10. Beau Jocque and the Zydeco Hi RollersClassics
CF: He’s deceased, unfortunately, but has a number of records out. This is a compilation of his work. We got to see them live once. We were in Lafayette, Louisiana in 1989. A friend of ours, the painter Francis Pavy, took us to one of those baroque houses in the country. The entertainment that night was Beau Jocque And The Zydeco Hi-Rollers. That music is a thing unto itself. It’s very unique and high-spirited and it’s designed for dancing. Francis and Tina and I were one of the few white people there in the audience. It’s mostly black men and women, and very interestingly, black cowboys.
TW: They were rodeo stars!
CF: They would dance up such a storm that when the band took a break they’d go out to their pickup trucks or cars and change their shirts because they would be completely soaked through.
TW: Beau Jocque was wearing a plastic apron, because he was trying to protect the bellows of his accordion. In Zydeco the accordion is the lead instrument. It shares some of those qualities of reggae as being a super dance form, very funky, but the dance steps are really hard. I spent most of that evening not only listening to that music but also trying to learn the steps. They do this thing called two-step but it’s not your white Texan two-step. It’s really smooth and fluid. The whole body becomes snakey and slithery.
CF: Beau Jocque was a giant of a man, really tall and big. That’s what killed him, actually, he died of a heart attack. He would sing some songs that were really suggestive, for example ‘Pop That Coochie’, and people would just go nuts.
