and etic distinctions between revivalists and community members, as are the implications (and pitfalls) of “authenticity” and identity formation. In the last five chapters, DeWitt offers detailed biographical sketches of Louisiana expatriates including Guillory and Poullard, record producer Chris Strachwitz and filmmaker Les Blank, revivalist musicians like Will Spires and Delilah Lewis, and the dancers populating clubs like Berkeley’s Ashkenaz Music and Dance Community Center. “In an attempt to preserve the integrity of each person’s story,” he explains, “each chapter containing interview material...