A few months ago, Joel Savoy, the Louisiana Cajun musician and label owner, was at a local pressing plant looking over the cover art for a just-finished tribute album to zydeco legend Clifton Chenier. The record already had a high-end roster — from veterans Lucinda Williams and Steve Earle to relative newcomers Charley Crockett and bluegrass picker Molly Tuttle — all singing and playing songs associated with Chenier, his accordion, and his blues-soaked singing. But then Savoy suddenly had to hit pause: The Rolling Stones had finally submitted their contribution, a year after they agreed to participate. Says Savoy, “We had to stop everything and change the cover art.”
“Zydeco is not made for guitar players,” Keith Richards tells Rolling Stone with a phlegmy chuckle. “It’s accordions. It’s made for wind. So, it was a bit of a challenge.”
Chenier, who died in 1987 of diabetes-related kidney disease, would have turned 100 on June 25. To commemorate that number — and help raise awareness of him and his music — Savoy and his co-producer, Los Lobos member Steve Berlin, readied A Tribute to the King of Zydeco. In addition to the Stones, Williams, Crockett, and Tuttle, the album also includes contributions from Taj Mahal, Jimmie Vaughan, Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo, and John Hiatt, each paired with a Louisiana musician (like accordionist Steve Riley and Chenier’s son CJ) to bolster the local connection. “Crockett turned out to be one of Clifton’s biggest fans,” says Savoy. “Molly wanted to be on the project. Steve Earle wrote to me and said it was the best vocal he’d ever sung.”
Profits from the album will go toward a newly established Clifton Chenier Memorial Scholarship Fund at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, benefiting students studying zydeco accordion. To cap off the campaign, a first-ever Chenier box set, Clifton Chenier: King of Louisiana Blues and Zydeco, arrives in November.
One of the best-known proponents of zydeco music, along with Buckwheat Zydeco and Rockin’ Dopsie, Chenier (pronounced “Shuh-neer”) seemed destined for crossover. Son of a sharecropper, he worked in construction and rice fields in Texas before devoting himself to music in the late Fifties. He signed to Specialty, the same label as Little Richard, and started making records during those early years of rock & roll. In his case, he modernized zydeco — rooted in accordion and rhythmic instruments like the rub-board and washboard — by way of blues and R&B elements and guitar solos. As he told the late folklorist Chris Strachwitz, “See, what I did, I put a little rock & roll into that zydeco, see. Mixed it up a little bit.”
The work paid off: Specialty singles like “Ay Tete Fee (Hey Little Girl)” and “Boppin’ on the Rock” were regional hits, and other Chenier recordings, like “I’m Coming Home,” “I’m a Hog for You,” and “Zydeco Sont Pas Salés,” became zydeco standards. A showman who sometimes donned crowns onstage and played a rhinestone-studded accordion, he was also on the third-ever episode of Austin City Limits and won a Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording Grammy for his 1982 album I’m Here. “Clifton was playing blues on the accordion,” says Savoy. “Sometimes singing in French, but as blues it was very accessible. Clifton was the gateway drug to Louisiana music.”
“It’s his voice, that real deep, soulful singing voice, which is a form of blues,” says Williams, who contributes a version of “Release Me” (itself a country hit covered by Chenier) with swamp-pop legend Tommy McClain and zydeco accordion player Keith Frank. “It was authentic, and he brought in R&B and soul, which is why I think he appealed to so many different kinds of people in different age groups.”
For some of the artists on the tribute, a love of Chenier’s music dates back decades. Williams, who grew up in Louisiana, actually recalls seeing Chenier play word-of-mouth shows in Houston when she was in her twenties. “It was a hole-in-the-wall place that Clifton would go play about once a month,” she says. “I don’t think they ever advertised it. Only certain people knew about it. It was really intense and magical. I went with a group of friends and we were the only white people in there. People could bring their own setups for making drinks and they had a big bowl of gumbo to feed everybody. People were dancing, I never saw Clifton stop and take a break. It was an education, besides just being really fun and exciting.”
