LCV Winter 2012 - (Page 92)

VINTAGE MUSIC THAT SOUNDS BRAND NEW A mong all the traditional music that flourishes in South Louisiana, swamp-pop gets the least attention from contemporary journalists, cultural commentators and academics. Such de facto neglect prevails for several reasons. First, despite its Cajun/Creole connections, swamp pop is virtually identical — in terms of musical structure and instrumentation — to the pop, rock and R&B from the mid-1950s to the early ’70s that was popular all over America. Much of swamp pop’s specific Louisiana identity is conveyed quite subtly, almost intangibly, in a poignant, soulful approach to singing, as exemplified by such seminal hits as Phil Phillips’ “Sea of Love.” Swamp pop’s Cajun/Creole influences only become obvious on songs that are sung in French and/or feature an accordion. To the contrary, the swamp pop repertoire includes a considerable amount of mainstream commercial material, both from South Louisiana and elsewhere. While some such songs are nearly 60 years old — Fats Domino’s “Blue Monday,” for one — they’ve remained perennially popular, segueing from a relatively brief tenure at the top of the pop charts to ensuing decades of eternal, venerated “oldies” stature. This significant overlap with mass culture means that swamp pop has never experienced the dramatic fluctuations that affected Cajun music, zydeco and New Orleans brass-band jazz. Those sounds all faced dwindling audiences, a negative image of aging irrelevance and the threat of extinction —especially during the 1960s and ’70s — until innovative young performers revitalized and modernized them, while also keeping the music traditionbased. The result is that swamp pop numbers often have far more name recognition than the signature songs of other 92 Louisiana EndowmEnt for thE humanitiEs • Winter 2012-13 South Louisiana indigenous genres, especially Cajun music and zydeco. Accordingly, it seems likely that scholars and preservationists pay comparatively scant notice to swamp pop because they don’t feel impelled to document it in an act of lastminute cultural salvation. (One notable exception is the valuable book Swamp Pop: Cajun and Creole Rhythm & Blues by Shane K. Bernard, published in 1996 by the University Press of Mississippi.) Today swamp pop remains a thriving genre in which songs a half-century old are routinely played — and recorded — with a freshness and enthusiasm that belies their age and familiarity. A case in point is keyboardist and singer Don Rich’s new album Kinda Sorta (Jin), which includes spirited versions of such R&B classics as Bobby Bland’s “Turn On Your Love Light,” Etta James’ “I’d Rather Go Blind,” Jackie Wilson’s “Lonely Teardrops,” Little Richard’s “Keep A Knockin’,” Otis Redding’s “Pain In My Heart” and the regional hit “Nobody But You,” first recorded by Little Bob and the Lollipops. (This South Louisiana group was also the first to record “I Got Loaded” which, decades later, helped establish the popularity of the Los Angeles-based band Los Lobos.) There is no studied revivalism in Don Rich’s music, nor in that of other swamp pop luminaries including Johnnie Allan, Warren Storm, Sonny Bourg and Skeeter Thomassie, among others. Rich’s albums do not include liner notes with detailed musicological essays. He makes no effort to change, update or rearrange the songs that he performs, but simply plays and sings them passionately with an unselfconscious approach that underscores the streetwise axiom “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” This ingenuous, timeless quality — with its total obliviousness to current trends — is precisely what makes swamp so appealing to its loyal core audience of happy dancing couples, and so fascinating to those who observe and write about it. Rich — a native of Pierre Part, in Assumption Parish — and other swamp pop artists perform at nightclubs and festivals that usually receive little attention outside of their local 

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