The
Magnolia Sisters
The renowned Cajun Singer, Folklorist and
Musician, Leader of the Magnolia Sisters, Ann Savoy, interviewed
at her beautiful Louisiana home by Madeleine Doherty of Filé Gumbo Cajun Club, London.
Those of you who have previously heard the Magnolia Sisters at File
Gumbo may think of them as an exciting, driving, Cajun dance band. Of course
they are all that, but they are also a lot more. They play a wide repertoire of Cajun and
Creole dance tunes, many of which you won’t hear from other Cajun dance bands.
They are not afraid to take a break in the middle of a kicking dance session to
sing an a capella ballad from old
Louisiana. 
Thank you, Ann, for agreeing to be interviewed
about the Magnolia Sisters. We are really looking forward to presenting your
band once more at Filé Gumbo in London. As well as telling us about the band, hopefully
you can also give us an insight into your knowledge and feelings regarding
women in Cajun Music
Firstly could you tell us about how and when
the band got together and what sort of music you were playing.
Well, what
happened was, I’d been playing music with Jane Vidrine and we had young
children and we would sit in the kitchen with the kids and that’s how we would
mother. We would get together and let the children play and we would both play
music. We both had bands with our husbands that played really hardcore dance
music but there was a big side of Cajun music that we both really wanted to
play that neither of our husbands wanted to play, for example, the old
repertoire of the twenties and the thirties, Joe Falcon and Cleoma Breaux,
Amadé Breaux, a lot of this early music with more lyrics. So, we were both into
songs and we love singing. We were trying to find Cajun songs that had more lyrics
and words to them. We wanted to do a very different repertoire than our
husbands wanted to do so I said, ‘I’m
gonna learn to play the accordion.’ Marc’s
father had given me an old accordion and I liked the music of Cleoma Falcon.
When I was pregnant, which was most of my beginning married life, I would sit
around playing the accordion while they repaired this old house we live in. I’d
sit by the fire and play my accordion and I learned all Cleoma’s music. Jane
and I also really loved ballads, which never fitted into the dancehall
repertoire, so we had big collections of them. I have a particularly large
collection because I’m one of those people who collects things a lot and people
had given me archival materials. I’d met some ballad singers and taped them and
so we started doing those songs, too, which were really obscure and we started
recording those. The words are so pretty in those old ballads.
We started the
band with a couple of friends in the neighbourhood and after a few line-up changes
it has been formed of Jane and me, Lisa Trahan and Anya Burgess. We have made
two CDs with this line-up.
As your band has an all-women line-up, can you
tell us a little about the role of women in Cajun music traditionally. Why did
they rarely get recorded? What contribution did they make? How have attitudes
changed?
I
would say that the reason there were not a lot of women recorded in the past
was that, basically, it was a very rough scene, the Cajun dance hall scene and
it was not a respectable thing to be a Cajun musician and it still isn’t. It’s
changed a bit as people have become more educated and the university crowd have
all gotten into it, more educated people. Back in the day it was more like people
that were more on the poverty level and they were playing Cajun music to
supplement their income. They were the outsiders, the Cajuns, the
French-speaking Americans. The goal for a lot of people in Louisiana was to
become more americanised. That was to join the bigger income crowd that could
hang with the English- speaking people and could do commerce with them. Also it
was clearly the role of women in this society to prepare food, raise children,
make up a home, hold that part together and the man would be out in the field.
The women would be out in the field, too, but they had a lot of stuff round the
house to do; they couldn’t afford babysitters. This was another good reason why
women couldn’t go and play in dancehalls. But Cleoma, who was pretty much my
example of a woman who played in dance halls, she made a whole lot of
recordings, including the first Cajun recording ever made with her husband. The
fact that she played with her husband, that was acceptable at least, She had a
guitar; this was a very new idea. A woman and a guitar was like a major draw.
Everybody would come to see her. She was really beautiful, a great singer and
she had only one child. She would bring her child and let her sleep on the
stage on a little blanket and it just seemed like she actually pulled it off.
She was a tough cookie, a strong woman and it seemed like she could do her
thing. And, importantly, that also brought a double income into her family.
Ann gets up and quickly throws lunch
together. She requested I record this to prove the point that women do the fun
things between the chores! Or was it chores between the fun things?
Cleoma died very
young; I think she was thirty-two, from a terrible accident. Joe got remarried
to Theresa; she played with her son. She was a drummer. I also liked Laura
Broussard; she recorded with Lee Sonnier. They were really famous for singing
‘The War Widow Waltz.’ Then there was Marie Solange Falcon, who played in a
band with Shuk Richard. And there was a female drummer in Nathan Abshire’s
band, I think she probably sang in the dance hall but she wasn’t on any of the
recordings. A lot of women played the drums.
