Savoy Fare: The Real Family Values of
Marc & Ann Savoy

Marc Savoy turns back to his worn workbench covered with accordion parts and pauses to compose himself. I've been watching his large blunt fingers attach delicate metal reeds to a slender wooden plate with minute screws, while he's been in full story-telling stride, rolling the words of this tale in his sonorous Cajun French-accented English. Something about the rise and fall of Marc's voice combined with the handwork he's performing to its rhythm reminds me of my late upholsterer father at work, and he has me mesmerized.

Marc's been reliving for me the year his father bought him a Hohner accordion from the Sears catalogue: "I used to pester his tenant farmer and friend, Hiram Courville, to play the accordion for me. And one day after a party the night before, Hiram came over, which was very unusual, and asked to speak to my father. He was very serious, and told my father that he should buy me an accordion because he'd seen that I was so intent on it, and didn't care for anything else. I heard them talking because after I heard my name, you know I was listening closely behind the door. But it was six months before he asked me, casually, "Do you want an accordion?" Can you imagine what he must have been thinking, for all those months? And it was another six months until Christmas came and he said he'd send for one for me."

Suddenly the words have stopped, and when I look up from his hands to his face, Marc is crying, tears welling up and coursing silently down his cheeks. "This brings up so many feelings," he says, mostly to himself, as he carefully sets down the accordion keypad and removes heavy black plastic-framed glasses to wipe his streaming eyes.

"My father loved music, he loved music so much. He was so talented and capable, building things. He could do so many things. Anything. Except play music. His father was a talented fiddler. But my father couldn't carry a tune, couldn't sing. It was awful to hear him. He might very well have been tone deaf.. But music meant everything to him. And I played that accordion the first time I picked it up. I had been watching Hiram so closely for more than a year, I knew every note of every song he played, and I could repeat them from memory. So there I was, in my bedroom, playing my new accordion on the day I opened the box, and my father came in from dove hunting, and heard music in the house. And he joked with my mother, 'Why is Hiram here playing music instead of out hunting doves with me?' And my mother said, 'You just look who's playing that accordion.' And when I looked up, I saw him, standing there in the doorway, not moving a muscle, watching me in shock.

"My father was a hard man. He had difficulty expressing his feelings, and he wanted things he couldn't really articulate. And I guess I was a difficult son, never able to do what he wanted me to. Not able to pick up the skills he was trying to teach me. And then there I was, playing the accordion, playing music, which he loved and couldn't do. I think that was the first time he believed I could do something worthwhile."

Marc's father wasn't musical, but he loved music so much that he built an "outdoor kitchen" — a room where music could be played and dancing could be spirited, and good food and drink could be consumed — and held regular parties there, bringing in the best Cajun musicians from surrounding towns and even from great distances. Marc confesses that he still can't explain why at 12 years old he was so uninterested in the enthusiasms of his contemporaries, but was drawn instead to the songs and stories of grownups who visited in the outdoor kitchen, old men who were not just his father's age, but were his grandfather's peers. What's clear is that these men who played and sang the music of their own ancient childhoods touched some great vibrating chord in Marc that is endlessly wonderful, endlessly satisfying, and has never been stilled. "I think about those times, and those musicians, all the time. I was so entranced by them. Children didn't speak, and weren't supposed to be seen unless called for in those days. So I stood quietly in a corner and just drank it all in." The music on fiddle, guitar and 10-button Cajun accordion was raw, mournful in joy, and wild. His grandfather played the fiddle, but it was the hands of the accordionist that held his attention. At the memory of it, Marc shrinks in as if to minimize his huge frame, making binoculars of his hands and holding them to his eyes, to show how intent and focused and wide-eyed he was throughout those long party nights. "One time I remember saying to my father, 'But they're leaving already, and they've barely gotten here.' And he asked me what I'd been dreaming about, because five hours had gone by, and the party was over. I was so focused on the music, I really hadn't noticed the time going by. It seemed like a half hour to me."

