Amédé Ardoin
Dennis McGee
Cléoma and Joseph Falcon
Marc and Ann Savoy
Dewey Balfa, Marc Savoy, and D.J. Menard
D.J. Menard
Michael Doucet
Alphonse “Bois Sec” Ardoin (nephew of Amédé Ardoin)
Canray Fontenot
Queen Ida
Clifton Chenier
King of the Zydeco
Michael Doucet
Director Les Blank
J'AI ÉTÉ AU BAL / I WENT TO THE
DANCE
B+
aka: French Dance Tonight (abridged version shown on
PBS American Experience)
USA (84 mi) 1989 d: Les Blank
co-director: Chris Strachwitz
Perhaps the definitive film on Cajun and zydeco music from
Southern Louisiana, co-directed by Chris Strachwitz, the founder of Arhoolie
Records who was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship in 2000,
Blank provides an insider perspective that both outlines and interprets the
history of Cajun and Creole music. Featuring vintage photographs and
recordings as well as recollections of musicians from within the culture
itself, including commentary from Marc Savoy of Eunice, Louisiana, a highly
regarded accordion player, and Michael Doucet, a fiddler, singer, songwriter
and historian who founded the Cajun band BeauSoleil from
Lafayette, Louisiana, also awarded a National Heritage Fellowship in 2005,
the film is a tribute to the cultural roots and a joyous celebration of the
music. The film has no real beginning or end, is no frills, where nothing
is the least bit showy or pretentious, but simply records musicians and singers
as they sit on a milk crate in someone’s backyard and perform songs, usually
with a fiddle or an accordion, while all around them barnyard animals are
roaming about, like chickens, roosters, sheep, cows, ducks, horses and cats
while laundry can be seen hanging on a line. The Acadians (aka
Cajuns) are French descendents from Nova Scotia, where nearly 12,000 were
exiled from Canada by the British in the 1750’s when they were suspected of
aiding the French, due to their language similarities, traveling great distance
when they migrated to Louisiana, which was a French colony at the time,
bringing with them Celtic traditions that soon mixed with Indians, free people of color and the Louisiana Creole people, who were
predominately influenced by the West Indies and Africa, providing the original
roots of Cajun culture in southwest Louisiana.
While the fiddle seems to have been the instrument of choice
in Cajun music, the accordion was introduced into early sound recordings of the
1920’s, where Joe Falcon, a white accordion player recorded the first Cajun
song in 1928, Allons à Lafayette, (heard here: Lafayette) before
touring across Texas and southern Louisiana with his wife Cléoma ("Joe Falcon &
Cleoma Breaux from an invaluable Cajun MP3 website playing vintage 78
recordings), while Creole musician Amédé Ardoin, a sharecropper at a nearby
farm, was known for his high-pitched vocals and considerable dexterity on the
instrument, becoming a frequent performer at dances, playing mostly for white
audiences. Ardoin met Dennis McGee, a white fiddler from Eunice, forming
one of the first biracial duos, making their first recording together December
9, 1929 in New Orleans (Amédé
Ardoin & Dennis McGee: Blues du Basile) while often performing at house
parties, driven in a horse-drawn carriage provided by the plantation
owners. After falling out of favor from the mid 30’s to 1950, accordian
music was rejuvenated in the late 1940’s by returning war veterans, where
traditional music was influenced by rhythm and blues, where the Creole black
offshoot of Zydeco
music was born, a blues and dance music featuring the accordion along with the
percussive sound of metal spoons on a corrugated tin rub board, where the
foremost practitioner was Clifton Chenier, known as the King of the Zydeco, with
his brother Cleveland on spoons (six in each hand).
Blank was born in Tampa, Florida but studied English at
Tulane University in New Orleans, going to graduate school in writing at
Berkeley in California, but returned to Tulane for a masters in
playwriting. But after seeing Bergman’s THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957), Blank
discovered a love for making films, making a number of educational and
industrial movies after completing film school at USC. According to an interview
with Mary Tutwiler from The Ind, March 23, 2010, Les
Blank screening at AcA - IND Media - theIND.com:
I used to work summers on a sea-going
tug boat in the Gulf, between Tampa, my home, and Texas and Mobile and New
Orleans and on one trip, I got off in New Orleans and saw the sights and a
friend of mine from school lived here and we saw the French Quarter and I was
living in an all boy’s prep school at the time and I thought this was a pretty
interesting place. I came to school here after high school. I wanted to play
football. It wasn’t the best place for academics...but that’s how I got here.
When I was at Tulane, those were
the days when Cajuns were under the carpet somewhere, you didn’t talk about
them much, they were kind of a mythical creature who lived back in the bayous.