My understanding was that
women, behind the scenes, tended to teach the children to play.
They did. I
think I wrote about that somewhere. Women, in their houses, would often play
the accordion. There were a lot of women musicians. They just weren’t recorded.
In fact most of the men I’ve recorded said,
‘My mom played the accordion, my grandma played the
accordion in the kitchen. That was the first place I learned how to play.’
That was very
common. And at house dances, a few women were fiddlers, but as far as making
recordings there weren’t many. When I moved here Sheryl Cormier was the only
one and she had a band of her own. Later she made an all-women band; some
tough-cookie Cajun women. Sheryl’s a great musician.
I started
singing with Marc (her husband) and Michael Doucet at that time, that’s the
first thing I did. As you remember, when we did our first dances at Filé Gumbo,
the giant Cajun dances back then. That’s so long ago. When was it now?
Early
nineties, ninety-one or ninety two.
It was such a fun scene
over there, the Filé
Gumbo scene, with Michael Doucet and then Richard Thompson came and sat in at
that dance.
Following the world-wide success of your ‘Cajun Music A Reflection of a People Volume
1’, where you sought to capture the spirit of a Cajun era before it was lost,
as I understand, I know that you have been researching and collecting material
for volumes two and three for many years. You told me that volume three would
focus on women in Cajun music. How much has that research and that of Jane
Vidine, who I believe has been researching separately, influenced your choice
of material for your albums?
We’ve always
listened to every female recording we could get our hands on. Historical music, we were always into historical
music. We looked for songs that had stories we could relate to, like songs
about love and loss. There are plenty of those in Cajun music, songs about
marriage, songs about experiences we could relate to and therefore sing with
feeling. The ballads are very much from a woman’s point of view; situations a
woman might get into. We got a grant from the State of Louisiana to research
historical Louisiana children’s music, so we really had fun with that. We
collected a huge batch of songs and then we made one record of children’s music
and we almost finished a lullaby record from that study but never did finish
it. Then Anya suggested that I should take all that research we did and put it
into Volume Three, along with my dance hall ladies, but in different sections.
I thought it was a brilliant idea. It’s pretty much done, Volume Three, though
weirdly, more so than two. I was going to put it out first, because there’s so
much more done of it. Then someone said I shouldn’t put the women in a separate
book because it makes them look like they’re not as good as the men, putting
them aside, but I must say I don’t agree.
Well, I must admit that when
you said it was only going to be a small volume, I thought, ‘Oh!’
Well, there are
not that many documented women. I’m not putting any modern women in it. If I
were to put any modern women in it, the person the most modern I would put in
would be Sheryl Cormier but I’m not going to go anybody more modern than that.
I’m interested in the old Cajun scene, how it used to be, not how it’s evolved.
I know from watching the band live and
listening to your many recordings that you are all multi-instrumentalists,
capable of playing in a wide variety of musical genre and in many styles in the
Cajun repertoire. How do you go about the process of putting together material for
a new album?
Basically, we
each of us love Cajun music a lot and feel that we have songs which touch our
personal hearts more than others, so we each bring our own songs, or somebody
will bring a song and say,
‘Would you
like to sing this song, it would sound good with your sort of voice?’
Anya has tended
more towards string band music because she was an Old-Time musician first. She
picks songs which are more like American songs in French. ‘Them Old Cotton
Fields Back Home’ is on the new Magnolia Sisters’ CD. We didn’t even know it in
English but later somebody pointed it out to us. It’s ‘Les Clos De Coton,’ by
Blackie Forestier but Anya heard it and the way that rhythm is, it’s more like an
American rhythm and the other one she picked was like that, too. It was a
Rayne-Bo Ramblers string band song. Lisa’s been doing songs by her ancestor,
Bixie Guidry,who recorded a bunch of 78s. She likes the same old stuff; she’s
got a good little Cajun girl voice. I love her singing. Jane and I picked some
songs we could sing together and I wrote a few songs. We make each other CDs
and listen and we rule some of them out, We like some of them; we sit around
and play them and if some of them work, we keep them. We also keep a few
standard dance hall tunes in there because people like to dance to them. But we
do that sort of music with our husbands. The goal of this band is our
creativity more, our musical creativity. We make the hard-kicking dancehall
records. I do that with the Savoy Family Band or the Savoy –Doucet Band, but
with this band, it’s my creativity, to find weird stuff nobody’s ever heard and
try and make it sound wonderful. I could say it’s a more spiritual, creative
thing. And I think friendships with women are very (pause for thought)…it’s
amazing a band of women can stay together as long as we have and not killed
each other! Women bands often seem to have a hard time, but we seem to get
along real well and travel well together. I don’t think anybody’s on an ego
trip; we’re all just trying to make this thing happen. It’s worked out well, we
have fun together!