Those old men also told stories in an archaic Cajun French, using descriptive language that Marc can still recall vividly. "Marc is a treasure chest, full of all this amazing bygone folklore, stories, French language that no one else even remembers, all the old words that are gone," says his wife Ann Savoy. "He's unique, like the dinosaur, almost the last one of his kind," says Michael Doucet, lovingly describing his old friend and musical partner in the Savoy-Doucet Cajun Band. "He represents a time that's passed, like a witness to a world that's almost disappeared. You need someone like Marc to keep us on the level," Doucet has said on several occasions. The older generation that really lived those songs is all but gone now, and Marc has reluctantly realized that he has taken their place as the link to the past that the next generation is looking to, to find and hold on to its roots. "I don't know what will happen when Marc is gone," Doucet says in all seriousness.

Marc witnesses for traditional transmission of Cajun culture — for all folk cultures — with outspoken passion. "Don't worry about what's on the TV, worry about who you are, where you come from, and where you're going and keep that. Dewey Balfa used to say, 'my culture's not any better than yours, go back home, find out who your grandmother was, find out what her language was, find out her stories.' What I want to say that's important about who we are," Marc says, meaning his own family, and their music, "is that we're not frozen in time, and we're not trying to be frozen in time, we do evolve. We evolve, but we don't change. We're play our music but we're not performers, we feel that the last thing Cajun culture needs is performers. We need people to live the Cajun culture and be Cajuns.

"What I see happening at these festivals, there's not enough representation of the real tradition. Why don't they put on the ancestors while they're still alive, instead of putting on the young granddaughter? In their own fanatical way they're trying to pay tribute to folk cultures. But they're paying tribute to what they think these folk cultures are. I think the worst thing you can do is to give people what they want. Because if you continue pandering to the audience, giving them what they want and have no scruples about it, pretty soon you're going to get to the level of the Romans and the lion's den, because that's what the people want. You have to draw the line — if you sell horseshit, you deal with people who want to buy horseshit, if you sell Stradivarius violins, it's a smaller, elite group, but you're dealing with a totally different group of people. And I would rather have 500 people who will encourage the performance of those cultures than 5,000 who just want to boogaloo."

That sentiment is shared by Marc's record label and its own outspoken founder. Arhoolie Records' Chris Strachwitz defines "vernacular music" — regional roots music whose traditions honor the past, but also respond to dynamic and constant change — as a spectrum that encompasses both "traditional" and "authentic" culture, which is a distinction he explained that documentarian Les Blank makes when he's looking for the essence of a subject he's trying to commit to film. In this lexicon, Marc's whole life in music — playing with family and friends all the old songs he's always known, the old songs he's brought back to life, and those he's come to write himself from and within the tradition — is authentic. It is heartfelt, it is genuine, it is unselfconscious and truthfully emotive, it contains the culture and history and tradition of his people.

But for all its outward trappings of historiography — in the self-conscious selection, retention and codification of those materials and methods, cadences, patterns, instruments, lyrics, musical forms, performance modes, etc. that are of an identifiable era, but attributable only to a locus of unidentified authors — Marc's music is, as he wants it to be, evolutionary, building a bridge between past and future, encompassing the contradictions of the culture and of the man himself. The music itself is constantly renewing, taking in experiences and perspectives offered by younger generations, including Marc's own generation and those of his children and others' grandchildren, playing both old and new Cajun songs and sounds. And this natural evolution comes both from without and within. The message — appreciate and support the unadorned and unfiltered tradition, bringing your skills and your heart to the performance — remains the same, but the mediums have changed, from homegrown bals de maison, to PBS's American Roots series; expanding from "traditional" Cajun instrumentation of accordion, fiddle and acoustic guitar to add piano and electronic keyboard; improving on the crude and cheaply-built accordions of earlier eras, to the vastly improved Acadians Marc Savoy builds today, from the old Cajun dancehall repertoire and fiddle tunes, to several newly-penned Cajun hits — "Amadee Two-Step" and "Sam's Big Rooster" — that are so organically of the tradition, few people realize Marc Savoy has written them.

Ann Allen grew up a world away from the farm towns and bayous of Louisiana into the genteel South of debutantes and society of Richmond, Virginia. She was like lots of girls in the 1960s, playing guitar endlessly in her room as a teen — as both of her daughters have also done — and after college moving to an uninhabited family farm with no running water or electricity to way of counter-cultural rebellion. She loved singer-songwriters and rock and roll. But she had spoken French from an early age, majored in French at college, and spent a year in the French-speaking Swiss alps and a year speaking French in Paris, so it was only a small leap to learning the Cajun French dialect, and appreciating the robust and flavorful language of Cajun songs and stories.

