Roots Of Fire

Roots Of Fire- a rousing musical portrait of young Cajun musicians.

Posted by Robin Menken

Funded out of their own pockets, Abby Berendt Lavoi and Jeremey Lavoi’s “Roots Of Fire” Is a passionate documentary about Cajun music and the younger generation of musicians dedicated to keeping this francophone music, culture and language alive.

Peppered with concert footage and juicy interviews, it’s a warm portrait of the saucy inheritors of one of America’s cultural treasures: Cajun music.

Abby and Jeremey first saw Feufollet at SXSW and first filmed them at a club in Berkeley. Then they began traveling to Louisiana to film key musicians of this musical conservation movement. They all became friends, eventually ersatz family- invisible as filmmakers, and this intimate film is the result.

(Ironically, their name "Lavoi" is a accidental French pun for "The Voice". )

10 years of down home visits produced part one of their paean to Louisiana roots music. They are working on part two- a portrait of Louisiana’s black francophone Zydeco music.

The film begins with Cyrus Island native Jordan Thibedeaux exhorting the crowd from the stage of the annual francophone festival, Festival Acadiens et Creoles Lafayette.  “This ain’t a history book. This ain’t a museum. This is a living, breathing culture.”

“Tu vi ta culture, ou tu tues ta culture,” activist Thibodeaux sings from the stage. "If you’re not living your culture, you’re killing it."

Thibedeaux, a proud local "métis" assures us Cajun is a mix of culture, not the all white culture people have assumed. His roots are African, French, Spanish and  Native American.
 
It's a stirring introduction to the next generation of Cajun musicians, dedicated to moving their culture and music into the 21st Century.

Joey Savoy and his brother Wilson Savoy are grown sons of famed accordion builder/musician, Marc Savoy, and musician-author Ann Savoy.

Ann Savoy was raised in Virginia but moved to Louisiana and never left, becoming a performer and  esteemed music historian. ("Cajun Music A Reflection of a People.")

Their bands: Savoy-Doucet Cajun Band, Savoy Family Band, Savoy-Smith Cajun Band along with Michael Doucet's BeauSoleil fueled the Cajun music revival in the 1980's. Marc is glimpsed for a minute backstage at a fest.

Joel plays with the Savoy Family Band and with Jordan Thibodeaux et Les Rôdailleurs. Younger brother Wilson plays with the Savoy Family Band, the Pine Leaf Boys and The Band Courtbouillon. Wilson explains."I grew up hearing French spoken, now I speak French. I grew up hearing music, now I speak music."

Joel's ex-wife, fellow fiddler Kelli Jones, is a member of Feufollet, Foley, Jolie Blonde et Les Bassettes and T'Monde (with Drew Simon and Megan Constantin.)

A folk singer from North Carolina, Kelli moved to Louisiana, married Cajun royalty and, like her former mother in law, began singing and writing songs in Cajun French.

Kristi Guillory of femme Trad band Bonjour Catin, is an ace accordion player who learned her chops as a young girl playing with "old men", a francophone songwriter and the Cajun Music Association's 1995 Female Vocalist of the Year.  

Basically, they've all played together in various aggregations, as is underlined in a dinner Joel throws for all the Grammy Nominated local musicians (including Barry Ancelet and Edward Adcock) before they fly to LA for the 2017 Awards ceremony.

Congenial hale fellow Wilson Savoy welcomes everybody in La Poussiere dance hall and seems to know many of them. His music is as ebullient as his personality. He explains "This is dance music, a symbiotic relationship between the band and the dancers... We play four hour dances, no breaks. Real bands don’t ever stop, if you have to take a piss, walk outside while someone else plays your instrument, the song never stops."  "Ga de don!"

Brother Joel (The Red Stick Ramblers) founded indie label Valcour Records (with Phillip LaFargue II and Lucius Fontenot) based in Eunice, Louisiana.

Joel explains that Cajun music and culture is an intersection of many cultures who wound up in Southwest Lousiana. The first recordings of Cajun Accordion music were recorded by virtuosic African-American Amédé Ardoin who played with fiddler Dennis (Denus) McGee -his tenant farmer neighbor (of Irish French and Seminole ancestry). Those recordings are the basis of subsequent Cajun and Zydeco standards. Ardoin died at 44, either as a victim of a racist killing, as recounted in this film, or as later studies suggest, of VD in a sanitorium.

In 2006, Joel started the annual Faquetaigue Courir de Mardi Gras as an alternative to the main Eunice courir event. The run has become one of the most musically based versions of the traditional event.

Regulars come from all over the world. It's a totally hands on event, all participation, no spectators. Everyone makes their own costumes, runs from house to house chasing chickens for their pots, finally climbs the slippery chicken pole.

Mardi Gras courirs are another from of "misrule" (like Wassailing and Halloween) that Pagan Europe inherited from Roman Saturnalia. A sixteenth century French tradition, Mardi Gras courirs have been held in Creole and Grand Chenier, small towns in Cameron Parish, since the beginning of the 20th century. Joel brought the festivities to Eunice in Acadia and St. Landry parishes.

The seductive immersive footage of the Courir, held on the Savoy lands (a domaine for eight generations), is the highlight of the film.

Like all the other celebrants, filmmakers Abby and Jeremey Lavoi (and their baby Lily) were dressed in homemade tatterdemalian motley.

Back Story: I was friends with Clifton Chenier, who regularly played Zydeco at church dances in Oakland California. When Clifton died I met John Delafose. Clifton personally handed down his crown as King Of Zydeco to John.

Sometime in the 90’s the state tourist board stripped  John of his Crown and awarded it to Bouzoo Chavis-whose records outsold John Delafose and The Eunice Playboys.

I spent time in Louisiana in the 80’s and 90’s, when
the Cajun dance halls and Zydeco Juke Joints were going full steam. The Crawfish Circuit. Some of those bars and clubs are long gone.

Many were simple wooden structures with wood burning stoves and picnic tables and, during the holiday months from Thanksgiving to New Years, Louisianians living in other states came home for weeks of wonderful family style dances. Three generations sat around the tables, eating homemade boudin, and danced up a storm.

I was lucky enough to know and hear and and dance to the likes of Michael Doucet (Beausoleil), Savoy Doucet Cajun Band (Marc and Anne Savoy) and the Savoy Family Band, Canray Fontenot, Freeman Fontenot, Varise Conner, Luderin Darbone, Sady Courville, Dennis McGee, Dewey Balfa, Zachary Richard, D.L. Menard and Rodney LeJeune.  I attended weekly radio broadcasts and jams at Freds Lounge in Mamou, KVPI in Ville Platte; the Savoy accordion workshop (now the Savoy Music Center), and the Rendez-vous des Cajuns radio show from the Liberty Center for the Performing Arts in Eunice.

(Those were the days of the local TV show Zydeco Express, a Zydeco American Bandstand viewed in Louisiana and Texas, featuring weekly dance contests. I danced on the show from Eunice to Port Arther. We won many contests.)

The Cajun dances were swirling floors of dignified waltzers and two-steppers, with an occasion cajun jitterbug or jig thrown in. Beautiful to watch and beautiful to do.

Alas, that generation of Cajun dancers are gone, or dying out. The younger musicians featured throughout this infectious film, who play this “dance music”  for their aging elders, wonder what form this music will take in the future if the dance halls all close, and meanwhile teach their pals how to dance.  Laissez les bons temps rouler!