Key to the Highway: The Life and Music of Clifton Chenier, King of the Bayous

“I got the key to the highway,
Billed out and bound to go,
Because the way you made me love you,
Lord its a crying shame.

Give me one, one more kiss baby,
Baby before I go.
The way that I love you,
About to drive me insane.

Well I love you love you love you love you love you.
Tell you what I’ll do,
Without your loving, baby, I might as well go on and die.”

He sings with all the desperation and wild abandon of heartbreak, overcome by emotion but with the presence of mind to do the right thing, to hit the road, consoled only by his conviction that the love he feels is real and eternal. Spurred on by a rollicking beat and interplay of saxophone and accordion, Clifton Chenier's voice vividly captures all of this feeling in his rendition of the classic blues song Key to the Highway, available on the 1973 compilation record Bon Ton Roulet, released by Arhoolie Records. It’s a song I’ve listened to hundreds of times, and it’s such a satisfying piece that for me it bears repeating over and over.

As with much of Chenier’s music, I find that he captures an emotional experience in a truly evocative and moving way. Such as in "I’m Coming Home (To See My Mother)", on the seminal 1970 album King of the Bayous, he poignantly expresses the bittersweet homesickness and maternal love of a road musician returning to his family home. On "One Step at a Time", on 1976's Bogolusa Boogie, a landmark album which was inducted into the Library of Congress in 2016, he captures the joy of a carefree new courtship. And always his vocals are enveloped by his marvelous accordion work, his mastery of which was unparalleled, at times almost like an electric organ, but more soft and organic, singing with its own inimitable voice.

For Clifton Chenier was first and foremost an accordion player. He played the chromatic accordion or as he calls it the 'piano accordion' and he is the king of his style, the Zydeco, a blending of French Cajun accordion music with rock and blues. For Clifton singing was almost an afterthought, so focused was he on the sound of the accordion and the instrumentation of his Red Hot Louisiana Band; washboard, saxophone, drum set, bass, guitar, and accordion. He often mumbled or grunted out his words, his enunciation truncated by his heavy Louisiana French accent. Sometimes he’d stop the note in his throat at the end of the phrase as he picked up a line with the accordion. To me this adds to his appeal. He was completely focused on the feel, the emotion, the groove of whatever song he is playing. He was surely a masterful singer with a perfect understated inflection, but he was not focused on a polished presentation.

He came from the woods of Louisiana where there is no polish. Where families lived in houses with rusty metal roofs raising pigs and chickens in the back. He was rooted in Creole culture, founded by the people of New France, a poutpourri of French and Spanish settlers, Native Americans and free black Frenchmen who settled in Louisiana in the 18th century. Joined by Acadian migrants, known today as Cajuns, French residents of eastern Canada who were cast out by the British after their victory in the French and Indian War. All absorbed into the United States in 1803 when the territory of Louisiana was purchased by Thomas Jefferson from a cash strapped Napoleon Bonaparte. Clifton grew up surrounded by rural Creole culture, a down-home lifestyle of homestead farming and crawfish gumbo. A simple unvarnished life of enjoying family, food… and music. Music everywhere; fiddles and accordions and washboards, playing and singing the night away. All with a spirit of celebration and enjoyment of the simple pleasures of life.

It’s the paternal lineage of arguably our greatest modern pop artist, Beyoncé Knowles. And it’s everything that Clifton Chenier was. From his straightened conk hairstyle to his gold front tooth down to his patent leather shoes, Clifton Chenier expressed Creole culture, and the great musical culture of Zydeco from which he rose up and was crowned the King of the Bayous.

