About three years ago, Cajun multi-instrumentalist Joel Savoy played a show at Ashkenaz Dancehall in Berkeley, California, when someone approached him with an unexpected proposition.
“John Leopold, who was the interim director of the Arhoolie Foundation, came up to me at a gig and said, ‘Hey, I’d like you to co-produce a tribute to Clifton Chenier with Steve Berlin of Los Lobos on Valcour Records,’” Savoy remembers. “It almost knocked me off my feet.”
Valcour Records is Savoy’s creation, an independent label inspired by the wave of bands launched by his friends and peers in the aughts that fused cultural reverence with no limitations. After recording and championing a wave of innovators like the Lost Bayou Ramblers and Feufollet to Bon Soir Catin and the Pine Leaf Boys, Valcour’s production of A Tribute to the King of Zydeco represents both a return to those artists’ cultural roots and inspirations, and Savoy’s family legacy.
The roots and connections behind the request stretch back decades.
Ground zero is the Bay Area’s El Cerrito, headquarters of iconic roots-music label Arhoolie Records. Arhoolie founder Chris Strachwitz was renowned for recording musicians across the world in their natural environments, and Strachwitz’s vision, down to Arhoolie’s Down Home Music slogan, shepherded vital early Louisiana recordings from Cajun trailblazers BeauSoleil and beloved dancehall veterans the Hackberry Ramblers.
But it was Arhoolie’s relationship and recordings with Clifton Chenier that nourished the friendship and mutual respect between Chenier and Savoy patriarch Marc Savoy.
“My father’s best friend was Chris Strachwitz,” says Joel. “So we grew up with Chris as our uncle, and I started recording music when I was 14 or 15 years old.” Strachwitz even gifted the young Savoy one of the vintage Neumann microphones he’d used on multiple Arhoolie sessions. “It kind of inspired me to keep going,” he says.
The Savoy family’s connection to Strachwitz and Arhoolie also includes matriarch Ann, who conducted one of Chenier’s last interviews. In archived audio from February 1984, a young Ann elicits vital memories from Chenier — while toddlers in the background occasionally make enough noise that she pauses the interview. “She did drag us around to a lot of those types of things,” says Joel with a laugh.
Twenty years later, Ann’s own recording career laid another blueprint. On the 2004 album Creole Bred: A Tribute to Cajun and Zydeco, Ann produced a roster of national and local luminaries (including Taj Mahal, Cyndi Lauper, and Los Lobos). Keith Frank and Nathan & the Zydeco Cha-Chas, for example, recorded a version of Clifton Chenier’s “I’m Coming Home.”
“The unifying thread is Clifton,” says Joel. “The reason this [Valcour] record is particularly different from other tribute records is that we’re not asking these artists to get with their band and record a Clifton song. We’re asking them to join a zydeco band for a Clifton song.”
To that end, Savoy assembled an A-list band of Acadiana luminaries — guitarist/vocalist Roddie Romero, bassist Lee Allen Zeno, keyboardist Eric Adcock, and drummer Jermaine Prejean — and set up camp at Maurice’s Dockside Studios. With that foundation and Chenier’s legacy and centennial as an invitation, roots-rock stalwarts like Taj Mahal, John Hiatt, Jon Cleary and Charley Crockett quickly committed to the project.
Managing all the musical pieces proved relatively seamless, thanks to the mutual respect and deep relationships of the producers and core band. Co-producer Steve Berlin’s saxophone work with Los Lobos speaks for itself, but he and Savoy turned to New Orleans for the lead horn on the project.
“When we put the house band together, we were like, ‘Derek Huston is the dude,’” says Savoy. Huston, a swamp-pop, R&B, and blues encyclopedia who’s played with everyone from Dr. John to the Hub City All-Stars, praises the mood and vibe of the recording process. “The whole session at Dockside was a very relaxed kind of affair,” says Huston. “It’s kind of not surprising – just involve the right people and let the music flow.”
Then came the project’s late-entry heavyweight wild card: The Rolling Stones.
Local guitarslinger and producer C.C. Adcock, after years of friendship with associates and family in the Stones’ camp, coordinated a lunch with Mick Jagger at Galatoire’s during the Stones’ Crescent City visit for their 2024 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival performance. Fast-forward to six months later, and Adcock was in New York City’s storied Hit Factory studio with the Stones’ Keith Richards, recording Richards’ guitar parts for a Stones cover of Chenier’s iconic “Zydeco Sont Pas Salés.”
“The whole thing has obviously been ‘the dream’ for a southside Lafayette boy who grew up on The Stones and playing in zydeco bands,” says Adcock. “It’s quite cool to hear how easily the two actually slip into one another. The Stones have always been known for taking roots music and running it through their own kinky filter and turning it into their own trick. But I think it’s been a while since they’ve got this lowdown. It’s exciting.”
With the Stones’ “Zydeco Sont Pas Salés” kicking off the album and helping generate major media coverage in Rolling Stone, Spin, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and more, the album sold out of its first pressing.
“The real reward is that the track and the story and the word ‘zydeco’ are literally everywhere right now, and that’s completely down to them having done such a slamming version of the genre’s namesake,” says Adcock. “It’s raising a lot of awareness around the globe for what we have that’s so special down here. It’s also raising a good bit of money for the scholarship in Clifton’s name at ULL – so that we can keep this music and Creole culture alive.”
The album’s core, complementing the marquee roster, pulses with accordion lines from the local icons who’ve praised and honored Chenier for decades. A number of them – Nathan Williams, Keith Frank and Curley Taylor – also played on Ann Savoy’s Creole Bred, underscoring the enduring allure of Chenier’s deep piano-accordion blues and freight-train breakdowns. For Taylor, Chenier’s towering influence is both familial – his uncle Lil’ Buck played with Clifton – and professional.
“His biggest contribution, for me and a lot of people, is that he’s made a way for us to survive,” says Taylor. “He gave us an image of what we could do with our career. Before Clifton, playing accordion was almost one of the last things somebody wanted to pick up and play. He’s allowed me and so many other players to provide for my family and other families. Where would we be without him?”