Anybody who has a number of Magnolia Sisters'
recordings will recognise the consistently 1930's theme of the covers. What
fascinates you, or is it fascinates all of the band, so much about the 1930's?
Well, first of
all we’re drawn to the feeling of a 78 record; we like the way they were
recorded. We like the bass of the
accordion; you could hear it really well. We like the honed-down arrangement;
we like those songs. Most of those songs are just so obscure, we just like that
era. We like it in a fashion sense for the clothing, we like it visually, we
like the way the Cajun bands of that era looked. We all had this set of five
records from Arhoolie Records, that was Cajun 78’s Volumes One to Five and they
were our first experience of Cajun music That was what made us love Cajun
music, it was those records. We learned everything on those five records. That
is my favourite set of Cajun records ever and they’re gone now. Chris (Strachwitz)
doesn’t do them anymore!
I’ve got them on vinyl.
Didn’t they come out on CD?
No, they didn’t.
I think he might’ve had a couple on cassette, but they were LPs. Those were my
favourite, that era, so that’s what formulated my love of Cajun music. The first
time I heard Cajun Music I was in a record store in Washington DC flipping
through a records. I remember Richard Thompson told the story that he was in
London flipping through a bunch of records when he found one by the Hackberry Ramblers .
Well, that was me in America flipping in Washington DC through old records.’ Hey what’s this, this looks interesting,
Cajun Music from the Thirties.’ That started my life. Literally it changed
my life utterly, when I heard that record. It was just like that! ‘I’m going there! ‘It was amazing, the
power of those old recordings, the hauntingness, the soulfulness, the groove,
the everything. I just loved it!
Yes, I had the same reaction to a set of
Folkways LPs from the Deep South, which actually pre-date Chris’ albums. I was
bowled over by the six early Cajun tracks and have been hooked on Cajun Music
ever since.
But back to Ann and less of
me!
Tim and I were talking about
the move away from house dances to dance halls and the subsequent banning of
children from places where alcohol was consumed. The consequence of this was
mothers were presumably marooned at home with children rather than tucking up
the kids at the Fais-Dodo. Tim then
pointed out the irony of the plethora of Cajun lyrics which have the vocalist actually
having a great time at the dance, whilst in his lyrics he is decrying the desertion of the cute
little woman, forcing him to retreat to Texas/ Grand Gueydan/ Kaplan etc, when
actually she is stuck at home with the kids night after night!
I see that
differently from what you’ve described here. When it was house dances, as we were
saying, everybody got to be present and then there was the fais-dodo, the cry
room at the back where the babies were put in order to sleep but there was
always alcohol; the men would go outside to drink. Then when there was the
dance hall, women would go out on dates with their husbands. It wasn’t all like
they were at home crying . The women would go and dance and dancing is such a
big part of this culture. Usually though, the men in the band, their wives were
on ‘la table des veuves’, the widows’ table, because they didn’t get to dance
with their husbands and the husbands didn’t really like them to dance with
other men very much. Even now they don’t! But there was some of that
resentment, surely. The women came to resent the men would go to the dances and
drink a lot and they were home with the babies. I’m sure there was a whole lot
of that and I’m sure there may have been some negative feelings towards their
husbands playing music in dance halls, big time. A lot of them quit because
their wives gave them too much grief! Plus there was the lack of
respectability.
How important do you think such vocals are
within the performance of a Cajun number and how much do you feel that the
voice was there to function as another instrument before the widespread use of
PA systems.
As far as the
song lyrics, Cajun music is a lot about blowing off steam. In the early days
before microphones the manner in which people sang was always very high-pitched,
because the accordions were always in C and sometimes D. That’s what defined
the style of the Cajun music, throwing up all that feeling plus the high keys
of the accordions. Then later, when microphones came in, 1935 already, it
became much more of a croony-country style of singing The string band era then
changed the style because they didn’t have to sing loud above an accordion, so
they could sing in any key they wanted. But there was very little amplification
and people had to be heard. The whole style was created around ‘How much noise can I make?’ Like the
fiddle, for example; the more strings you bear down on, the more you’re heard.
The bigger strings you could put on your fiddle, like those Black Diamond
strings, they’re huge and heavy, the more you could hear it, that big sighing,
droning rhythm and the triangle with a rhythm that could cut through anything.
The accordion, clearly, is loud enough to be heard if you put some muscle
behind it. It’s all based on noise and rhythm. I think the vocals were also
based on that in the beginning.
Can you account for the fact
that the lyrics are often so much the same?
I have no idea
why that is. There are plenty of good, long marriages in the Cajun culture. I’m
guessing that, as you imply in your question, the dancehall life put a big
strain on a lot of marriages. Probably there were a lot of women who said,
‘Look, I’m going off because he pays no attention to
me. He’s off in the dance hall every Saturday night.