Clifton with his brother Cleveland Chenier on washboard

I discovered Clifton Chenier when I was a disenchanted young jazz musician. I was obsessed with the jazz of the fifties and sixties, when the genre’s preeminence in popular music was overtaken by the burgeoning rock genre and, thus freed of the constraints of meeting a wide popular audience, became more obviously was what it always had been, high art, and began to be expressed in increasingly free, cerebral and transcendent forms. I was obsessed with John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, and Miles Davis and was nurtured by an unusually openminded jazz program at my high school, led by Mr. Ponte, a classically trained pianist who valued personal expression and taught improvisation. (Incidentally the piano player in the junior jazz ensemble ended up bombing the Boston Marathon in 2013, but that’s a tale for another day.) At the time, the grand tradition of jazz consumed me to the point where I applied to spend my summer at a jazz program at a local music college. However I soon found my jazz dreams dashed by daily and hourly discussion of theory, technique, melody, even marketing and networking, but not one mention all summer of feeling, of spirit, or expression.

When a music becomes recognized as high art by culture at large it gains cultural value and is adopted by the intellectual elite and the educational institutions. A musical tradition that was always passed on informally and personally becomes the purview of professors, and its all too often adulterated through the process. It’s as if the very essence of jazz which gave it cultural cache was strangled out by an institution greedy for prestige and tuition.

An institution cannot understand art. An individual can understand it and given the right circumstances that individual can keep their art alive within a benevolent institution. However the power of the institution is always threatening to stomp out the wildflower growing on the well-manicured lawn which it cannot know how to value. I learned this the hard way at that summer and it crushed my spirit.

Clifton Chenier was my antidote. I was introduced to his name through Paul Simon’s "That Was Your Mother", the sole zydeco track on his largely African fusion album Graceland. In this particular song, which Simon included to provide a link between South African and American styles, he is accompanied by the accordionist Grand Dopsie and his band, and he sings the lyrics, “dancing in the shadow of Clifton Chenier, king of the bayou.” This caught my ears and I tracked down some recordings of the King.

Three of us, friends from our high school jazz band, painted houses in the summer and listened to music. I was the sax player, my brother played double bass and our friend Dan played the drums. As we climbed up and down ladders with paint cans and brushes, we listened to Clifton singing "Walking to Louisiana" (delightfully pronounced “loo-zeeana). It was a glimpse into a simple and joyful world where the cares of life were subjugated to the more important concern of having a good time, enjoying the ride as it goes; the mantra of “bon ton roulet,” let the good times roll. I fell in love with Chenier's brand of Zydeco. This was simple music, plain music, with a great depth of feeling and a lively bluesy shuffle, played with a spirit of revelry. This could not be co-opted by the intelligentsia. This was a music that belonged to the people of the French South and surely to the worlds’ people, of which I am a part.

One of the things I love about recorded music is I can enter into disparate worlds, very far from my own experience, either by time, physical distance, or cultural distance. I can enter that culture and enjoy its gifts through the universal language of music. Great music touches everyone, and it’s for everyone, because it goes deeper than the relatively superficial cultural attributes that separate us. This is why a white kid from the suburbs can listen to hip hop and hear something powerful and real, and that is perfectly natural. And this is why I, white kid from Boston, can listen to John Coltrane and Clifton Chenier in turn and be entertained, edified, inspired and buoyed by these masters of music. It is one of the great honors of my life, and it makes me wonder in awe at the beauty of the human spirit. Wherever this human experiment goes I know for sure that we are capable of great things. This is who we are. We all feel the same, we all go through the same experiences and we all love music.

"I come from the woods. Don't know nothing 'bout the city." Clifton Chenier was born in Opelousas, Louisiana in 1925 to a black creole sharecropping family with partial Native American heritage. His father Joseph was an amateur accordion player. “My daddy used to play accordion you see and I used to follow him when I was a little boy, you know. And where he would move I was right there with him you know. But he was playing one of them small, real little French accordions you know. But I start playing the piano accordion, because you could get more out of it you know. That’s what happened. But I always used to listen to him you know."

