Photo Credit: Kathy Anderson

Buckwheat Zydeco- Looking Back, Moving Forward

OffBeat - September 1994

By Todd Mouton

It took extensive lobbying by Clifton Chenier to get Buckwheat to try Zydeco. Now he's the genre's most well-travelled bandleader. Before embarking on a long tour to promote his two new albums, Buckwheat talks about his past and works to put his bus back together.

This train needs an engine block.

It's early August, less than a week before the launch of two new records and a tour for Buckwheat Zydeco and The Ils Sont Partis Band, and their giant purple and silver tour bus is in trouble. After a million miles (literally) on the road, the Buckwheat Express is burning oil. Lots of it. The band only has a two week break to deal with the problem of the black muck, and things have just gotten worse: Buckwheat and his mechanic have discovered a crack in the engine block

It'll be two days before they can get a new one. That block will arrive just four days before the band starts a month of roadwork. Engine parts are spread out under the carport and into the parking area of Buckwheat's large Spanish ranch-style home in Carencro, Louisiana. So it's not surprising that Buck is concerned.

What is surprising is that he's doing the engine work himself.

July 1987 at the On A Night Like This record release party at S.O.B.'s in NYC.

Photo Credit: Joseph A. Rosen

No stranger to working with his hands, accordionist and keyboardist Stanley "Buckwheat" Dural, Jr. Iikes to be in the thick of things. A competent mechanic, Buckwheat is better known as the leader of the world's most successful zydeco band. His version of Southwest Louisiana's propulsive Creole French music was the first signed to a major label (Island, in 1986), and his band has maintained a higher profile worldwide than any other act in their genre. The group has recorded with Eric Clapton, Dwight Yoakam, Willie Nelson and David Hidalgo of Los Lobos. Mavis Staples is featured on their new record. They've opened gigs for U2 and other major artists. Buckwheat played on Rolling Stone Keith Richards' solo debut. On top of that, his band can probably name the best places to get a quick meal in about 80 U.S. cities.

Still, it's not all that glamorous looking up the greasy rear end of a Silver Eagle bus in the hot Carencro sun.

Now a man and a band with an international following, Buckwheat Zydeco occupies a unique position in the music world. Fourteen zydeco and soul-flavored records and incessant touring have won the group a reputation for some of the hottest music this side of James Brown. The live show alone has kept fans on their feet since 1979, when Buckwheat first launched his zydeco career. His records have incorporated a wide spectrum of musical styles, and his latest two endeavors are no exception. Five Card Stud, his fourth album for Island, features Tex-Mex and country influences along side the requisite soul and zydeco tunes. Choo Choo Boogaloo, his new children's album on the southern California label Music For Little People, offers small fry a wide-ranging introduction to Louisiana sounds. (The children's disc also features a couple of performances that Buck's adult fans may want to add to their collections.)

Both albums were recorded at Dockside Studios in Milton, Louisiana, and Five Card Stud is already climbing the "adult alternative" radio charts. During a break in the work on his bus, Buckwheat discussed his convictions about his Creole heritage, his musical attitudes, and how zydeco originator Clifton Chenier taught him some very important lessons.

Though the first musical sounds he heard were zydeco and la-la music, the stripped-down precursors to his current sound, Buckwheat's early relationship with the accordion was anything but love at first sight. A child prodigy, Buckwheat took to the piano at age four or five, vehemently resisting his father's efforts to get an accordion into his hands. "I was truly against this stuff," Buckwheat says. "I was against zydeco, period-I'm serious.

"In the house, my daddy played the accordion. That was the first thing I remember as a really really tee-baby. He played by himself. He and his brother with the washboard - the original washboard with the wooden frame. We used to use the same washboard to wash clothes. I know - I had knuckles, cut up them knuckles, man, washing clothes. That's where the music originated from, with accordion and washboard only. That's how the music was played. And if you had drums you had a cardboard box and sticks or forks and you'd play the cardboard box as your drums.

A friend of Clifton Chenier's, Stanley Dural, Sr. was not a professional musician. "My dad never played on stage for the public," remembers Buckwheat. "But you could have 100 people at his house, he'd play for 'em. You take the same people and bring 'em in a club, he'd never play. He felt like the music was meant for family entertainment, only in the home."

From Left: David Hidalgo of Los Lobos, Buckwheat, and Dwight Yoakam on set of video for "Hey Good Lookin'" in 1990

 

And Buckwheat felt that his dad provided enough accordion entertainment for the whole family. The young keyboardist wanted to learn what he called the music of his generation.

