ZYDECO--EYE EEEEEE!

ZYDECO!!! Just a few short years ago I had never heard of Zydeco, much less the music!

We moved to Orange, Texas in the year 2000. I had never heard of Orange, Texas either. One day my husband turned the radio on to some very strange sounds. Dare I call it music? I couldn't stand it. They even had a station that played nothing but!! How could anybody stand such! But every morning the alarm would go off and the God awful sound would come on! I got to where I liked the alarm better than the music!
We were coming back from Beaumont one afternoon and passed a little cafe called "Larry's". They advertised crawfish, one of my husbands favorite foods. Another thing I had never heard of.
In my growing up days, we called them crawdads and they lived in the mud and you took a piece of bacon, tied a string around it, put it down the crawdad hole and he'd grab it with his little ole pinchers.
I never heard of this horrible creature that you pulled their heads off and sucked their brains out! But never the less we stopped and went in. I could always order shrimp. Now that was good food!
This little place had a dance floor and a "band", consisting of 3 men, one playing a "squeeze box", one playing a fiddle, and one playing a washboard while some how blowing on a "juice harp".
Oh NO, this was Zydeco!! Now I was gonna eat and listen to Zydeco! Can this get any worse?
Of course you know the answer is always YES!
I fixed my salad and started to look around. This was not a dive, this was not a night club, this was a family restaurant! They served beer, but just about every place we went served beer. Not like up here in Arkansas. Now this was not late at night but evening, supper time!
On the dance floor was several couples. One was an elderly man and a very young girl. Look liked his grand daughter! What was going on here?? Another couple was this woman dancing with a young man about the age of six! Then I looked and there was a man dancing with a baby, a grand mother looking lady dancing with a grandpa!
The more I looked around the more I started to giggle. I told Preston we were in some kind of strange place. He said, "No, we were in Cajun Country"! That the people here were a happy bunch and to listen to the words of the music, it was all happy!
And ya know what, it was. Happy. And I learned to love the music. It is like no other. And you don't hear it any other place but in Cajun Country!
Growing up in a dry home not to mention in a dry county, seeing beer sold everywhere was strange to me, even at my age. We would go to festivals almost every weekend. Those little towns would celebrate just about anything. And as always there was beer! Some bands would play and you brought your own lawn chair and cooler. Grand dads danced with babies, young men danced with old ladies! All the family had a good time. And NEVER did I see anybody get drunk, disorderly, or ugly. And there weren't even a lot of law enforcement. People just knew how to party and get along!
One time we went to Lake Charles to see Percy Sledge, now that is getting into deep Cajun Country. It was a big civic center, and along the edges were vendors selling some of the best food I have ever eaten. This is were I had my first taste of alligator on a stick. The one thing I pointed out to Preston was the cheerleaders booth, selling beer! Not the cheerleaders, the parents. Like our groups here at home selling burgers for the football boys!
It is a strange land and strange bunch of people, but some of the truest forms of deep rooted heritage ever to be found. You can taste it in their food, feel it in their music, and know it in their friendships! I shall always love my Cajun friends, and their wonderful Zydeco! Even if I still think it all sounds pretty much a like!