@grantpotter @accordionnoir
Be interesting to know if it’s just availability, or cost or style?

Some of the nicest one-row so called #Cajun accordions have been custom built in #Louisiana over the years

Not so, larger three-rows, or fully chromatic piano #accordion like Clifton Chénier played that made it possible to mix in blues and R&B to create #zydeco

Early one-row 🪗 couldn’t play #blues easily so it got left out of most Black American music 🤷🏽

#Zydeco is the exception with backstory

@grantpotter @accordionnoir

@grantpotter @accordionnoir
🪗 didact 2:

And I think Boozoo Chavez was mostly known for playing three-row diatonic #accordion, not the one-row that became more popular with younger #Creole #zydeco players
https://antonesrecords.bandcamp.com/album/hey-do-right

@grantpotter 🙏🏼
Great selection of #AccordionBandcamp recommendations in this Bandcamp Weekly feature on #Creole and #Cajun 🪗 music
https://daily.bandcamp.com/lists/cajun-creole-accordion-music-guide

I’ll be getting some of these artists to play on @accordionnoir radio including Marcella Simien ❤️‍🔥🪗
https://marcellaandherlovers.bandcamp.com/music

#accordion #zydeco #Louisiana #Texas #Memphis

@tuftyindigo
Also, that “My favourite recording of Clifton Chenier’s is the one from Berkeley in 1966” story may have been from Michael Tisserand

He wrote the great Kingdom of Zydeco, still one of the best books about the music
https://www.michaeltisserand.com/kingdom-of-zydeco
#zydeco

@tuftyindigo
My friend Jared Snyder researched the lost English-speaking African American square-dance #accordion tradition that Lead Belly sprang from (it was LB’s first instrument)

Chenier’s Berkeley recording is Jared’s favourite because you can hear his left hand playing those blues base lines

Pretty much all his later recordings he got a band with bass guitar together

On that one it’s just Clifton, his brother Cleveland on rubboard and a drummer

#Zydeco’s #blues mix from the source

@tuftyindigo
That’s a very important recording because it’s Chenier’s first performance in front of a white kind of college folk/blues revival audience

If you listen to it, imagine if somebody had played #zydeco #blues #accordion like that (as Clifton had been doing since the 1950s) on national TV like Ed Sullivan with The Beatles

Millions of kids taking accordion lessons at the time might have made the world a different place

@tuftyindigo
I think Chenier probably had piezoelectric mic internally mounted inside his #accordion at times

That was kind of top-of-the-line Accordion amplification for a long time

Accordion ended up about 40 years behind the guitar in amplification by the 1970s. And has never caught up

You can most clearly hear the technology in the recording at Berkeley from 1966 because he’s performing just with his brother on rubboard and a drummer
https://youtu.be/I11Pvvjpa4o
#zydeco