Ann met Marc at the National Folk Festival in 1975, and as everyone who's seen the Les Blank film "Marc and Ann" knows, the first thing Marc said to her was "you're so pretty like a little speckled turkey egg," in pungent Cajun French. It was unusual as a courting line, but it piqued Ann's interest. And as she grew to know and fall in love with him, her appreciation for Marc's traditions and old-fashioned family values, so different from the concerns and experiences of most of her peers, made her decision. After a long-distance courtship visiting back and form from Richmond to Eunice for a year, Ann married Marc in 1976.

"Ann is so stylish," her friend Nancy Covey says, every time she introduces Ann to members of her Cajun country Festival Tour, which ends up at the Savoy farm for the annual crawfish boil every year. "She has a definite look of the '40s that is absolutely right on her." Covey also pushed Ann to show off her Grammy party dress, and the restored Savoy family home. "Marc and Ann are so special," Covey says, year after year to her tour groups as their bus hurtles down Highway 190 toward the Savoys' farm and the traditional early evening crawfish boil. "They have this incredible home, incredible children, they are incredible musicians, and they have this incredible life. On someone else it would seem artificial, but they truly live it. And it's a life a lot of people would like to have, and envy."

Ann Allen knew little about Cajun music when she met Marc Savoy, but she's since become a fine performer of traditional Cajun songs, and a Cajun music authority, compiling and editing the premier text on the subject, Cajun Music: A Reflection of a People Volume I (Bluebird Press 1984), a history with music and song transcriptions in Cajun and Creole French (with phonetic guides and English translations), and contributing a chapter on Cajun music to American Roots Music (Harry N. Abrams 2001), a companion volume to the PBS series of the same name. But Ann's best-known projects are semi-traditional: "Evangeline Made," the Grammy-nominated tribute to Cajun music, which she produced for Vanguard, features pop and folk idols Linda Ronstadt, John Fogerty, Richard Thompson, Nick Lowe, Linda Thompson, and Rodney Crowell, performing traditional Cajun songs with an all-star backup band. Her current Vanguard project is a similar tribute to Zydeco music, which will feature Taj Mahal, Cindy Lauper, David Hidalgo of Los Lobos, Sweet Honey in the Rock, and others yet to be named. And Ann was recently featured in the film, "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood," performing three songs on the T-Bone Burnette soundtrack released by Sony Music, and appearing onscreen with a jazzy 40s-era band that included Joel Savoy, Marc and Ann's oldest son.

Marc and Ann began playing Cajun music together, and eventually formed a trio with BeauSoleil fiddler and frontman Michael Doucet to play unadorned Cajun traditional songs. "In the Savoy-Doucet band, it really is a three-person thing," Ann says. "Each of us brings what we want to do, although it's kind of Marc's venue, and Michael and I do our thing within that venue. Michael and I do the fiddle things, and I got Marc to learn some real old songs from 78s that he didn't know. He fought it at first, then he fell in love with them. It's just the fact that he didn't want to sit down and learn anything. He picked it up by osmosis, and I find that a lot of Cajun people do it that way. It's so much in their head, and then they just play it." Ann describes the Savoy-Doucet Band as most reflective of Marc's taste, but explains that "No one really produces the Savoy-Doucet Band. We don't say, 'What would make this song really kick?' In the Savoy-Doucet band we're concerned with the feeling we have, the feeling we produce playing the music. In traditional music there's a round, just like a dance step, of accordion, steel, fiddle, back to accordion, vocal, then do it again. That's the rule."

