HOT OFF THE BAYOU

By MICHAEL WALSH/LAFAYETTE

It's nine in the morning, and Fred's Lounge is packed. please do not stand on the tables, chairs, cigarette machines, booths and juke-box! warns the sign on the wall of the tiny, bunker-like tavern on the main street of Mamou, Louisiana. Despite the early hour-the club is open just one day a week, Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.-the all-white crowd is washing down breakfasts of spicy boudin with cold, long-necked beers. As the onlookers tap their toes and stamp their feet, bandleader Don Thibodeaux, backed by an accordion, steel guitar, fiddle, drums and triangle, starts to sing: "Jolie blonde, regardez donc quoi t'as fait ..."

It's after midnight at Richard's Club, 20 miles away in Lawtell. The spacious wooden dance floor is vibrating as the all-black crowd whirls and twirls to an infectious two-step. A young boy tickles the ribs of a frottoir, a washboard-like instrument, with a pair of spoons-zhicka-zhicka, zhicka-zhicka-as a sultry teenage girl in a red Janet Jackson cap thumps out a beat on her electric bass guitar. Keith Frank, their brother and leader of the Soileau Zydeco Band, has the mike. "Get on, boy!" he sings, accompanied by a repetitive, irresistibly danceable rhythm: "Ow! Wooo! Get ready ..."

Welcome to Acadiana, the heart of Cajun country and home of the tastiest food, best dancers and liveliest music in America. In an increasingly homogenized musical nation, the area around Lafayette, Louisiana, a town of 106,000 located 120 miles west of New Orleans, remains blessedly distinctive. Here the Cajun-Zydeco tradition has not just survived but flourished, as 125,000 people were reminded last week at the Festival International de Louisiane, an annual celebration of the music of the Francophone world.

Cajun musicians are a colorful, immensely talented lot whose fame is just beginning to reach beyond the bayous and prairies of backcountry Louisiana. Among them are the scholarly accordionist Mark Savoy; guitar virtuoso Sonny Landreth; Michael Doucet, the leader of the fiery Cajun band Beausoleil; and Zydeco players like Keith Frank, Geno Delafose and Terrance Simien, whose dynamic marriage of white Cajun and black Delta blues offers a thrilling alternative to rap and processed R. and B.

Major record labels are starting to take notice. Musicians like Landreth, Wayne Toups and Stanley "Buckwheat" Dural have been marketed beyond the "roots music" category, and Cajun-Zydeco festivals and clubs have sprung up on both coasts. The Cajun-Zydeco sound has influenced mainstream artists as well. Paul Simon's homage to Zydeco and its late "king,'' Clifton Chenier, That Was Your Mother, was one of the highlights of his multimillion-selling Graceland album. Country chanteuse Mary Chapin Carpenter won a Grammy in 1992 for Down at the Twist and Shout, her foot-stompin' tribute to Cajun music in general and Beausoleil in particular. "What drew me to Cajun?" ponders Carpenter. "In no particular order: percussion, fiddle, spices, waltzes, Acadian accordion, the tempo, lyrics of love and spirit, gumbo, wails, Highway 10, darkness, dance halls."

The Cajuns are descendants of the Acadians, a band of French colonists who founded "l'Acadie" in 1624 in what is now Nova Scotia. Expelled by the British in 1755 -- an event still remembered locally as the "Grand Darangement" -- they eventually wound up in the isolated, rural southwest of Louisiana. There, sharing space with African Americans, many descended from French-speaking Creole "free men of color," they evolved their unique musical language.

The preservation of a folk tradition that nearly expired during the region's Americanization in the 1950s owes much to accordionist Savoy, 54. The godfather of the Cajun revival, he hosts a weekly Cajun jam session in the front room of the music store he has operated since 1966 in Eunice, a small town (pop. 11,000) northwest of Lafayette. A master craftsman who builds 75 to 100 accordions a year, some of them costing up to $1,400, Savoy is a purist who prefers French to English, forbids amplification at his jam sessions and plasters the walls of his workshop with chauvinistic folk homilies ("Some Cajuns are turning their back on a hot bowl of gumbo for a cold, tasteless American hot dog").

The accordion may bring to mind visions of polkas and Lawrence Welk, but to the Cajuns it is the cornerstone of their distinctive sound. First introduced into Louisiana in 1850, the diatonic Cajun accordion has 10 melody buttons (instead of the more familiar piano keys) on one side and two bass accompaniment buttons on the other. "The Cajuns liked the accordion for two reasons," says Savoy. "No. 1, you could break half the metal reeds and it would still play. And No. 2, it was loud."

That, according to Beausoleil's Doucet, accounts for the striking vocal style that marks Cajun music: a high tenor that must strain to be heard over the roaring accordion and droning fiddles. The protean Doucet, 43, is a virtuoso violinist, accordionist and singer who gleefully punctuates the French lyrics with the traditional shouts of "Oh, ya, yaie!" He is also an accomplished composer and scholar who has tracked the Cajun style from its origins in northern France through the songs of such 20th century Cajuns as Amada Ardoin and Iry Lejune. Together with his brother David and some friends, he cut the first Beausoleil record in 1975 in Paris; by 1986 the band was playing full time, and Doucet has never looked back. "It's not us," he says of the band's popularity. "It's the music."

If Cajun is the raucous, slightly tragic musical memory of a people, then Zydeco is its ebullient younger cousin. The name is the phonetic rendering of the first two words of the French phrase "les haricots sont pas salas," which means "the snap beans aren't salted," a traditional indicator of hard times. But there is no misery here: while Cajun's intrinsic melancholy can be heard in its grave waltzes, Zydeco is almost nothing but upbeat two-step rhythms. Audiences show their appreciation not by applauding but by getting up and dancing.

The most popular Zydeco artist currently is Frank, whose rap- inflected music is rocking Zydeco clubs like Richard's and Slim's Y-Ki-Ki in Opelousas. But a number of even more talented young musicians are fast emerging. Delafose (pronounced De-la-foss), 23, whose late father John was a highly regarded Zydeco performer, is a superb accordionist who sings in both English and French. A quiet man who habitually sports a big, black cowboy hat, Delafose taught himself to play the accordion at age 13. On his first solo album, French Rockin' Boogie, he shows his ability to take the simplest melody and then, as he puts it, "add the lacing" to turn a foursquare tune into a surging, syncopated dance. "I'm pretty traditional," he says, "but I can step it up when I want to."

Simien, 29, a red-hot accordionist whose vocal style recalls that of Aaron Neville, first discovered Zydeco at a fund raiser for his local Catholic church. "Black people in those days, they worked, they went to church, and they went to Zydeco," notes Simien, whose father was a bricklayer. "That was their life." On albums like Zydeco on the Bayou and There's Room for Us All, his high, near falsetto voice floats lovingly over a driving, rock-hard accompaniment.

The best synthesist of them all, however, is Landreth, 43, a long-haired, laid-back bottleneck ace whose virtuosity evokes comparisons with Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. A long-time sideman for such musicians as John Hiatt and John Mayall, the Mississippi-born, Lafayette-bred Landreth also played with Chenier in his prime. His first major-label solo album, 1992's Outward Bound, displayed a brilliant command of styles, including Chet Atkins-style flat picking, Delta blues and slide guitar. His most recent album, South of I-10 (referring to the interstate that bisects Louisiana), is even better. Creole Angel, for example, features a Zydeco-like repeated riff that builds to an overpowering climax. Landreth's variety of accents embraces the joyous cultural fusion that is Cajun country. Says he: "Man, this is the place to be." It's hard to disagree. --With reporting by David E. Thigpen/New York

With reporting by David E. Thigpen/New York