The Stones, who played a version of “Zydeco Sont Pas Salés” with Riley, have their own history with Chenier’s music. Mick Jagger recalls buying a Chenier album during an early trip to New York City in the Sixties. “It wasn’t really available in England, so maybe I picked it up when I went to New York and to one of those big stores,” he tells Rolling Stone. “You go into the blues section and see a guy with an accordion and buy it out of interest. It was blues, but an interesting, different kind of blues.”
Later on, Jagger says his friend, saxophonist Richard (Dickie) Landry, took him to a Chenier show at, of all places, a high school in California and had a similar experience to Williams’. “It was a dance at the end of the year or something, and we went to the canteen of this high school,” Jagger says. “All of the audience were Creole-speaking and emigrated to the West Coast. Even though they were teenagers, they liked Clifton and were dancing these French two-steps and knew all these moves. It was like going into another cultural orbit completely. Dickie tells me I met Clifton, who thought I was from Rolling Stone magazine. I’m not sure if that’s really true. But I love that kind of story.”
Jagger, who heard about the Chenier project by way of singer, songwriter, and musician C.C. Adcock, signed up right away. Although he wasn’t sure if Richards or Ron Wood would be up for it, Jagger chose “Zydeco Sont Pas Salés” because, he, says, “I thought it’d be more of a groove.” Adcock, who produced the Stones track, says he always considered the Stones’ “19th Nervous Breakdown” “as being kind of similar to a zydeco two-step groove, so I imagined that one when we were making the track bed.”
Savoy, the son of Cajun musicians and authorities Marc and Ann Savoy, admits he isn’t that familiar with the Rolling Stones’ work. “It seems like they’re one of the most famous rock & roll bands ever,” he says. “I guess I’ve heard some of their stuff on the radio, but I didn’t grow up listening to that kind of music at all. I like it, but it’s just not my bag. I play Cajun music.”
What exactly Jagger would be singing would be another matter. The title of the song, which gave birth to the name of the genre, translates as “the snap beans aren’t salty,” and it’s sung in French Creole. “No one really knows what the words are,” Jagger says. “It’s lost in the midst of time. I did a bit of a deeper dive, and maybe it’s about hunting dogs too.”
“The song means a lot of different things,” Savoy says. “You can look at it as a sexual thing or the person not having enough money to put salted meat in the beans, so the beans aren’t salty. It could be anything. But it made sense for the Stones to want to do the namesake song.” (Informed of the translation, Richards himself says, “Basic stuff. He must have meant it, whoever it was.”)
Given the Stones’ schedule, their remake didn’t happen fast. Jagger added harmonica and a French-sung vocal to a bare-bones track featuring Riley on accordion. “I do speak French, so it’s much easier, I suppose, but it’s not same kind of French,” he says. “I’ve tried to write songs in Creole French before, but they never really come off.” Later, Wood added a guitar part before the song went to Richards. “I’m listening to this track and saying, ‘I know that harp player,’” he says, adding slyly. “All of the guys were on it, and when I hear Ronnie, I had to go in, right?”
When the finished track finally arrived a few months ago, at that very last minute, Savoy didn’t hesitate to include it. “When I heard it, I said, ‘It has to be on the record — this is the way the record starts,’” he says. “And I love hearing [Jagger] singing in French.”
In some ways, the timing for both Chenier projects couldn’t be better. Interest in Americana is on the rise, and the soundtrack for Sinners, the hit horror film set in the blues-drenched Mississippi of the Thirties, blends in blues and old-timey songs alongside modern hip-hop. “With the shape of pop music, from what I hear, and all this AI creation, everything sounds the exact same,” say Savoy. “I think a lot of people are turning to Americana and vernacular music to find something that sounds like it’s real.”
Williams herself sees another reason to salute Chenier. “I heard this funny thing that when journalists would come to his house to interview him, he started charging them!” she says. “He’d say, ‘I’m still working when I’m talking to you.’ Apparently one writer showed up at his house and knocked on the door, and Clifton’s wife went to the door and said something like, ‘It’s gonna be…’ and however much they were charging. I was like, ‘Yeah, go for it!’”