As a Cajun music convert, Ann's traditionalism can be even more pronounced at times than Marc's, but as Marc is quick to credit, her musical background is more diverse. "I would love to do some old jazz standards," Ann confides. But that project, like so many others, has to wait its turn. Right now she's too busy recording with her all-female Cajun band, the Magnolia Sisters, whose changing personnel have always included a few Cajuns-from-birth, as well as a few more Anglos like herself, features some non-traditional instrumentation and close harmonies, and covers some familiar tunes performed Cajun style. "The Magnolia Sisters are a wonderful band, even if I am producing them," Tim Sommer opined deprecatingly. Sommer, songwriter and fulcrum of the sinuous '80s rock band Hugo Largo, and the A&R savant who signed the hit factory Hootie and the Blowfish, had to talk the Magnolia's into allowing him to produce them. "They're not used to being produced, and they're still a bit wary of it. But I believe strongly in their music. Cajun songs are among the most soulful, melancholy American tunes you will ever hear. And the way they sing and play them is so beautiful it's heart-wrenching." Sommer evidenced his enthusiasm for the Savoy family's bands last winter when he invited both the Magnolia Sisters and Joel Savoy's swing/cajun/gypsy jazz/old-timey string band, the Red Stick Ramblers, to appear on "Louisiana Jukebox Live," the cable show he produces in New Orleans, that does for Louisiana's home-grown jazz and heritage talent what "Austin City Limits" does for the Texas roots rock scene. "There is something really special there," Sommer reiterated, speaking of the Savoy family, and Cajun music, "and you don't find anything else like it in America today."

Joel isn't the only one of the next generation of Savoys to play music. Marc and Ann have four musical children, three of whom perform with their parents in the Savoy Family Band, whose first as-yet unnamed album will be released shortly on Arhoolie Records. "We never tried to make the kids play music," Marc and Ann explain separately. "I hoped they would want to play, but I knew if we forced them, they wouldn't care for it," Marc said. "They picked up the instruments on their own. There were always opportunities to play, and of course there were so many instruments around." "We have had so many wonderful musicians around all the time. And we hinted to them that if they played in the band, they could travel with us." Ann said, exploring the evolution of their family band. "There were no music classes at any of their schools, Louisiana is a pretty poor state. And of course none of their school friends wanted to hear that weird old-fashioned Cajun music. 'You mean your parents are that weird couple that played Cajun music?' That was something to be avoided. Our kids like us playing now, but they went through their various phases with music. Sarah had her Gothic rock period. Gabie loved boy bands. I think the boys got into Cajun music more quickly. Girls have more peer pressure to conform. But also our social life is so wrapped up in the music. Joel had a good friend, Linzay Young, who also played fiddle, and Linzay's grandfather got them little jobs playing Cajun music, which got them some money to buy more Transformers. This was when they were about 10 years old. And then they had a little band, Gens Jeune de la Prairie, and cut a couple of tracks for a little sampler CD. They played at a crawfish boil for Edwin Edwards [the notorious and popular three-term Louisiana Governor, currently serving time in prison for fraud] at a place around here. They had a rock band, The Fits, and played electric guitars, but they can play all the instruments, anything that's around. They have no fear of instruments. Maybe it has something to do with the Saturday morning jam sessions at the store.

"All the kids seemed to pick up music in that formative time, 10, 11, 12. I learned to play guitar when I was 10. They all had piano lessons from a local teacher. Sarah played piano and guitar and she picked it up around then too. She played Tori Amos and "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." Gabie took fiddle lessons and got real good on it and wrote a little song when she was about 8, but then she just abandoned it. She's playing guitar really well right now, she's playing Cold Play, and Eric Clapton, and sometimes she and Jane Vidrine's (another Magnolia sisters member) daughter get together and play their electric guitars, but they're just starting that. Wilson's piano teacher made him play a Cajun song for his recital, because she said it was the best thing he did. But he quit taking lessons and learning to read music because it was slowing down his ideas. Sarah, Wilson and now Joel all play accordion, but Sarah and Joel used to be in a rock band. I guess they played the music that was popular at the time. Wilson though, is just like Marc. He is so intense, and he loves Cajun music. When you hear him singing on our record, or at the store jam, or with his band, it's definitely Cajun."

We were standing in her mudroom one day, and Ann peered closely at a black and white photo of Marc as a young man pinned up on the wall. "Isn't it amazing how much Wilson today looks like Marc did back then?" she asked me. The resemblance is striking — Wilson is the spitting image of Marc at the same age. And he's grown quickly into the big boots of his dad. "Wilson seems to have the same affinity for Cajun music that Marc has," Ann noted again, marvelling at the way each of her children is different. "He has that same tenacity, that same focus. Wilson studies Cajun music all the time way back to the roots. He knows Amadee Ardoin better than Amadee himself."

