Oh, Creole, Creole World : Canray Fontenot’s Heart and Music Are Deep in Louisiana

WELSH, La. —  The house Canray Fontenot lives in is a good stretch from everywhere, in a town of 3,299 about two-thirds of the way between Lafayette and Lake Charles in southwestern Louisiana, deep in the land known as Acadiana.

Once in Welsh, a visitor still doesn’t have an easy time spotting the rocky dirt road that splinters off a cracked, aging asphalt street, and doubles back in front of the place where Creole fiddler Fontenot, 68, has lived for four years. Though modest, Fontenot’s is one of the few actual houses among a batch of no-longer-mobile homes, along this fenceless block of rural residences.

Clearly, if the world wants to hear from Fontenot, the world can find its way to Fontenot. Still, he is a hospitable, even gracious host. “You just come by any time,” he says, carefully supplying directions over the phone in his sing-song accent. “I’ll be here, unless I might go out to the store.”

At the appointed hour, he opens the screen door, apologizing for the unstable chunks of stone that serve as his wobbly walkway. “We’ve had a lot of rain, and I haven’t had a chance to fix those up yet.”

He is considered one of the two finest fiddlers, along with Dewey Balfa, of the traditional French music of Louisiana, yet his performances Saturday and Sunday at the Southern California Cajun & Zydeco Festival in Long Beach will be his first for the public in the Golden State.

“I’ll go anywhere-- if somebody else does the driving,” he says, seated now and moving gently to and fro in his favorite rocker, dressed casually in a checked short-sleeve shirt, soft-blue denim jeans and white socks, no shoes. His speech is every bit as melodic as his fabled violin-playing, sentences composed of flowing vowels, sustained consonants, staccatoed interjections, grand pauses, percussive cackles.

Occasionally, he concludes on an unresolved note of melancholy, echoing the blues undercurrent that characterizes his haunting fiddle work on the decades-old two-steps and waltzes he sings, still exclusively in French.

Fontenot’s willingness to travel to California isn’t shared by his frequent musical partner, accordionist Alphonse “Bois Sec” Ardoin, cousin of the legendary Creole accordionist of the ‘20s and ‘30s, Amedee Ardoin.

“That old sonvabeetch--he’s scared of the earthquake,” Fontenot says with a gruff, tobacco-stained laugh.

There’s very little that can put Fontenot off a chance to play for new audiences, though. “When you go and play for different people,” he says, “it’s amusement and education. You learn from them, and they learn from you.”

Besides, his state isn’t without its own form of Nature’s Practical Jokes. Fontenot glances outside as another in a series of sudden cloudbursts brings down another round of potbellied Louisiana raindrops. Conversation is interrupted periodically by explosive claps of thunder and shards of lightning that are merely shrugged off by people who live so close to the Gulf of Mexico and its hurricanes that they pay for cable just to get the Weather Channel.

Other technological niceties are less prevalent. Fontenot says he had a telephone installed in his house only a few years ago; air conditioning remains a luxury he does without. The only cooling he gets comes from a ceiling fan that wobbles overhead as it churns its way through the thick, wet, simmering spring air.

Drawing a long breath, Fontenot explains that in the absence of Bois Sec, he will team up in Long Beach with Texas accordionist Edward Poullard and his California-based guitarist brother, Danny Poullard. Both performed with Fontenot recently at a Cajun-zydeco festival in Rhode Island, promoted by the same people behind the Long Beach event.

He lights up another in a steady stream of straight Camels--by no means unusual in a region where a restaurant with a no-smoking section is as rare as a highway without at least one billboard touting the cancer detection unit at the local hospital.

But, hey, who worries about a little smoke in a state where the nickname for one of the staple foods is “mudbugs” and where the locals relish dining on parts of animals usually seen only by veterinarians in the course of roadside autopsies?

The cigarettes seem as good a way as any to pass the time, something he’s got more of since he retired four years ago after working for decades on rice farms and, most recently, in a feed-and-grain store in Welsh.

“I never had an easy job in my entire life,” Fontenot says. “Clifton (Chenier, the Louisiana accordionist) told me, ‘There must be something wrong with your brain. . . . You’ve been working all these years on that rice farm. You ain’t supposed to touch none of that stuff. I know, because I know a good musician when I hear one.’

