The accordion reached its peak popularity with African American musicians between the end of Reconstruction (1865–1877) and the early twentieth century.
Clarence Tross, a West Virginian musician, reported
that it was ‘‘mostly the colored man’’ playing accordions in that period, and a contemporary from coastal
Virginia remembered that accordions were ‘‘the only
kind of music we had back then.’’ In Mississippi, some
of the earliest ensembles playing blues used accordions,
and one accordionist, Walter ‘‘Pat’’ Rhodes, was
among the earliest Delta blues singers to make records.
As the first mass-produced instrument marketed to
rural blacks, the accordion served as the precursor to
the mass marketing of guitars that fueled the growth
of rural blues. Even so, few early blues musicians
played accordions and by the mid-1930s a number
of factors combined to bring about the demise of its
use in almost any popular black music. With the
emergence of zydeco—the blues-influenced music of
the French-speaking African American population of
southwest Louisiana—in the late 1950s a new bluesy
accordion sound emerged. Zydeco showcased accordion virtuosity the way blues bands featured the electric guitar. In the hands of master accordionist
Clifton Chenier, the accordion achieved unprecedented credibility as a blues instrument.
Types of Accordions
Two types of accordions concern us here: the diatonic
button accordion and the piano accordion. All
accordions are two rectangular boxes connected by a
bellows with the melody notes on the right side and
the accompaniment chords on the left side. As the
name implies, the button accordion has buttons for
both melody and accompaniment. The diatonic scale
is the same scale found on the single-key harmonicas
(such as the Marine Band) commonly played by blues
harpists. Like the slots on those harmonicas, each
button on the accordion produces a different tone
depending on whether the bellows are pushed or
pulled. The original design was for a single row in a
single key, but later models featured two and three
rows in related keys allowing the accordionist to play
in multiple keys. The accompaniment may have as
few as two buttons or up to twenty-four in various
configurations. This single-row design is the model
still popular with the Cajuns of southwest Louisiana.
Diatonic accordions dominated sales to the general
populace from the 1840s to 1925 when sales of the
piano accordion began to dominate. This instrument
offered several immediate advantages over the button
accordion. First, the piano keyboard offered a full
chromatic scale that sounded the same note regardless
of the bellows direction. Secondly, the accompaniment provided up to 128 buttons arranged in basschord combinations to allow playing of almost any
chord progression. The button accordion was reduced
to a niche instrument while the piano accordion
became wildly popular in America and remained so
until the advent of rock ’n’ roll.
Pre-Blues Usage
One of the earliest photographic images of an American accordionist is a daguerreotype from 1850 of a
black man from a southeast Louisiana plantation
playing a button accordion. The slave narratives collected by the Works Progress Administration in the
1930s contain recollections of accordions being
played as accompaniment for dancing. The largest
concentration of accordion players occurred in the
post–Civil War period, a time referred to as Reconstruction (1865–1877). The newly emancipated slaves
purchased instruments with their own earnings and
they seem to have bought accordions in significant
numbers. Accordions were cheap, lightweight, durable, loud, and provided built-in accompaniment.
Mississippi Blues
In Mississippi, older relatives of Big Joe Williams,
K. C. Douglas, Jim Brewer, Eli Owens, and Henry Townsend all played accordion. Two of the most
important Mississippi accordionists were Homer
Lewis and Walter ‘‘Pat’’ Rhodes. Lewis performed
with blues guitarist Charley Patton at Dockery’s plantation in the early part of the twentieth century in an
ensemble made up of one or two guitarists, Lewis,
and a fiddler. It was likely a popular sound—Rhodes,
a street singer from nearby Cleveland, regularly
played in an ensemble with similar instrumentation.
In 1927 he became the first Sunflower County musician to record. His recording of ‘‘Crowing Rooster
Blues’’ accompanied by Richard ‘‘Hacksaw’’ and
Mylon Harney on guitars precedes Patton’s own
more famous recording of ‘‘Banty Rooster Blues’’
by two years. This record, backed with ‘‘Leaving
Home Blues,’’ is the only commercial blues recording
in English that used the accordion until the emergence
of zydeco. Folklorist John Lomax did record another
Mississippi accordionist in 1937 for the Library of
Congress. Blind Jesse Harris sang ballads and reels
for the most part, but did perform a memorable version of the popular blues tune ‘‘Sun Gonna Shine in
My Door Someday.’’