And so he did, performing Farfisa organ with Sam and the Untouchables, a rhythm and blues band, at age 9. He also won a string of talent contests around Acadiana. "I was in school and l used to go perform for talent shows. I wouldn't be a 4-H member, none of that, but they'd say 'he's got to come' and sneak me In there."

Eventually, his father put his foot down, insisting that Buck take up the accordion. "I was about thirteen years old and I wouldn't play the accordion so he took my keyboard away from me for close to a year."

If his mother hadn't intervened, he says he might have strayed from music altogether. Thanks to her efforts, he followed his muse, forming the venerable 15-piece Buckwheat and The Hitchhikers in 1971. That band's influence on Buckwheat's sound is still heard today.

With the Hitchhikers, Buck's talent for arranging and ability as a bandleader took center stage. The band rehearsed constantly, learning all the hits of the day. They played gigs from Texas to Mississippi and as far North as Arkansas, opening shows for artists like soul singer Bobby Womack. Featuring five vocalists, five horns and five rhythm players, the band was as much a musical phenomenon as an ego factory.

In 1975, Buck decided to call it quits. He'd had enough of everyone wanting the spotlight, and he went home, planning on taking a year off from the music business. That was when he got the call.

It was a phone call from Austin, Texas that forever changed the course of Buckwheat's musical career. It was his good friend Paul "Lil' Buck" Senegal on the line, and he had already heard about the breakup of The Hitchhikers. Senegal was on the road playing guitar with Clifton Chenier and The Red Hot Louisiana Band, and his message was simple. "Clifton wants to talk to you," he said. "He wants to know if you are gonna play some organ for him."

Buckwheat continues the story. "I said, 'Man, I don't know about that, Lil' Buck.' 'Cause I didn't want to have nothing to do with zydeco. So he got Clifton on the phone and I spoke to him. He wanted to know if I would play organ in his band. And I respected Clifton. You're raised to respect your elders, and you have to.... I mean, that's how I was raised.

"So he tells me not to do anything until he gets back to Louisiana. I said OK. Man, I thought about that, I thought about that. I said, 'Lord have mercy - oh no no, I can't do that.' And I really didn't want to play any music at that time."

But there was no stopping the King of Zydeco. "He came over to my house and he said, 'Buck come give it a try. See if you like it. If you like It, you're gonna stay with me. If you don't like It, I'll understand.' I said, 'I don't know,' my head down. I'm thinking about my dad, too. 'Lord!' I said, 'that's his buddy.' So we talked a while and I said I'm gonna give it a try."

Their first gig together was on a weeknight at Antlers in downtown Lafayette. Clifton called and said, 'We'll come and pick up your organ.' I said, 'I don't know about that.' I was gonna get a trailer, get my own organ and if I don't like this I'm gonna leave. See, I was truly against this stuff, man. I was against zydeco, period.

Clifton arrived about six o'clock to find a silent Buckwheat with his organ, floor pedals and Leslie cabinet already outside the house. It was to be a pivotal evening for the young organist, and Buckwheat was afraid that the pivot would not go his way.

"I'd never been in a zydeco," he says. "I didn't know what it was like, what I experienced that first night with Clifton Chenier."

It was quite a scene. "Man, you had older generation, younger generation, people all around the world and everything. And we started playing, never had no rehearsal."

The nervous keyboard player was floored by what Clifton had done with the music he'd heard as a child. "Clifton Chenier started playing this accordion - piano-note accordion - and got to goin' in 1-4-5 (chord progression), in the blues. I said, 'I can't believe this!'"

Buckwheat chuckles as he tells the story. "Please believe me, from that day I advise any person, any one individual, 'what you don't understand, don't criticize.' If I hadn't gone that night I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now. I'd never know tomorrow more than what I know today. And I was a critic! I couldn't believe it."

Photo Credit: Russell Jeffcoat

The scene, continues Buckwheat, was more than just music and dancing. "The energy! The energy that came out - it was so much, it was something I'd never seen before. And Clifton Chenier got on that stage and played for four hours nonstop, and I thought we'd play for about an hour. I'm serious as a heart attack. That's what happened. I couldn't believe that."