“But I had a different idea. A lot of time I would pass on a lot of invitations (to perform) if I didn’t feel like going. I’d rather work on the rice farm than play music when I don’t want to.”

Nowadays, Fontenot is treated by those who know him, or of him, as a national treasure. The National Endowment for the Arts recognized him and Bois Sec as “Master Traditional Artists” with $5,000 National Heritage Foundation grants in 1986. A framed copy of a congratulatory letter, signed by then-President Reagan, hangs on Fontenot’s living-room wall, where it competes for attention with numerous photos of Fontenot’s six children and their spouses (presidential honors are nice, but family comes first around here).

“Ahh, Canray!” Michael Doucet, fiddler, musicologist and leader of the Cajun band Beausoleil, savors the name with the appreciation of a wine connoisseur sipping a 1928 Bordeaux. “In my view, he’s a creative genius in the French music of Louisiana,” Doucet said, backstage during the recent Festival International de Louisiane in Lafayette. (Beausoleil, with whom Fontenot performed at Carnegie Hall in 1985--headlines this weekend’s festival in Long Beach.)

“The thing about Canray,” Doucet continues, “is that he absorbed so much from his father (accordionist Adam Fontenot), and from Amedee, of what his whole culture was going through. They sang a lot about separations from loved ones, which is an extremely powerful force in a very isolated, tightly bound culture like this.” (Case in point: Fontenot’s house in Welsh is barely 20 miles from Basile, where he was born in 1922.)

“He can sing with his violin,” Doucet says. “And he can play the blues element, which is very subtle in our music. It’s a shame none of his kids plays, because most musicians now don’t know how to play that style of Louisiana string music. It’s a dying art.”

At the heart of that style is the fiddler’s near-constant use of two strings, differing from the predominantly single-note approach that typifies the country and bluegrass fiddle. Melody notes are played in harmony or doubled in unison on an adjacent string to give the Cajun fiddle its extra volume and thicker texture.

Even Cajun music stalwart Dewey Balfa, about six years Fontenot’s junior and another National Heritage Foundation honoree, has in recent years pumped up the basic instrumentation (fiddle, accordion and triangle) with electric bass and drums, concessions to the rock era rarely indulged by the tradition-loving Fontenot.

Furthermore, in a genre dominated by white Cajun fiddlers such as Balfa, Fontenot is one of the few living links to the black Creole side of the musical coin. Though they have shared the same section of Louisiana for generations, Creoles and Cajuns have significantly different heritages.

Creoles are mixed-blood descendants of the Indians, Europeans and Africans who came together in the region in the late 18th and 19th Centuries; the Cajuns descended from French-speaking Acadians who were forced out of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, Canada, by the British in the mid-1700s and eventually settled in southwest Louisiana.

“A long time ago,” Fontenot says, “if you was black, it was considered you were playing Creole music, and if you was white, it was Cajun. It’s about the same thing, but the black people always do a little something different, whether it’s gospel or whatever it is.”

Balfa, speaking from his home in Basile, likens the distinction between Cajun and Creole music to that between the blues and Appalachian folk music. Both often relate heartbreaking tales of life’s hardships, but the Creole, Balfa says, has “more of an African blues beat” than the Cajun, “which has a beat more like bluegrass. . . . Cajun is pretty square,” he chuckles.

The fact that so few young blacks are carrying on the tradition of Creole music is frustrating for Fontenot, who says that in workshops he’s taught in Texas, Washington, D.C., West Virginia and elsewhere, there have been virtually no students who are black or Creole.

“The black kids, they just want to play R&B;,” he says, half matter-of-factly, half sadly. “Someone could apply for a grant,” he adds, “and get a little money for them and a little money for Canray to teach them.”

Fontenot’s father died when Canray was 13; his mother, Ozemire, also an accordionist, died about a year later, forcing him to drop out of the fifth grade and go to work, as did his only sister. Often, he still refers to his parents, dead more than half a century, as “them old people.”

His young life was marked by back-breaking labor, extreme poverty and cruelty. He talks, without passing judgment, of the family friend who got drunk every weekend, of getting whipped for disobedience, of his mother’s death, probably from internal hemorrhaging.