Both the Harris and Rhodes recordings show how
hard it is to play blues on the diatonic button accordion. The instrument is incapable of playing many of
the slides, glissandos, and flatted notes that are dominant features of blues music. Both men stop playing
while they sing and play simple melodic lines using
only bellows shakes to emulate the vocal line. These
shortcomings made it easy for a number of musicians
who started on the accordion to decide to switch to
guitar as soon as one became available. Some of those
young musicians included Big Joe Williams, Blind
Willie McTell, and McKinley Morganfield, aka
Muddy Waters. Huddie Ledbetter or ‘‘Leadbelly’’
was born in 1885 in the far northwest corner of
Louisiana where he learned to play the button accordion for the local dances called ‘‘Sukey Jumps’’ with
the older musicians in the area. As a young adult he
switched to the twelve-string guitar, but continued to
play the accordion, eventually recording four tunes
on it for various small New York record companies in
the early 1940s.
Ame´de´ Ardoin and Creole Blues
A unique blues accordion tradition, unrelated to
the northwest Louisiana style played by Leadbelly,
developed in southwest Louisiana among the
French-speaking people of African descent. Their
music synthesized elements of the French Caribbean,
Cajun, American Indian, French, and African (Wolof
and Bambara) cultures. The music of Englishspeaking African Americans made a relatively late
entrance into this mix. For example, accordionist
Sidney Babineaux recalled first hearing the blues on
a Bessie Smith record in the late 1920s. Blues were
considered risque´ and crude and were banned from
Creole dances. Still the most influential musician of
the period, Ame´de´ Ardoin, recorded a handful of
‘‘blues’’ songs. These did not follow the chord structure common to the twelve-bar format, but instead
followed the harmonic pattern caused by the lefthand accompaniment of the accordion. Ardoin
played his blues in the ‘‘cross position’’ that blues
harmonica players commonly use and this caused
the instrument’s standard accompaniment to be reversed. Accordionists cannot play the critical fifth
chord; they can merely imply it, leaving the blues
with an unresolved feel.
Ardoin’s blues conceded structure to this harmonic
reality, but not to the spirit of the blues. His vocals are
blues inflected, full of flatted thirds and sevenths and
the slurs and glissandos associated with the best Delta
blues singing. His most distinct blues records include
‘‘Blues de Basile,’’ ‘‘Les Blues de Voyage,’’ and ‘‘Les
Blues de Crowley.’’ Ardoin’s playing career ended in
late 1930s when he was beat up by a group of white
patrons at a dance, run over, and left for dead. The
incident caused Ardoin to lose his mind and led to
his eventual commitment to a Louisiana asylum for
the insane where he eventually died. His two steps and
waltzes are still performed by both Cajuns and
Creoles, but it is his blues in particular that influenced
zydeco pioneer Clifton Chenier.
Zydeco
Ardoin’s final recordings made in December 1934
were the last by a Creole musician until 1954. During
this undocumented period, musical influences from
the greater English-speaking African American culture became more important in Creole music. Blues,
which had often been taboo even in Ardoin’s time,
became an integral part of the repertoire of younger
Creoles. The ‘‘rub board’’ or ‘‘frattoir’’ became the
standard for accompaniment of the accordion and
accordionists began to favor multiple-row accordions. In 1954 a Lake Charles appliance dealer
named Eddie Shuler recorded one of these younger
accordionists, Boozoo Chavis. Shuler recruited
Houston-based bandleader Classie Ballou to accompany Chavis and the resulting record, ‘‘Paper in My
Shoe,’’ became a huge regional hit. Chavis’s success
gave a visibility to this new music outside of the French-speaking community. The success of ‘‘Paper
in My Shoe’’ was partially responsible for getting
Clifton Chenier signed by Specialty Records in 1955.
Clifton Chenier
Clifton Chenier has the distinction of being the first
Creole musician to master the piano accordion. With
a full four-octave piano keyboard, Chenier could emulate the licks of any blues pianist, but the bellowsdriven free reeds created a much more nuanced, vocal
quality similar to that of blues harpists. Chenier also
used the full 128 accompaniment buttons to approximate the left hand of boogie-woogie and blues pianists. His recordings for Specialty Records such as
‘‘Boppin’ the Rock’’ and ‘‘All the Things I Did for
You’’ display the masterful blues playing that garnered him a large regional audience throughout the
Gulf Coast.
