Musician Buckwheat Zydeco dead at 68

BUCKWHEAT Zydeco (pic), the accordion player who found an unexpected mainstream audience with the danceable genre of Louisiana’s Creole community, died on Saturday. He was 68.

The artist, whose real name was Stanley Dural Jr, had been suffering from lung cancer. His manager, Ted Fox, wrote on his website that Buckwheat died at 1.32am, “keeping musicians’ hours right to the bitter end.”

Buckwheat grew up in a musical family immersed in the sounds of zydeco, which has similarities to the blues but is defined by a faster-paced, up-tempo sound. “My dad played the accordion for family entertainment. He played the accordion every day, in the morning before work, when he came home for lunch and after supper,” he said in a 2014 interview with the Nuvo newspaper of Indianapolis.

Before Buckwheat, the music was seldom heard outside of the homes of Louisiana Creoles, the people of the southern US state with blended African, French and indigenous roots. But after winning critical acclaim in the 1980s, Buckwheat’s band became the first zydeco act signed by a major record, Island. — AFP