And there was more than one Chenier on the stage that night. " And listen," Buckwheat continues. "Cleveland, his brother, I'm looking at this guy, I'm serious, I'm looking at this man, he's got this washboard on him, I've never seen nothing like that in my life. Wrapped around him like suspenders, like we're using today. I said, 'What In the hell?' And he's got these things in his fingers, you know, some bottlecap openers. He's got these things all wound up in his fingers. And this cat starts playing. Man; I couldn't believe this. Cleveland starts playing this stuff and the sound just came up in such a rhythm. I said 'Man that don't sound too far from what I'm doing with the beat. Shoot, I can't believe this.' And it went on every night, every night. Every night he performed that's how hot it was."

As proof of his conversion, Buckwheat offers a final endorsement. "I stayed with him over two years. I repeat this all the time but it's the honest truth - I wouldn't have nothing to do with zydeco, regardless of the wishes of my dad or what. I didn't want to have nothing to do with it. But working with Clifton, man, that really boosted me up."

From that point, Buckwheat began a sort of musical reconciliation with his father, eventually culminating in the formation of Buckwheat Zydeco and The Ils Sont Partis Band. In the meantime, though, Buck hit the road and recorded several outstanding sides with Chenier and The Red Hot Band. It was 1979 when he decided to try zydeco on his own.

Before that, he had never tried to play the accordion and he had never been featured as a lead vocalist. He gave himself two and a half years to experiment with his new career including eight months woodshedding with the accordion. Though learning the squeezebox often "gave him the blues," he successfully learned to play both sides of the 37-and-a-half pound instrument. Things went better than he had planned, and Buckwheat emerged from the woodshed with the basics of his now trademark style. By late 1980, he and his band were touring Europe.

As Buckwheat's zydeco career unfolded he and his father grew closer. According to Buck, "He became my best friend. He had never in all my life come to listen to me perform on stage until I got with Clifton Chenier." Now things were different and his dad would travel as far as Texas to see him play.

It was also during this period that Buckwheat decided it was time to teach his growing audience that Cajun and zydeco music were not one and the same. He'd seen enough mis-billings and he decided to take preventative measures. To this day all of his contracts bear a large red stamp stating that if the word Cajun is used in any way to promote his show then the contract will be null and void. "People just didn't know," Buckwheat says about early concert promoters.

Island Records' 1990 Publicity Shot

Photo Credit: Greg Allen

From 1979 to 1985 the band released seven well-received albums on the Blues Unlimited, Black Top and Rounder labels. Buckwheat was becoming a favorite on the national circuit, and his music caught the attention of New York-based writer Ted Fox. Now Buckwheat's manager, Fox was initially a big fan. "Buck was always my favorite and I'd try to see him whenever I could," says Fox, who first saw the group play at the old Tramp's on 15th Street in Manhattan. Fox had written a little about zydeco music and the friendship that was struck between the two men led to the first major-label release in the history of zydeco music.

It was on a cross-country flight that Fox first mentioned Buckwheat to Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records. Fox was completing an interview for In The Groove, his book profiling several music business figures, when he found out that Blackwell was unfamiliar with zydeco. A few weeks later, Fox made him a "best of Buckwheat" compilation.

The tape cataloged some of Buck's landmark tunes, and it became a big hit at Island's Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas. Soon thereafter, Blackwell called Fox, wanting to sign Buckwheat to a multi-record deal. He wanted Fox to produce the record, and after some talking, a contract was signed. In less than two years, the music and band named for a song about snap beans was winding up on year-end Top 10 lists. Six albums later, the team behind the ground-breaking On A Night Like This album is still together, a string of successful releases and unique collaborations behind them.

"He's really an under-discovered musical genius," Fox says of Buckwheat. Fox himself is not a musician or an engineer, but he has been instrumental in keeping Buckwheat's career on a upward trajectory. He's been in the booth for the band's recordings of Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix tunes, and he's come up with suggestions for original material as well. "I just felt that my role as producer was to introduce new ideas and to encourage Buckwheat in what he was doing," he says. "It's sort of part cheerleader and part guidance counselor. I'm just sort of trying to get the best and introduce a couple of new ideas when we can... in that way it's kind of a collaborative thing."

With the release of Five Card Stud and Choo Choo Boogaloo, the second wave of Buckwheat Zydeco's major label days has arrived. Where his first Island albums scored on jazzed up traditional numbers and rootsy cover tunes, the new releases demonstrate the bandleader's versatility. The children's album (narrated by Taj Mahal's brother, Winston Williams) features some New Orleans music, while Stud showcases the soulful side of Buck's trick bag.