On the radio in New Orleans, there was a radio commercial for Tichenor’s
Antiseptic, the chords and the music were Cajun sounding, it was sort of
dissonant sounding but to my mind a pleasing, catching kind of music. On the
football team, there were a couple of Cajuns and I noticed they were quite
different from everybody else and I enjoyed their outlook and their humor and
their kind of crazy sensibilities. And they told me about these dance halls out
in the woods and I thought this would be interesting, so my girlfriend and I
drove over there, and I attended one of these functions down a dirt road in an
old barn type building made out of old wood and the floor was jam-packed with
people dancing around in a circle and sweating and the beer was really cold and
they were doing the two-step and everybody was in perfect sync with one another
and every time they hit their feet down on the floor, the whole floor would
cave in and bounce back up. They didn’t speak much English at all. I was
studying French, I could get by, I could get my beer ordered and I had a lot of
fun. It made a deep impression on me. I wanted to come back and do something
later.
I was in Houston, doing an
industrial film for a Gulfport tube company that makes oil pipes. To entertain
myself, I went to a Cajun dance I saw advertised in the Houston paper. Again,
it was the same kind of people doing the same kind of dancing. I made friends
with the leader of the musical group and he invited me and my girlfriend over
to his house for chicken gumbo. He cooked a delicious chicken gumbo. I was very
moved by his deep affection for his food as well as his music. I wanted to
experience more of that. So later, when I saw Dewey Balfa in Chicago, I
introduced myself, he invited me backstage and he shared some of his moonshine
with me, and he said, “Come on down to Louisiana and I’ll help you make a
film.” Down there, I met Marc Savoy and he was very helpful as well. Paul Tate
and Revon Reed also were most helpful. Revon Reed let me live in his garage
apartment in Mamou.
The way to identify French dancehalls in the early days was
find a roadhouse off on a dirt road someplace that had all the side windows
wide open during the daytime hours, as that was a sign it would be open for
business later that night. Near the door would be an area sectioned off
for the men, along with buckets of cold beer, while sand would be liberally
applied to the dance floor. During the Depression, when farmers were
doing backbreaking work in the fields, earning little more than $1.50 all day,
Cajun musicians discovered that for a few hours work they could earn
$2.50. Inspired by Ann Allen Savoy’s book Cajun Music: a Reflection of a People, 1984, Blank is an unseen
force behind the camera, where the power of the film are the musicians playing
music onscreen while also offering reflections on their early
experiences. Dennis McGee remembers playing with Amédé Ardoin, who is to
zydeco music what Robert Johnson is to the blues, and Buddy Bolden is to jazz,
all three dying under mysterious circumstances, while Mark Savoy comes from a
family in Eunice that designs chairs and furniture and holds a chemical
engineering degree, but he became a legendary accordion maker while also
playing the accordion in a Cajun family band that includes his singing and
guitar-playing wife Ann, the author of the book. Stepping on an accordion
while hanging from a tree, Savoy displays the durability of the instrument that
at least partially accounts for its long-lasting influence, as they never
break, while offering a lesson on how exactly (in five levels) Cajun accordion
is played. According to Savoy, it was performers like fiddler Dewey Balfa
playing at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964 that triggered the modern era
Cajun revival.
The film is loaded with Cajun and zydeco performers like
Queen Ida, Canray Fontenot, D.L. Menard and Nathan Abshire, along with the
irrepressible zydeco music of Clifton Chenier, who used to show up at
Fitzgerald’s, a roadhouse bar and dancehall in Berwyn (just outside Chicago)
every 4th of July week, whose recollection of songs was unparalleled, like the
Duke Ellington of zydeco, as he’d play Little Richard in English right
alongside those French Louisiana two-steps. Queen Ida talks about the
Cajun belt in southern Louisiana and Texas as if it is foreign territory cut
off from the rest of the world, an unexplored part of America that was simply
left alone and went largely undetected by outsiders for centuries, yet the rich
diversity of their lives is filled with a healthy mix of French, Caribbean,
Indian, and cowboy cultures, where they survived the Depression by
understanding how to live off the land, where hunting is a mainstay of their
survival as well as their diet, where Cajun food is all the rage today.
Blank takes his camera away from the Bourbon Street tourist attractions and
shows us life in the small tucked-away towns that are little more than a main
street, an old filling station with old stores and bars with peeling paint on
the walls. Never calling attention to itself, the film is a time capsule
into another era, where what’s so heartfelt about all this music is how close
to poverty the performers remain, as these are all people that never made a lot
of money, that worked hard all their lives, many who survived the Depression by
working in the oil refineries where nothing came easy. All their songs
are about loneliness, heartbreak or hard times, women that left them or were no
good, drunken revelations, misbehaving, or death, a reaction to living rough
lives, yet the sheer energy is so deliriously invigorating, covering the full
dramatic spectrum in every song. These are artists that love and
appreciate what life has offered them, that sing with a spirit of joy, where their
jubilant exhilaration offers some of the best of the human experience.
