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Crawdiddy is the musical collaboration of brothers Ken Wells and Pershing Wells who grew up on the banks of Bayou Black near the South Louisiana town of Houma. Ken, a journalist and novelist, is the lyricist who sketches out the songs and basic melodies; Pershing is a musician and talented producer who comes up with the arrangements and uses his guitar, vocal and recording skills to render the final tracks. Much of this collaboration is done long distance. Ken writes and edits for The Wall Street Journal and lives on the outskirts of New York City; Pershing owns and operates Digital Sac-a’-Lait Production Co. in Houma, La., where he also guitarist and vocalist for The Blue-Eyed Soul Revue, one of the South’s premier R&B bands. This CD reflects an upbringing which the Wellses call semi-Cajun. Their mother, Bonnie, was a French-speaking, gumbo-cooking, two-stepping Cajun from a big extended family in nearby Thibodaux. Their father, Rex, was a woodsman from Arkansas who moved to South Louisiana during the Great Depression and found a swamp even more likable than the lonesome river bottoms he left behind. And the food was a whole lot better. “We grew up on gumbo and redfish courtbouillon ,” Ken recalls. “When my mother’s family was around, at bourree games or crawfish boils, we heard Cajun French being spoken. We had a Cajun grandma who told us about the loup garou and gris-gris and tales of the old days when everybody spoke French and hurricanes lashed the coast with no warning. Meanwhile, Dad had a slight Southern accent and a decidedly Southern outlook but he generally out-Cajuned the Cajuns when it came to hunting and fishing. He was a notoriously good alligator and frog hunter and for a number of years the undisputed sac-a’-lait fishing champion of Terrebonne Parish. We literally grew up tromping the swamps with him.” This upbringing produced eclectic musical influences. For years, on Rex’s orders, the household radio could only be tuned to the Grand Ole Opry or the Louisiana Hayride, which meant an immersion in the up-tempo bluegrass of Flatt and Scruggs, the blues-tinged country of Hank Williams or the “story” songwriters like Johnny Horton (“The Ballad of New Orleans”). Bonnie, meanwhile, on Saturday night family trips to a Bayou Black beer joint named Elmo’s, loved to jitterbug to Fats Domino (the term Swamp Pop hadn’t yet been invented) and two-step to Cajun music. But she also was a great fan of jazz and pop standards and gave her sons an appreciation of the likes of Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. Meanwhile, boys will be boys: the Wells brothers would sneak off to friends’ houses up the bayou to listen to forbidden soul music on WYLD, a regional black music station, and that seditious tidal wave that was overrunning pop music called rock-n-roll. Which brings us to the Alligator Joe CD--admittedly a gumbo of musical styles. The Wells brothers borrow freely from funk, blues, rock, jazz, traditional Cajun and country, not-to-mention the story song. In fact, the title track, Alligator Joe, plus “Momma’s Cookin’ Gumbo” and “Hurricane Jane” might be the first-ever songs in a genre the Wellses have christened frog-hop—the marriage of the story song to hip-hop, but with a South Louisiana accent. And if the track “Set It on Fya” isn’t swamp funk, what is it? No matter. What stitches this collection together is Ken’s assertion that this is basically another form of Cajun music. “OK, not like the Balfa Brothers or the Hackberry Ramblers, groups for which we have huge admiration. But think about it this way. Of the legions of people who consider themselves Cajuns, how many still speak the language and write music in Cajun French? The answer is, sadly, not many. Meanwhile, our family situation was pretty typical. We didn’t inherit the language. The Cajuns of my mother’s day, having been bullied and embarrassed into thinking their language was ‘bad French’, declined to pass it on to their children. But of course, we did get the rest of it—the food, the music, the idioms, the attitude, the peculiar phrasing and cadences of Cajuns speaking English; the story-telling, the sense of exuberance with which Cajuns live life; and, not least, the Cajun self-deprecating sense of humor.” But the Wellses also saw the conflicts and the contradictions, coming of age when Cajun culture was undergoing a rapid transition from an isolated farming and fishing society into one jerked into the modern industrial age by the discovery of oil. By the time Ken and Pershing were entering high school, Cajun families were as much entwined with working seven-and-seven shift work on the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico as they were with Sunday backyard crawfish boils. TV was beginning to spin its homogenizing web, changing perceptions and aspirations. In the 1960s, most young Cajun musicians aspired not to follow French music pioneers like Clifton Chenier but the Beatles or Eric Clapton. The songs on the Crawdiddy CD draw widely from all these experiences. But, as Pershing points out, it also is music influenced by Ken’s life in the wider world, and his ability to see and distill South Louisiana from some distance. This gives the music a romanticized viewpoint at times, but also a certain clarity that is often hard to achieve from swamp level. He colors and sands these observations with humor and gentle satire. “Ken’s songwriting adds romantic and spiritual spices to the mix that those of us living here in Cajun Land usually just don’t use,” says Pershing. “He writes in the character of a person who dreams deeply about the land he grew up in.” Of course, one of the things that makes this collaboration unique is that Pershing lives, works, and plays music in South Louisiana; he’ll take a demo from Ken and, with one foot in the swamp and his keen and contemporary musical eye, render an arrangement true to the region’s deep and rhythmic musical roots. |
