Cajun and Zydeco Dance Music in Northern California is an excellent recent addition to the growing list of ethnographies of music and dance revival scenes. Ethnomusicologist Mark DeWitt delivers a colourful and in-depth investigation, focusing primarily on the San Francisco Bay Area from post-World War II up to 2005.
DeWitt immediately grabs the reader's attention by framing Cajun music within the sphere of mainstream popular music, using Mary Chapin Carpenter's hit ‘Down at the Twist and Shout’ as a case study. DeWitt then uses an account of his own visit to a house dance party to show the importance of the house party as a social space and the centrality of dancing to the Cajun scene. Cajun dance music begins in the Bay Area when Creoles (French-speaking blacks and people of mixed race) migrated from west Louisiana and east Texas immediately following World War II. They didn't live near enough to each other to constitute a neighbourhood community, but they formed a sense of community through house parties and church dances. Here DeWitt draws on the concept of ‘social capital’, dealing with social networks, which is central to his narrative – particularly ‘bridging’, which involves reaching out across diverse networks. Over the course of the book, he delineates three overlapping scenes in the Bay Area which, through bridging, interact in various ways to form a more overarching Cajun and Zydeco music and dance scene: the original post-war Creole community; non-Cajun music and dance enthusiasts; and, finally, later white Cajun migrants.
DeWitt gives a number of concrete examples of bridging social capital. He describes how record producer Chris Strachwitz of Arhoolie Records and filmmaker Les Blank, both Bay Area residents and both cultural outsiders to Cajun and Zydeco, working together with traditional artists, became important catalysts in the popularisation and dissemination process in the 1960s and 1970s, not just in the Bay Area, but internationally via LP productions and documentary films. Similarly, the Ashkenaz folk dance club in Berkeley became an important meeting place, as local musicians such as ‘Queen’ Ida Guillory, who won a Grammy in 1982, and Danny Poullard performed regularly for Cajun and non-Cajun dance enthusiasts.
DeWitt shows how Cajun music acts as a kind of barometer of ethnic and racial status and relations, as Cajun swing emerges in the 1930s and 1940s as a ‘white’ style by aligning with the larger phenomenon of western swing and country whereas, during the civil rights movement, Zydeco becomes considered an identifiably ‘black’ genre. DeWitt shows how a positive (white) Cajun identity first emerged in the wake of the ‘new ethnicity’ movement of the 1960s. It wasn't until then that a full-blown national Cajun revival from within the tradition took place, spearheaded by the Balfa Brothers, who had a key appearance at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. On the other hand, he shows how Clifton Chenier infused Cajun music with the structures of blues and rhythm and blues to create Zydeco in the mid-1950s. He shows how elements of ‘blackness’ are ascribed to Creole and black musicians, even though some of them may identify musically with ‘traditional Cajun’ (i.e. ‘white’) stylings. Poullard claims, for example, that at one time it was ‘all French music’, a tradition shared by whites, Creoles and blacks alike.
The most interesting section of the book concerns Poullard, a member of a musical family who becomes a musician later in life, learning the accordion at 31 from an older musician. This, and his penchant for learning from other musicians' recordings by slowing them down to half speed, calls into question essentialist notions of authenticity and insiderness. DeWitt's ethnographic description of the jam session atmosphere and the group consensus process developing out of Poullard's jam sessions is particularly rich and astute. DeWitt shows how, in the Cajun revival, in contrast to the Balkan scene studied by Lausevic, the instrumentalists got interested in Cajun music first, and a parallel interest in the dancing came later. Similarly to the experiences of the Balkan enthusiasts interviewed by Lausevic, DeWitt's consultants describe their hearing Cajun music for the first time in terms of its emotional impact on them.
DeWitt shows how the revival experiences a surge in the 1980s and takes on a life of its own. He places himself within this scene not as an outsider to Cajun culture, but rather as an insider to the revival scene itself. The surge in the revival is fuelled by a national craze in the 1980s for all things Cajun, especially food and music. The unprecedented success of Paul Simon's Graceland (1986) – which included one Zydeco track – helped significantly to bring Cajun and Zydeco to a mass audience. At the same time, DeWitt shows that Cajun and Zydeco remain marginal to world music, due to ‘differential perceptions of exoticness’ (p. 202).
In the end, DeWitt points out that the term ‘revivalist’ is perhaps no longer really applicable after the mid-1980s, due to the diversity of the dancers and musicians who entered the scene after that time. He adopts the term ‘leisure enthusiast’ for these later arrivals, pointing out that they have the characteristics of ‘affinity’ groups as described by Slobin (Reference Slobin1992).
Most importantly, DeWitt has given voice to a whole range of people involved in Cajun and Zydeco as musicians, dancers and cultural activists, carefully guiding but never overpowering their narratives. The book's greatest strength is that it really shows the community-based aspect of such a music and dance scene and the multiplicity of intertwining networks that act to keep it vibrant, as well as his fully integrating the dance component into the narrative.
This book is highly recommended for people interested in Cajun and Zydeco, in musical revivals, in the relationship of ethnic music making to popular music, and in the social basis of music making and dance. The one weakness, and this is likely no fault of the author's, is that it could have been enhanced with the inclusion of a CD or DVD of field and commercial recordings and videos.
