Slippery sounds
Slippery Sneakers plays Mardi Gras tonight
WOONSOCKET— When Robert Graves Leonard is squeezing his red-white-andblue accordion, and his band Slippery Sneakers keeping the beat with him, playing wallflower is not an option.
This band of troubadours has mastered the sound known nas zydeco, a Louisiana-spawned genre powered by the piano accordion, with a fiddle and rub board percussion for extra oomph, as well as all the instruments needed for a rock and roll combo. Listen a moment or two, and you might catch yourself trying to do an old-country clog dance and Michael Jackson moonwalk at the same time. Zydeco is a hybrid sound, combining traditional music brought over from France with rhythms and grace notes lifted from blues, soul, reggae and other genres that originated with African Americans.
“The roots of this music are French, Caribbean, African, and a little Spanish, too,” Leonard says. “We’’re a six-piece band — drums, bass guitar, rhythm guitar, rub board percussion, accordion, and fiddle. With a line up like that, you can’t help but move.”
The insistent zydeco beat will be the sound track when northern Rhode Island celebrates Mardi Gras Saturday night at St. Ann Arts & Cultural Center in Woonsocket. For those who flunked French, Mardi Gras is French for Fat Tuesday (please pretend you don’t notice that Rhode Islanders have moved the party to the weekend.) It’s the last day before the austere Lenten season, during which observant Roman Catholics for 46 days swear off such indulgences as sweets, alcohol, and meat on Fridays.
That makes it a date when people who share a French heritage let their hair down and party hard. And northern Rhode Island, home to so many folks who claim French Canadian ancestry, is no exception.
In New Orleans, home to the USA’s biggest and bestknown Mardi Gras celebration, the revelry is stretched out over several weeks, with feasts, parades, balls, and wild bacchanalian behavior in the streets. Woonsocket’s party is shorter — the main event is a one-night dance and feast — and a bit more restrained, but by all accounts, it’s still a great party.
The bash begins tonight at 5 p.m. The location: St. Ann Arts & Cultural Center, 84 Cumberland St. Tickets are $30, or $35 cash at the door (if they’re still available.) Call Lorraine Cloutier at 401-7629072 or send email to lcloutier1@cox.net
Russell Morin Catering is preparing a buffet that will include both the sometimes-spicy Cajun cuisine of Louisiana and the hearty fare enjoyed by Franco Americans in New England mill towns. Partyers will enjoy mixed greens melange with dressing, artisan breads, French meat pies, chicken and sausage gumbo, old-fashioned creamy grits, red beans and rice, southern-style collard greens with ham, pecan pie with vanilla ice cream, and coffee.
The French-speaking Cajuns of backwoods Louisiana are known to serve up everything from crayfish to alligator to raccoon to river rat at their Mardi Gras. You can be assured though, that the caterer at the Woonsocket party is not that concerned with authenticity, and will stick to meats commonly found at local butcher shops.
Two bands will be playing. Local favorites Jeff Gamache and Runaway Train will get the crowd moving with country and country rock. Once folks are up and dancing, Leonard and Slippery Sneakers will take over to provide a real Louisiana sound. They’re considered New England’s number one exponents of zydeco.
Slippery Sneakers has been playing at Woonsocket’s Mardi Gras for more than a decade, so many locals are now familiar with the troupe, who can be somewhat startling to those hearing them for the first time.
The lean and lanky Leonard is the front man, squeezing a piano accordion painted to resemble the American flag. Rub board player Betsy Dawn Williams is in motion the entire show, dancing while she beats out a rhythm.
Just what is this zydeco music? It’s sometimes lumped together with the music played by Louisiana Cajuns, but it’s actually something different entirely. You’ll never hear anything quite the same. Leonard explains it with a history lesson.
In colonial times, he notes, the first Louisiana settlers were French people who were looking to start plantations, and the African slaves they brought along to do the work. These people — both the whites and the blacks — were called Creoles. Cajuns — originally called Acadians — were part of a second wave of settlers. They made their homes in the bayous, or swamp country, along the coast.