Such hardships were common to virtually all the people of Acadiana. Blacks had added burdens: If they aspired to an education, they had to buy their schoolbooks. And the poll tax kept most blacks from voting. Both requirements, Fontenot remembers fondly, were abolished by “the Kingfish,” Louisiana Gov. Huey P. Long.

But there was still deep-seated racism to contend with, and Fontenot remembers whites trying to persuade blacks of his parents’ generation not to educate their children.

“They’d say ‘Oh, no--put that little nigger in the field. If you send him to school, he’s gonna learn how to make a check and he’ll be making some bad checks,’ and them old people would fall for that. They didn’t know any better. That’s why I told mine, ‘As long as you’re gonna be staying with me, you’re gonna go to school.’ I got six, and they all finished high school.”

Such memories may contribute to the wistfulness in his vocals, which have a deeper, grittier soulful quality than those of many of his white Cajun counterparts. That, and the African element missing from Cajun music, may provide further clues why his songs were written with a minor-key desolation, far more often than Cajun songs.

Nevertheless, what comes through time and again is his love of music for music’s sake, an attitude shaped by forbears who played not for money, but to entertain their families and friends. That joyful spark is exemplified in “Malinda,” a lilting, Caribbean-influenced song that Fontenot still plays.

If it were strictly up to Fontenot, he would have performed years ago at either the Southern California or San Francisco Cajun-zydeco festivals. But sometimes, money is an issue.

“I’ve been wanting to go, and I said to Chris (Strachwitz, head of Arhoolie Records, which has recorded Fontenot’s music), ‘Why in the hell you never got us on that (festival)? And he said, ‘No, Canray, they don’t pay enough money.’ ‘Ohhhhhhhh,’ I said. ‘I see.’ ”

He stretches out the “oh” with a vocal fall down the scale; it’s the mirror image of the way he’ll twist the word “Wellllll” upward, like the sound of his fiddle when his fourth finger glides up the A-string.

The one time Fontenot did play in California was several years ago when he was hired to play a wedding reception. Because it for an acquaintance, he agreed to make the 1,600-mile trip for $300 and an airline ticket.

Mostly, though, music is something he’s done strictly for pleasure. And whenever it stopped being pleasurable, he quit.

After fronting a popular string band during the ‘40s, he stopped fiddling almost entirely through the ‘50s. At that time, Fontenot said, it seemed that “all the white people were listening to was country-and-Western, country-and-Western. And all the black were listening to was rhythm-and-blues. I sold everything I had. I wanted to be sure I didn’t fool with that darn stuff no more.”

But then, in 1964, he changed his mind after bumping into old friend Chenier, the late “king of zydeco.”

“I met Clifton over there in Elton (La.), and he said, ‘Canray, where are you working tonight?’ I said, ‘It’s been eight years--I don’t mess around with that stuff anymore.’ He said ‘Oh, no, no, man! I’m the best in Louisiana on the accordion, and you’re the best on the fiddle. You can’t let me down like that. I say, ‘I already done it!’ ”

Chenier told Fontenot about the touring he’d done and the new fans he’d found in unexpected parts of the world. “He started telling me, but I said, ‘That’s you--I ain’t never gonna go any place.’ But he said, ‘Get your damn self a fiddle, you leave the damn rice farm and do something for yourself.”

Fontenot took the advice, and by 1966 was invited to the Newport (Rhode Island) Folk Festival, an event that two years earlier brought Dewey Balfa before East Coast audiences. Those enthusiastically received appearances by Balfa, Fontenot, Chenier and others sparked the first national interest in the indigenous music of southwestern Louisiana.

Today, the “Bois Sec-Canray French Band” is one of a handful of high-profile acts given prestigious closing slots at the annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festivals. Meanwhile, Cajun music is in demand at dozens of folk, blues and zydeco festivals throughout the country and in Europe, where American roots music has long been given greater respect than in the land that spawned it.

Still amazed at the international interest in the music of his people, something “them old people” never would have dreamed, Fontenot smiles as he reflects on the years he had forsaken the fiddle, then realizes the wisdom of Chenier’s words.

“Music,” he says, nodding gently. “It can take you places.”