He worked from a young age as an agricultural laborer, and at home his father introduced him to the French music of the region. A particular favorite was Amede Ardoin, the first black creole singer to be put to record. At the time the style of black creole and white cajun music was largely indistinguishable. When Clifton was young he witnessed the rise of Fats Domino, an early rock innovator of Creole origin. It would be Clifton’s innovation to blend rock and blues with the French style, which would go on to popularize Louisiana French music nationally and worldwide. “Zydeco been out there for a long time, but it had nobody really put the pep to it till I took it and worked it up.”

In a rural community like Opelousas they would host house dances, rotating houses weekly among the local community. They’d make a pot of gumbo, move out all the furniture and dance the night away to old-time zydeco music, often just washboard and accordion. Clifton's father as well as his uncle Morris, a guitarist and fiddler, would perform. Though raised in a musical environment, Clifton didn’t take up music seriously until he got married and moved away from home. “One thing my daddy tell me all the time, he say, 'You wanna play accordion?' I say, 'Yeah.' He said, 'I’m gonna tell you something son. You wanna be something, be something. If you gonna be nothing be nothing. But if you learn how to play that accordion, I want you to do one thing.' I said 'What?' 'Don’t let nobody beat you. Don’t let nobody get ahead of you, with your style.' You know. I said 'Well, I don’t believe you have to worry about that.'"

In 1945 Clifton moved to Port Arthur, Texas, where he joined his older brother Cleveland working at the Gulf and Texaco oil refineries. Cleveland was a washboard player and they began performing together on the weekends and their off hours. He soon developed his singular style and caught the attention of John Fulbright, a record producer with Specialty Records out of Los Angeles. Clifton remembers the scene, “We were out in the country, one of those country dances, you know those little clubs out in the woods. Those girls put those little red dresses on and come on out on Sunday evening. We had those little dances like that, you know. So [Fulbright] said 'Cliff, you better get out of here, man. You play too much accordion to step in the woods like this.' I said, 'Well, I’m a country boy, man.'... He said, 'Well, why don’t you come up to California [to record]?' So I said, 'No, you ain’t getting me that far.' So, it took Fulbright about five years to get me out of the woods back then.”

Young Cleveland and Clifton Chenier

Finally Clifton reluctantly went into the recording studio with Fulbright, recording "Aye Tete Fe (Hey Little Girl)" in 1955, showcasing his singular style. It was a national hit. He left his job and he went out with his brother Cleveland and a band, the Zodico Ramblers, on a tour headlined by Etta James. From then on he was a professional musician, with high times and low times, but always touring and recording, slowly building up recognition and acclaim for his brand of accordion blues which birthed an enduring genre.

His star rose in the gulf region, as the accordionist Rockin' Sidney's recalls, "At that time Cliff was as big as Elvis Presley in Louisiana.... When he came to town, it was a big event. People would be talking about his dances a month in advance.... I thought he was the biggest star in the world." In 1966 he was described by Ralph J. Gleason, jazz critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, as "One of the most surprising musicians I have heard in some time, with a marvelously moving style of playing the accordion ... blues accordion, that's right, blues accordion."

In 1964 he made what would prove to be a very important connection with his longtime record company, Arhoolie Records. Clifton was good friends with Lightnin’ Hopkins, a master guitarist and blues singer, who was married to Clifton's second cousin. At that time Lightnin’ had a recording contract with Arhoolie, founded by German born producer Chris Strachwitz in 1960. Lightnin' took Strachwitz to see Clifton play at a little French club in Houston, where he immediately offered him a recording contract and booked him a recording session the next day.

Chenier with Lightnin' Hopkins, New Orleans 1974

Born in Germany, Strachwitz and his family emigrated to the United States when he was in his teens shortly after the Second World War, and Chris soon fell in love with American music. “The rhythms haunted me.... I'd hear all this stuff on the radio, and it just knocked me over. I thought this was absolutely the most wonderful thing I had ever heard.” He devoted his life to promoting and preserving the music he loved, especially Blues, Cajun/Zydeco, and Tejano/Norteño. Clifton would go on to become Arhoolie's best selling artist and he remained loyal to Strachwitz for the rest of his life.

