Ardoin, Alphonse

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Alphonse Ardoin

1915-2007

Musician

The French-speaking, African-American Creoles of southwest Louisiana have maintained a unique musical tradition. The contemporary expression of that heritage is called zydeco, and was made popular by Clifton Chenier during the 1970s and 1980s. For the older folks of the region, the blues-inflected two-steps and waltzes played on accordion and fiddle are simply "la musique creole." One of the last surviving musicians to play in the old style was Alphonse "Bois Sec" Ardoin, an accordionist who died on May 16, 2007, at the age of ninety-one. Ardoin and fiddler Canray Fontenot, musical partners for half a century, influenced countless musicians and embodied the link between the rural music of the nineteenth century and the urbanized, electrified sound of zydeco.

Alphonse Ardoin was born on November 16, 1915, in l'Anse de Prien Noir (Black Cyprian's Cove) near Duralde, Louisiana, in Evangeline parish. His family had lived and worked as sharecroppers in the region since the 1830s. When Ardoin was four years old, his father died, and Ardoin grew up helping his mother and other relatives in the fields. According to Ardoin, a white neighbor named Alfred Veillon also helped him get a start in life by offering him odd jobs to make money. It was Veillon who first called him by the nickname "Bois Sec" ("dry wood") because Ardoin was always the first farm worker to run for the barn or hide inside a hollow tree when rain began to fall.

Ardoin's older cousin Amédé Ardoin was the first African-American Creole musician to make commercial recordings, starting in 1929, and was the first to expand the possibilities of Creole music by incorporating the syncopations of blues and jazz. Bois Sec Ardoin often heard his cousin play at dance parties, and began to accompany him on the triangle.

The music stayed with the young man, and he resolved to master the single-row, or button accordion, himself. When he was about seven, he began to borrow his older brother Houston's instrument surreptitiously, while Houston was away from the house. In Michael Tisserand's book The Kingdom of Zydeco, Ardoin recounted how he would practice in the hayloft of the family's barn, saying "it was not a good hiding place, because you could hear me for miles." Houston soon caught him in the act, but hearing that his brother's musical prowess surpassed his own, allowed Ardoin to keep borrowing the instrument. Soon, Ardoin had saved enough to buy one of his own.

Unlike his cousin Amédé, Ardoin never attempted to earn a living solely from his music. He continued to work as a farmhand on the local cotton fields and tend the eight-acre plot next to the house in which he was born. He grew rice and soybeans and raised pigs and chickens. With his wife, Marceline, he raised fourteen children. He did a little carpentry on the side, and he played music, at home and at the roving dance parties held by neighbors, a lively tradition in the Creole community.

In 1948 Ardoin began playing with Canray Fontenot, another farmhand from nearby Welsh, Louisiana. They called their duet the Duralde Ramblers. Gradually, the pair branched out from house parties to the saloons and clubs of southwestern Louisiana, where they often shared the bill with Clifton Chenier and his brother Cleveland. During the 1950s, they had a radio broadcast every Sunday on KEUM in Eunice, Louisiana. Over many years of playing together, Ardoin and Fontenot developed an uncanny rapport. They traded leads and vocals, switched tempos and improvised together seamlessly. "We can read each other's mind," Ardoin told Tisserand. "It's not like that with anyone else."

By the 1960s, folklore enthusiasts had begun to take an interest in the indigenous music of the Louisiana bayou. Musicologist Ralph Rinzler invited Ardoin and Fontenot to perform at the prestigious Newport Folk Festival in 1966; the assembled crowd was the largest either player had ever seen. Their performance at Newport represented the first time traditional Creole music had received such wide exposure. On their way home from Rhode Island, the duo made a studio recording in Virginia with producer Richard Spottswood. The result was the first full-length album by an African-American Creole band, Les Blues du Bayou (later reissued as La Musique Creole).

After their success at Newport, Ardoin and Fontenot received offers to play concerts and music festivals across the United States and in Europe. The pair performed at Carnegie Hall and became a mainstay of the annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Ardoin's sons Morris, Gustav, and Lawrence also teamed up with their father to form the Ardoin Brothers Band. The band, usually featuring Fontenot's fiddle as well, recorded a single and began to get steady club work.

The family suffered a severe blow when Ardoin's son Gustav was killed in an auto accident in 1974, and Ardoin briefly reined in his musical endeavors after his son's death. His traditional Creole style was waning in popularity, as it was being overtaken by its new incarnation as zydeco and by rock and roll. However, he remained a visible and respected leader in his local community. He performed at Mardi Gras, at the annual Fourth of July festival in the hamlet of Elton, and always at home. Twice a year, the Ardoin clan butchered a pig and hosted a "boucherie."

As Ardoin aged, he was increasingly appreciated as a link to the passing cultural traditions of his people. His music and agrarian lifestyle were captured in the 1973 documentary Dry Wood by independent filmmaker Les Blank. Blank featured Ardoin again sixteen years later in J'ai Ete au Bal (I Went to the Dance), a broader film history of Cajun, Creole, and zydeco music. In 1986 Ardoin and Fontenot were awarded the National Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Ardoin carried on after Fontenot died in 1995; he began playing and recording with a new generation of musicians. He had made the album A Couple of Cajuns with the white fiddler Dewey Balfa in the early 1980s and returned to the studio in 1998 to record Allons Danser with Balfa Toujours, a band led by Balfa's daughter.

During Ardoin's final years, his children and grandchildren carried on the family's accordion tradition, including son Lawrence "Black" Ardoin, and grandsons Dexter Ardoin, Chris "Candyman" Ardoin, and Sean Ardoin, who leads the band ZydeKool. Bois Sec Ardoin told Tisserand, "All my grandchildren play zydeco now, but I can't change them. Oh no, I got to let them go."

At a Glance …

Born Alphonse Ardoin on November 16, 1915, in Duralde, LA; died May 16, 2007, in Eunice, LA; married Marceline Victorian (d. 2000); children: Morris, Florence, Mildred, Amelia, Dorothy, Juanita, Emily, Alberta, Matilda, Lawrence, Ronald, Russell, Gustav (d. 1974), Hazel (d. 1998).

Career: Worked as a farmer beginning in childhood; accordion player; Les Blues du Bayou, released 1971; Bois Sec Ardoin and Dewey Balfa: A Couple of Cajuns, released 1981; Allons Danser: Bois Sec with Balfa Toujours, released 1998.

Awards: National Endowment for the Arts, National Heritage Fellowship, 1986.

Selected discography

Albums

Les Blues du Bayou, 1971 (reissued as La Musique Creole).

The Cajuns, Vol. 1, 1972.

Zodico: Louisiana Creole Music (various artists), 1979.

Bois Sec Ardoin and Dewey Balfa: A Couple of Cajuns, 1981.

Allons Danser: Bois Sec with Balfa Toujours, 1998.

Sources

Books

Savoy, Ann Allen, Cajun Music: A Reflection of a People, Bluebird Press, 1984.

Tisserand, Michael, The Kingdom of Zydeco, Arcade, 1998.

Periodicals

London Independent, May 21, 2007.

New York Times, November 22, 1998; May 20, 2007.

Online

"Dry Wood: Bois Sec and Canray," Folkstreams,http://www.folkstreams.net/context,42 (accessed December 27, 2007).

"Lifetime Honors: 1986 National Heritage Fellowships," National Endowment for the Arts,http://www.nea.gov/honors/heritage/fellows/fellow.php?id_1986_01 (accessed December 27, 2007).