Southeast Texas: Hot House of Zydeco
** A 2001 article originally published in the Journal of Texas Music History

by Roger Wood & photographer James Fraher

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Creole Community and "Mass" Communication:
Houston Zydeco as a Mediated Tradition, Journal article by John Minton; Indiana University Folklore Institute, 1995

For the uninitiated, zydeco is most simply (if somewhat simplistically) described as a combination of Louisiana French accordion, Afro-Caribbean rhythms, and African American urban blues, performed by, and primarily for, the black Creoles of southwest Louisiana and southeast Texas. Notwithstanding its roots in older rural traditions, the genre as currently recognized and popularly acclaimed represents a relatively recent folk/popular syncretism forged in urban, semi-professional performance venues such as the neighborhood taverns and Catholic halls of Houston's French town district, an enclave attesting to the ongoing rural-to-urban migration of twentieth century Creoles.

Just as significantly, the musical developments paralleling these socioeconomic and demographic shifts are further entwined with electronic media, especially with the small specialty labels defining and documenting the vital southwest Louisiana/southeast Texas/southern California nexus in post-War black music.

Fully in keeping with this bivalent basis in both local folk tradition and regional recording industry, zydeco has simultaneously gravitated toward inclusive global and exclusively local media markets. On the one hand, that is, the growth of outside interest in, and media outlets for, ethnic music generally and zydeco specifically has occasioned a proliferation of popular productions and scholarly compilations directed toward a national or international audience; conversely, the enthusiastic acceptance by Creoles of this mediated innovation, coupled with their increased access to the actual media--especially now with the advent of audiocassettes--has unleashed an outpouring of recordings intended for purely local, even interpersonal distribution.

Today, all of these diverse media markets are amply represented in Houston's Creole community, reflected both in the physical presence of the electronic formats and in the complex correlation of these various carriers with the variable activities, attitudes, and ambitions of eclectic performers. In the Bayou City's Creole clubs or Catholic halls, one may alternately hear musicians of national or international, regional, or entirely local reputation, at the same time purchasing from behind the bar or off the bandstand recordings of similarly divergent provenience: state-of-the-art CDs, LPs, or tapes from global distributors; more provincial productions by...

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