“The Cajuns were originally colonists along Canada’s Atlantic coast,” Leonard says. “Sometime in the 1700s Britain gained control of that region. When the Acadians — that’s what the French there were called — wouldn’t bow to the British flag, they were exiled. Some of them were put on boats and sent to Louisiana. They ended up in the bayous. There are some very tragic stories from that time, of families being separated forever.”
Sometime later, peddlers flooded Louisiana with inexpensive diatonic accordions. “‘Diatonic’ means you get different notes when you push and different notes when you pull,” Leonard says. “What you hear today is usually a chromatic accordian, which gives you the same note whether your squeezing or pulling.”
Cajun accordionists had to skip some notes to adapt their traditional French dance music to the new instruments. As a result, Cajun music has a distinctive herky-jerky feel. With the passage of time, it was also influenced by country music and Texas swing.
Eventually the region’s African-American Creoles picked up the music, and gave it their own twist. “You can’t get a bluesy feel with a diatonic accordion,” Leonard says. “Black musicians wanted the music to have a bluesy sound, so they picked up chromatic accordions, piano accordions. They also got rid of the triangle that the Cajuns liked for percussion and replaced it with the rub board housewives used for scrubbing dirty laundry. Later on they added the electric bass and drum kits.”
The result was zydeco. Famous exponents of the music have included Amédé Ardoin, Clifton Chenier, Queen Ida, Rockin’ Dopsie, John Delafose, and Boozoo Chavis. When Creole musicians picked up the sound, they added a syncopated rhythm, creating a strain of their own. Through the decades, zydeco has also been influenced by blues, jazz, soul, funk, reggae, and in recent years, hip hop.
“The word zydeco comes from ‘les haricots,’” Leonard says. “That’s French for beans. The Creole people in Louisiana would have big parties where they played the music and served spicy beans. Some times they couldn’t afford salt, and you’d hear people yelling ‘Les haricots ne sont pas sales!’ — ‘The beans aren’t salty enough.’ The expression got attached to the music.”
Leonard became familiar with zydeco through his interest in jazz, soul, and other types of music that originated in black communities.
“I’m born and raised in Rhode Island,” he says. “I actually don’t have any French ancestry. I’m 100 percent Celtic — Scottish, Irish, and English. But I’ve been listening to black music, African-American music, since I was about four years old. When I was younger I paid a lot of attention to Jimmy Smith, the B3 organ player, and I had an organ at home for about 30 years.
“I went to a zydeco festival here in Rhode Island. When I heard the music, I though, wow, I could play that. I had actually taken up accordion back in fifth grade, but when I got to seventh grade, I realized the accordion was considered kind of nerdy, so I started playing piano. I did a lot of Jerry Lee Lewis. I started going to more zydeco festivals, and when the musicians would jam at night, I’d join them. Some of them encouraged me to keep going with the zydeco.”
He began traveling to Louisiana to hear more, and then took up writing zydeco tunes. A number of his songs have since been recorded by Louisiana musicians, which he considers a great honor.
About 20 years ago, he first put together his own zydeco band. He points out that finding New England musicians who understand zydeco music is not always easy.
“I play CDs for them and point out the distinctive differences,” Leonard says. “These days zydeco often uses a drum technique called ‘double-clutching.’ You hit that bass drum twice very rapidly. I tell drummers with my band to study that. It’s also very hard to tell a really good guitar player you don’t want him playing lead. In zydeco, the guitar is for rhythm. And it’s very important the beat is on the two and the nine, not the one and the three. In that way, it’s similar to reggae. I’ve taught a couple of people to play rub board. You either have the knack, or you don’t. The girl playing rub board with us now has been with the band 14 or 15 years.
“Zydeco has been around since the ‘20s, but it’s still very current. Young people pick it up and they’re always adding something new, like double-clutching. That came out in the ‘80s.”
So what will the crowd be hearing at St. Ann’s tonight? “We’ll be doing mostly zydeco music, of course,” Leonard says. “And a lot of my own songs. We’ll mix in a few other songs that aren’t zydeco. Hank Williams’ Jambalaya, for example. That’s more a country song. And we’ll be doing waltzes, too. Maybe every four songs we’ll do a waltz. Zydeco is very high energy, and people need a chance to slow down with a waltz.”