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3 Chapter one Prelude Down At The Twist And Shout Saturday night and the moon is out I wanna head on over to the Twist and Shout Find a two-step partner and a Cajun beat When it lifts me up I’m gonna find my feet Out in the middle of a big dance floor When I hear that fiddle wanna beg for more Wanna dance to a band from Louisian’ tonight. And I never have wandered down to New Orleans I never have drifted down a bayou stream But I heard that music on the radio And I swore someday I was gonna go Down Highway 10 past Lafayette There’s Baton Rouge and I won’t forget To send you a card with my regrets ’Cause I’m never gonna come back home. “Down At The Twist And Shout” by Mary Chapin Carpenter © 1990, recorded on Shooting Straight in the Dark, CBS 46077 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. Since that band was performing many original songs, I assumed that this was one of them, and all the more so due to its apt portrayal of how many of the dancers in attendance that night, myself included, had been introduced to the music. I mistakenly thought that the song was a tribute to Ashkenaz, the Berkeley club where we were dancing and where one or two Cajun or zydeco dances took place each week. 4 prelude: down at the twist and shout In fact, Mary Chapin Carpenter, the singer-songwriter star who began her career playing the coffeehouse circuit around Washington, D.C., wrote and recorded this song for which she earned a Grammy award in 1992 for best country female vocal performance. Carpenter wrote this song one cold, rainy weekend in her Takoma Park, Maryland, apartment when she heard that Michael Doucet and his band Beausoleil would be playing at the Twist and Shout, a D.C. area music venue where she had previously heard other “roots” acts. Without attending the Beausoleil show—and indeed, with little prior exposure to Cajun music except for local public radio programming—she nevertheless wrote this remarkable song. In a dream come true for the songwriter, Beausoleil later agreed to collaborate on its recording.1 When I discovered that the song I had first heard performed live in Berkeley wasactuallyanationalhitonthecountrycharts,Iwasbothsurprisedandintrigued. How could Carpenter write a song whose lyrics and manner of musical presentation —a non-Cajun singing in English to a Cajun two-step rhythm, with Cajun musicians (Michael Doucet, fiddle; Jimmy Breaux, accordion; and Billy Ware, percussion ) sitting in—fit so well a place (Ashkenaz in Berkeley) that was in no way an inspiration for the song? Its depiction of a dance hall “up north” was startlingly apt for those out west. The song’s success as a commodity in popular music culture could be taken as a measure of the songwriter’s ability to capture a certain zeitgeist, having to do with the marketing power of the word Cajun as a catchall term to signify exotic food, music, and other expressive culture across all historically francophone groups in Louisiana. Louisiana French music has been used in recent years as a soundtrack to promote a wide variety of commodities, including world music recordings, Louisiana tourism, grocery stores, over-the-counter stomach medicine, and automotive parts. Like the appearance of the Cajun label as a marketing tool and like the popularity of Carpenter’s song, the existence of a thriving dance scene for live Cajun and zydeco music some 2,000 miles from the home base of these regional styles begs the questions, how and why? 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. While the focus of the book is an ethnographic study of this local scene, I have chosen to lead off by examining “Down At The Twist And Shout,” an item of mass popular culture, to emphasize that this scene did not appear for reasons entirely unique to northern California and to provide a starting point for a discussion of themes that will resurface in other chapters. Postcolonial critiques of anthropological practice acknowledge that other...

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