Eclectic Company: The Life I Love Is (Listening To) Music With My Friends.
Festival Tours International — Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys

I was a young woman when I first came south to Louisiana on what became an annual pilgrimage to the music in New Orleans, Lafayette, Eunice, Ville Platte, Mamou. I already knew about Cajun and Zydeco from hearing Nathan Abshire, the Balfa Freres, Michael Doucet avec Beausoleil, Antoine “Bois Sec” Ardoin and Canray Fontenot, John Delafose, Clifton Chenier, Dennis McGhee, and the Savoy Family, from years of folk festival-going in the northeast. But even the laid-back atmosphere of a festival was too formal for Cajun, la-la, and Zydeco. I wanted to hear them played as they were meant to be – at home.

So I took a little trip down the mighty Mississipp. My friend Nancy Covey, a former concert programmer from Santa Monica, CA, who had semi-retired before her marriage to English guitarist, songwriter, and influence on several Cajun bands, Richard Thompson, continued to run Festival Tours International, a tour company for non-tourists, to take people behind the scenes and into the homes and lives of musicians from many different root stocks. Louisiana was a natural destination for one of her freewheeling jaunts, because there was a pre-fab-ed shape to drape the tour on – bookend weekends of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival – and who doesn’t love to get the insider’s view and a hotel bargain, especially when the city you’re visiting is full up with revelers? In the beginning, Nancy’s tour groups, including the hard-to-impress pros of my music critique-ing crowd, even stayed in the same hotel where the festival put the out of town musicians. Talk about your backstage pass!

But the heart of Nancy’s Louisiana tour was always the week between the weekends. For three days, she could draw her tour-goers westward to Cajun country, where she really wanted to be. There were some standard components: Alligator Annie’s (and later, Blackie Guidry’s) swamp tour-cum-Cajun concert, Floyd Soileau’s record-pressing plant (till it burned down) and the “live in-store” Zydeco band, Avery Island’s Tabasco tour (gist of the tour: “Tabasco is made from peppers and salt.”), or a visit to a rice mill (where we once got tiny bags to throw at music critic Steve Hochman’s part-of-the-tour wedding to Frommer’s New Orleans Guide author Mary Herczog), a gourmet cooking class with Chef Pat Mould at Jefferson Island, accompanied by the fiddle and guitar duets of Michael and Sharon Doucet, and the hand-to-hand combat of pre-boil crawfishing in someone’s rice paddy.

Those events and activities were reliable fun, but all were lagniappe, because the tour was really hung on the triple peaks of a crawfish boil, a barbecue, and an afternoon snack of Crystal Light lemonade and homemade cookies – local party comfort food shared during intimate musical visits with the music-makers, their families, their neighbors, and old and new friends at their homes – at the farmhouse of Cajun accordion-maker Marc Savoy and his Cajun music historian wife Ann, at Zydeco accordionist Geno Delafose’s farm with its flatbed truck stage, and in the yard of singer-songwriter-guitarist (the “Cajun Hank Williams”) D.L. Menard’s modest house next to his (almost defunct) chair factory.

The music at each of those places was the best jamming around. And the dancing! You haven’t lived until you’ve Cajun two-stepped on hard-packed earth, with maw-maws bouncing toddlers and the dogs barking merrily around you, or done the dirty dog Zydeco style in ankle-deep grass under the stars with the bottles clicking and the triangles and froittoirs (aluminum rubboards) chanky-chanking while a pickup band of unknown and famous family and friends play and sing their hearts out. In that heated atmosphere you become an honorary member of the family in the space of a heartbeat. It’s no wonder that Nancy’s tours get filled up with alumni every year. For most of us, it’s a family reunion: Mary and Steve always bring a red velvet anniversary cake to the crawfish boil, and the siren’s call of the music keeps drawing us back from wherever we call home. [More info on Louisiana Tour 2010 (sorry folks, not this year) can be had from festtours.com.]

Now what, you may be wondering, does any of this have to do with Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys, who played for a packed, culturally diverse crowd, for the Banners Series, shared with the Louisiana Crossroads live music and interview radio series, at the finally reopened Bulber Auditorium at McNeese State University a month back? I could point to accordionist Steve’s close relationship with his accordion-building cousin Marc Savoy, or to the band’s family-dinner styled self-mocking answers to Todd Mouton’s friendly questions, or to the dancing outside that Lake Charlesians have done when Steve’s played for Downtown At Sundown, in the big parking lot on Ryan Street, and will do again, when he plays Contraband Days at the Civic Center Amphitheater May 3rd (3:00 – 4:30 p.m.).

But those aren’t the reasons why after years of listening with only half an ear to this very talented guy, who went from boy band cute at the start of his set to old man tough as his five o’clock shadow grew in, and who’d previously struck me as too slick to be playing truthfully, I became a big Steve Riley fan that Banners/Crossroads night, and came home with “The Best of Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys” [Rounder Records 2008], the band’s two-disc 20th Anniversary CD, to prove it. It has everything to do with the feeling I get when I’m listening to authentic music – written and sung to communicate the full palette of emotions – when it’s played and sung by excellent musicians who have, and give, something more than even an elegiac performance. That Banners/Crossroads night, the band was great, the night was mellow. David Greely (fiddle) and Sam Broussard (guitar) played heartbreaking solos, and Steve sang and played till he was wringing wet and then some. And in slow songs like “Aux Natchitoches,” moderate tempo tunes like the “Ardoin Medley,” and hot numbers like “King Zydeco,” Riley did to me what he’d never done to me before – he made me know I’d come home.