While other Creole musicians remained local or,
like Chavis, retired, Chenier embarked on endless
touring, both nationally and internationally, and
slowly developed a following for his style, which was
now labeled zydeco. The name derived from the title
of a traditional Creole dance ‘‘Les Haricots Sont Pas
Sale’’ (‘‘The Snap Beans Are Not Salty’’) cut to a
phonetic spelling of the Creole pronunciation of haricots (snap beans). Chenier, billed as the ‘‘King of
Zydeco,’’ scored his largest regional hits with his
blues tunes: ‘‘Louisiana Blues,’’ ‘‘Black Gal,’’ and
‘‘Black Snake Blues.’’ As a national presence, he performed at venues that commonly presented blues performers, which created a large crossover audience for
zydeco. For Americans he presented a completely new
image of the accordion as a soulful instrument that
contrasted greatly with their preconceptions of saccharine sweet accordion music that were drawn from
Lawrence Welk’s popular TV show.
Chenier’s talent combined with tireless touring and
consistent recordings brought zydeco a national popularity that allowed other zydeco performers to follow
on the path that he had blazed. This included Chavis,
who returned from retirement to have enormous success with his own more rural version of the music. Still
Chenier remained the King until his death in 1987. His
legacy is heard in the playing of his son, C. J. Chenier;
Stanley Dural, aka ‘‘Buckwheat Zydeco,’’ his former
organist; and Nathan Williams. All play piano accordion in a blues style that owes greatly to Chenier.
The success of zydeco and quality of Chenier’s blues
performances have inspired many to pick up the
accordion and will continue to inspire more.
JARED SNYDER
Bibliography
Savoy, Ann Allen. Cajun Music: A Reflection of a People.
Vol. 1. Eunice, LA: Bluebird Press, 1984.
Snyder, Jared. ‘‘Boozoo Chavis, His Own Kind of Zydeco
Man.’’ Sing Out! 44, no. 1 (Fall 1999): 34–41.
———. ‘‘Breeze in the Carolinas: The African American
Accordionists of the Upper South.’’ The Free-Reed
Journal 3 (Fall 2001): 19–45.
———.‘‘Leadbelly and His Windjammer: Examining the
African American Button Accordion Tradition.’’ American Music 12 (1994): 148–166.
———. ‘‘The Legacy of the Afro-Mississippi Accordionists.’’ Black Music Research Journal 17, no. 1 (Spring
1997): 37–58.
Tisserand, Michael. The Kingdom of Zydeco. New York:
Arcade Press, 1998.
Discography
Virginia Traditions: Non-Blues Secular Music (1978, Blue
Ridge Institute BRI 001). (This recording includes nonblues accordion by Isaac ‘‘Boo’’ Curry and Clarence
Waddy.)
Ardoin, Ame´de´
Ame´de´ Ardoin: Pioneer of Louisiana French Blues
1930–1934 (1995, Arhoolie Folklyric 7007).
Chavis, Boozoo
Refer to The Kingdom of Zydeco and Boozoo Chavis, His
Own Kind of Zydeco Man for a more complete discography.
The Lake Charles Atomic Bomb (1990, Rounder 2097).
(Contains some of his earliest hits.)
Chenier, Clifton
Refer to Cajun Music: A Reflection of a People for a more
complete discography. Some of his earliest recordings and
greatest hits include the following:
Bayou Blues (1970, Specialty Records SPCD-2139–2).
Zydeco, Volume One: The Early Years (1989, Arhoolie
Folklyric CD-307).
60 Minutes with the King of Zydeco (1994, Arhoolie Folklyric CD-301).
Harris, Blind Jesse
‘‘Sun Gonna Shine in My Door Some Day.’’ LC-1331-A-1.
Reissued on Field Recordings, Volume 4, Mississippi &
Alabama 1934–1942 (1998, Document DOCD-5578).
Leadbelly
Each of Leadbelly’s accordion pieces are on different
records:
A Leadbelly Memorial Volume, Volume II (1963, Stinson
Records SLP 19).
Take This Hammer (1968, Folkways FTS 31019).
Global Accordion: Early Recordings (2001, Wergo SM
1623).
Rhodes, Walter ‘‘Pat’’
‘‘The Crowing Rooster’’ (Columbia 14289-D).
Leaving Home Blues (Columbia 14289-D)