Clifton Chenier with Chris Strachwitz

Along with covering popular or traditional songs, Clifton was a prolific songwriter. He would mostly record in one take, preferring to capture the spontaneous feeling of a live performance. "When the red light goes on and the tape is running through the machine, I want to perform the song just once and go on to the next tune. Let's not mess around trying to get a better take. The best is the first." All of his records have a different feeling, displaying Clifton's versatility, such as Sings the Blues, released in 1987, where he showcases his hardcore blues chops.

His son C.J. Chenier joined the band in the late 1970s, first playing saxophone and later learning accordion after his father. "I love my father, and I love the fact that he had the strength to do it, even after everybody ridiculed him in the beginning about what he was trying to do with that accordion, because they had a misconception of what the thing could do. Like he would always say, 'Whatever you put into this instrument, that's what you get out of it.' When he wanted to make blues come out, he made it come out. When he wanted ballads, he played it and it sounded soft and sweet. When he wanted zydeco, he'd yank that out of there too."

There is plenty of archival footage to be found online. Clifton is featured in the 1973 Les Blank documentary Hot Pepper, available on Criterion. In interviews Clifton is perfectly relaxed, informal, warm and humorous. Often smiling sweetly, with an endearingly prominent row of upper teeth and slightly awkward in stance and gait, while playing he is always consumed in the music, completely given away to the sound and the feeling. Clifton preferred to play for the older generations who appreciated the French music, who bought more alcohol which pleased the club owners and who didn't cause trouble. "In Louisiana, man, they have nine hundred people on the floor. That’s right. That’s where they’ll go. They’ll go to the dance to dance. They don’t ever sit down. Yeah. And if ain’t got no dances to perform, they won’t stay there either. They’ll go somewhere where they can dance. Yeah. On Monday night we had six or seven hundred. On Monday night. And everybody be having a ball. That’s right."

One of his bandmates testified to the power of Clifton's live show. "We played so many of the black clubs in and around Lafayette, in Cankton and Grand Coteau and New Iberia and out in the middle of the crawfish ponds where there'd be a big old wooden shack, 'Paul's Playhouse,' you know... And a lot of these dances were the most electrifying thing that you could possibly do. There'd be two or three hundred Creole people in there dancing to Clifton. These old ladies would get up and dance in front of you. Sometimes the music was so hot that my hair would literally stand on end. I would be just shivering, and saying to myself that if I died at that moment, if I were electrocuted right there, that I would have done everything in music that I could ever possibly want to do, because the feeling was so intense. Clifton was able to create that feeling because he was totally real."

Interest in traditional music grew in the 1970s and the 1980s saw the height of Chenier's acclaim. In 1976 and 1979 he performed on the PBS show Austin City Limits. In 1984 Chenier performed at the White House where he received the 1984 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the federal government's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. That same year he won a Grammy for best Traditional Folk Recording for his record I'm Here. After several years of failing health, he passed away in 1987 due to complications of diabetes and he was posthumously inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1989. His son C.J. took over the band at his death and continues to tour with the Red Hot Louisiana Band.

There are certain artists who stay with me and for a reason I can't fully explain I have found an affinity with Clifton Chenier. Year after year I find myself listening to him, stomping my feet and reveling in the joie de vivre of Chenier's music. He's playing to make people happy, to make people dance, first the French people of rural Louisiana and then expanding over time reaching more and more people with his gift.

American music is a unique tradition which blends European and African musical forms. The very basis of our music's great innovation and worldwide influence is its multiculturalism. This is the story of Louisiana, and our unique nation; and along with a long history of culture clashes and their various -isms, it's also a love story of disparate cultures sharing their traditions and finding new expressions. Clifton Chenier, a black Frenchman, blended European accordion music with African-rooted blues into a new genre, variously called La-La music and Zydeco. Estuaries, like the vast wetlands of the Mississippi river delta, blend the disparate ecosystems of fresh and saltwater bodies and are among the most fertile ecosystems on Earth.