Chris Strachwitz echoes Ann's estimation of Wilson's vocal prowess. "His singing is authentic. If you had your back to him when he was singing, you would swear you were listening to one of the old-timers. Wilson is the first of many reasons I wanted to release an album by the family band," Strachwitz said. "You should hear him play piano. He plays Cajun tunes and he really rocks out. He's got so much energy. Just like Marc had when he was running around and honky-tonking in those early years when I first got to know him." Honky-tonking? Marc Savoy? It's impossible to equate the almost mournful-in-merriment Cajun traditionalist family man Marc Savoy as a gadabout singleton raising hell with his pals in the 1960s, but Strachwitz is not the only one to describe Marc this way. California-based documentary filmmaker Les Blank first came through Louisiana's Cajun bayous with a grant to make the film, "J'ai Ete Au Bal," a documentary about Cajun lifestyle and culture, and with Chris Strachwitz's introduction to Marc Savoy. He appeared on Marc's doorstep one day, and asked if he could film him talking about and playing Cajun music. Marc said that he was agreeable, but as he had just run over a chicken, and had to go make a gumbo with it for an impromptu party he was organizing with some friends who had the beer, it just wasn't a convenient time for an interview. "He invited me to come along, but explained he'd be pretty tied up, partying. So I tagged along, and it was quite a party." Blank described the party which went on for several days, until he really had to leave, and hadn't gotten any filmed footage with Marc. "At the last hour he relented," Blank recalled with amusement. "And then we shot the film we needed for the piece."

That film and the albums that followed introduced Marc Savoy's world to new audiences, and touched resonating chords in Cajun-born youngsters who had previously viewed their own roots with embarrassment. "A few things converged," Michael Doucet explained to me once, "that brought a positive spin on Cajun culture. You had the films, and then the food, and suddenly, people couldn't get enough Cajun. Raising the profile of Cajun culture, and seeing how the rest of the world appreciated it, made Cajuns feel better about themselves. Suddenly it wasn't just okay to be Cajun, it was cool."

Today, Marc and Ann and their traditional family are the epitome of cool, playing Cajun music at home, at the Savoy Music Center, Marc's combined workshop and music store, and on stages in North America and Europe. Between them they're instrumental in a half-dozen groups. Marc and Ann play together and in the Savoy-Doucet Band, Ann's got the Magnolia Sisters, Joel and the Red Stick Ramblers play some Cajun tunes, there's the newly-formed Wilson Savoy and the White Mule Boys, and of course, there's the Savoy Family Band, the natural extension of living the Cajun life. Five of the Savoy family members are in the band, and most are multi-instrumentalists. With five singers, four accordion players, three fiddlers, two guitarists, and one bassplayer/electronic keyboardist, the Savoy Family Band makes use of all the things that Marc holds most dear, It is the embodiment of his father's legacy.

By hosting grand traditional celebrations at home and weekly jam sessions at the Savoy Music Center, which houses his accordion shop, record store, and audio outlet, Marc Savoy has become the Cajun music cultural attache. At Marc's shop, you can most clearly see the folk process at work, almost any Saturday morning, as Marc and a few elderly musical friends pass on their love of this music to Marc's children and their friends, and to the strangers passing through who make the pilgrimage to buy music and soak up the atmosphere in the front room, surrounded by instruments in cases, next to displays of CDs and next door to the audio center where Marc sells amplifiers and electronic gadgets for the next generation' players. When they're in town, Marc and Ann's sons Joel and Wilson and some of their friends are usually found in the thick of the crowd, Joel playing a smooth sweet-sour fiddle, and Wilson playing a thumping upright piano or, increasingly, taking over the accordion honors from his dad. It's the same scenario as those family parties that Marc attended as a child, once he'd learned to play accordion himself, but it's different, by inches. And in moving Cajun music forward a bit, while keeping true to it's central spirit, Marc has inherited his own grandfather's and father's authentic lives.

Sitting there in the workshop one evening, while Marc was just putting the finishing touches to a set of reeds, and Tina Pilione, former Magnolia Sister and apprentice accordion-maker was painting a food coloring stain on two matched pieces of wood, I asked Marc if he'd known or hoped when he was young that his life would turn out the way it has, living in the heart of Cajun country, playing music with his family band, living a modern version of his own father's life. Marc took a deep breath, and looked straight at me when he shakes his head and answers: "No, I did not. I never dreamed of this. This is more than I ever could have imagined."

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