I can’t really answer that question but you
would think there would have been a lot of strain in the marriages. Some of the
wives I’ve interviewed of deceased people, they did say,
‘I don’t know anything about that. I didn’t like
that. He quit that. I asked him and he stopped playing’
Most of them did.
Dewey Balfa quit for a long time and sold insurance. Dennis McGee quit for most
of his life. Dennis’ whole career was like five years and then he just went and
started being a barber or a barbeque guy, whatever he could do, just to support
his twelve children. Then he came back much later or he was re-found, as were
the Hackberry Ramblers. All these people did this when they were young and then
they had families, then some of them, when they got older, were rediscovered by
people like us, knocking on the door,
’Aren’t you one of the Hackberry Ramblers?’
or ‘Aren’t you Dennis McGhee?
Then they
started building up a career with their second breath. It’s interesting because
you always picture Dennis McGee playing for a hundred years but, no, it was a
tiny period and then he came back. And that could be said about a lot of people
that weren’t dancehall people. I think Wade Frugé’s quote is good. He said,
‘I was in the dancehall playing the fiddle and my
girlfriend was out there being squeezed by another man and I said, “To hell
with this!” I quit playing. I wanted to dance with the girls!’
Can you tell us about your
recently released CD?
First I have to
mention our Grammy-nominated one, which was the one before. That was pretty big
excitement. It was called ‘Stripped Down.’ When it was nominated for a Grammy I
couldn’t believe it because we’re more obscure, we don’t hit the roads a lot
and so we were pretty honoured with that. This one is an interesting collection
of gems that we dug out that people have never heard before. The cover of the
CD is designed after an old piece of sheet music for one of our favourite songs
on the CD, called, ‘Est-ce que tu penses
jamais à moi?’Do You Ever Think Of Me?’ Or ‘Do you never think of me?’ This
was a sweet American song which became Cajunised.
I couldn’t work out who it was on the front
cover.
Good, we didn’t
want you to. It’s supposed to be any lady reading a letter, but secretly it’s
Lisa. She’s disguised, she has a very Cajun face and dark Cajun eyes, a
twenties looking face. But don’t tell anybody!
Apart from File Gumbo, where else will you be
appearing in your forthcoming European tour?
We’re playing at
the Birmingham Jazz festival, in Farnesdale. We love that little dancehall there;
it’s on the moors, the Band Room. Also at the Sage in Gateshead and in the
Outer Hebrides, a Celtic Hebrides Festival. Then we’re doing a pretty big chunk
in Spain. And, of course, Filé Gumbo. We’re booked every single day except one.
One day we are free!
It looks like quite a lengthy undertaking. I
know that you are all true professionals when it comes to such things, but how
do you find the stamina?
We pace
ourselves; we don’t party hard because there’d be no way you could do that.
We’re kinda party girls and so we have to control ourselves! That is what we
like to do, party, but we can’t do that and something as exhausting as
performing every day, with all that travelling. We just try and give our all to
the actual performances.
We love bringing
Cajun music abroad because, for one thing, a lot of people abroad seem to speak
French and they can understand the lyrics. And I’ve always thought that the
British people have great appreciation for really obscure old stuff and I’ve
always thought the British were the hippest people in the world. They just get
all the most obscure things and embrace them and love them. They always would
have old 78 records and I’m thinking, ‘What,
we don’t have them in America!’ People from England would come over and
collect cool early American stuff and bring it back. Things like that make me
think it’s a very fascinating country and I like the British people a lot. I
admire them for being thinking people.
I love these
little venues where you think you’re in the middle of nowhere and we think
there’ll be two people but it’s just packed with all these people who do Cajun
dancing and we think ‘How do they know
this? Where are they from? Who are these people?’ Yes, we love bringing
Cajun music to Great Britain.
Thank you, Ann, for sharing so much with us
today. We look forward ourselves to a delightful event with all the band on the
25th July at Filé Gumbo.
We can’t wait!
We love to play there, as we have done for so many years, for you and Tim. We
have a ball every time!
But I must add
that I don’t want to lead anyone astray in thinking that the Magnolia Sisters won’t
be playing kicking dance music when we come to to Filé Gumbo, because that’s
mainly what we do on stage, we’re a dance band. We play real hardcore Cajun dances
that last as much as three and four hours all over America, in Europe. We have
a real tight groove and we play a lot of party dance music. In a dance we would
not be playing ballads, well, we might do one as a sample. Just so that you
understand, our more creative side would be shown in our albums more than at a
dance. At a dance we play hardcore Cajun dance music and we love it!
And so
do we!
Photo
by Gabrielle Savoy
©
Madeleine Doherty 24.05.14