The first credit on the back of the Five Card Stud CD reads: "All Arrangements by Stanley Dural, Jr." In truth, that mention is long overdue: Buck has been arranging nearly all of his music since his days with The Hitchhikers. A novice guitarist with nine years of sax playing behind him, Buckwheat typically learns the whole band's parts before rehearsing a new tune. Several songs on the new album showcase his talents as an arranger.

The CD starts in an uncharacteristic manner, not even hitting a zydeco rave-up until the fourth number, a tune about the "I.R.S." Only two of ten songs are straight zydeco, and the balance of the album is a menagerie, to borrow the title of Mango Records' 1993 Buckwheat compilation.

A Mexican trumpet line opens the duet with Willie Nelson on his "Man With The Blues." The funky blues of "Bayou Girl," one of the album's highlights, was derived from an unreleased Van Morrison jam that Fox guesses dates back to the '60s. All the tunes are inventive in one way or another, and they reflect the wide-open approach that has carried Buckwheat from his days as a Hitchhiker to the present. His discs have featured guitar solos from white Brits like Clapton, Texas cowboys like Nelson and California Hispanics like Hidalgo, and the results have expanded the scope and popularity of zydeco music.

"It was a hard time for Clifton Chenier," Buckwheat says. "I wish he was here to get the glory for something that he invented, for something that he made happen. It took a long time for his music to get played on any white station." It was in fact the most basic lesson Chenier taught him that has kept Buckwheat on top. It was that first night in Lafayette that Buck realized, in his words, "Don't ever criticize something you don't understand, 'cause man, you'll be the loser."

Home on the range near Lafayette, Louisiana

Photo Credit: Rick Olivier

On Five Card Stud, Buck performs a soulful version of "This Train" in duet with Mavis Staples. He'd been searching for the right spiritual to cover for some time, and their funky rendition is a testament to the power of music to expose and bridge cultural gaps. That song is the adult companion to Choo Choo Boogaloo, which covers a fictional rail ride from Lafayette to Carencro to Mardi Gras.

"This Train" is also an apt metaphor for Buckwheat's overhauled purple and silver tour bus, which is now bound for venues all over the United States (including a stop at the House of Blues on September 24).

The road has been one of the constants in the life and career of Stanley "Buckwheat" Dural Jr., and it's still his greatest musical release. I love the road. I love to tour. Playing good music with good musicians and seeing smiles on happy people's faces, that's where I'm at," he says, hoping for over a million miles from his bus' new engine block.

Only six years ago, Buckwheat and company were the original house band at El Sid O's Zydeco & Blues Club in Lafayette (Buck also tutored Nathan Williams, El Sid O's founder Sid Williams' younger brother, who is now a zydeco star in his own right). These days, fans on the Louisiana-East Texas zydeco circuit don't see much of the band. "When we park that bus here, by the time the motor says 'off you see a disappearing act. Everybody's bookin', man-'Thank you, Jesus, let me get back to my house.' So not just me, everybody needs some rest." And paychecks in the smaller Louisiana clubs just can't match the good money of his road gigs.

Throughout his nearly 38 years of performing music, the road has given Buckwheat not only a leading edge on his career but also great satisfaction. "I'm enjoying it (now) just as much as I did in '79 or with Clifton Chenier," he says. "I enjoy it every night. Bad night, good, I don't care, I enjoy it, just as long as somebody's happy in there."

Clifton Chenier and his father are gone now, but Buckwheat carries on their music. He'll be touring well into the future, he says, with a few guiding principles to keep the nights interesting.

First, he plays what he feels and never follows a set list. He improvises on accordion, keys and melodica when the mood strikes, and he's seldom content playing the same type of music for a whole evening. "I'm not performing a set for only one set of people," he says. On a long enough night he likes to mix "a little rock & roll, blues, jazz, funk, a little bit of everything and staying to the roots."

His band has a repertoire of between two and three hundred songs, and Buckwheat aims to impress his audiences. ''You're gonna sit back here and you'll listen to the whole hour and you're gonna say, 'Well, can't he play something else?'' I wouldn't like you to ask that question. I want you saying, "Well I didn't k know he could do that."

Todd Mouton is a freelance writer based in Lafayette, Louisiana. He is a frequent contributor to The Times of Acadiana. This was his first article for OffBeat.