[cheerful Cajun music]
*
- Marc Savoy: As a young kid, I was very interested
in the older people.
I loved those people,
and I would just sit by these old guys, you know,
and just watch them play music, you know,
all night long and just soak it in, you know,
and soak it in.
[both singing in French]
*
I loved those people.
And if they would have played saxophones,
instead of accordions, I'd be playing saxophones today.
I wanted to be what they were,
and I wanted to do what they did.
[cheerful Cajun music]
*
Cajunism.
It's a way of life.
And it's a vision.
It's a vision that people have of who they are.
The French language is still spoken.
And there's Cajun food and, of course, Cajun music.
*
- Ann Savoy: Preservation of the Cajun culture
is very important to Marc,
and he wants to try to hang on to that world
as long as he can and keep it authentic.
He wants it to remain this older culture.
- What a gorgeous day, huh? - Oh, my God.
- Marc Savoy: My great-grandfather, my great-great-grandfather,
they all lived here on this property.
You know, my great-grandfather
had a spinning wheel factory here,
a cotton gin, sawmill.
So I just feel that spirit walking around outside.
[cheerful Cajun music]
My mother and my father would sponsor dances in the house,
and there was no less than maybe ten
great accordion players in this neighborhood.
Because my brain was programmed with this music
for so many years, I just picked up the accordion,
and I played it, because I had such
a desire for it, you know.
It wasn't that I felt like doing it.
I needed to do it.
[cheerful accordion music]
*
So what is this thing?
It's a Cajun accordion.
What makes it different than other instruments?
Well, one thing, an accordion have reeds
kind of like wood instruments, like saxophones and clarinets,
but these have steel reeds in them.
That's why they have such an intense,
amazing amount of volume.
[accordion music]
It's kind of like a harmonica, but the lungs, in this case,
that pushes the air through your harmonica,
the lungs here are the bellows, this contraption here.
When you press the button here, nothing happens
until you blow or push air through it with the bellows.
[accordion music]
Plays a seven-note major scales, simple, simple, simple,
which means you can't play anything very complicated,
because you only have seven words in your vocabulary
to tell the story.
The other side of it, it's got
a very, very simple bass and chord accompaniment.
[accordion music]
The songs we play, the accompanying chords
would be C, G, which we have, but also F.
And we don't have the F chord.
It's only these simple...
* Umpah, umpah
So what did we do?
Well, the fact that we don't have the F chord
and that we played the G against it
sometimes adds to this discordant sound
that Cajun music is known for.
[cheery accordion music]
*
- Ann Savoy: The accordion at first
was not accepted by the Cajun people.
And it was very unpopular. It was very loud.
It drowned out the fiddle.
*
But that eventually the people realize
that loudness would come in handy in a loud dance hall
with people dancing and yelling and partying.
So at the turn of the century,
the accordion became the sound of Cajun music.
*
- Marc Savoy: By the 1930s, the only factory
that was sending accordions to Louisiana
was the Hohner people, which was in Germany,
but Hohner decided to improve these accordions
and to modernize them.
Well, they to the point that
no self-respecting Cajun wanted to play one.
[cheery accordion music]
In 1955, a man from Lake Charles built
the first Louisiana accordion.
When I saw that, I came home the next morning,
I was 17 years old, and I told my dad, I said,
"Guess what I saw last night,
a handmade copy of these old German accordions."
I said, "And it was wonderful.
It played so much better than the other accordions."
I said, "I want to build one."
[cheery accordion music]
*
It took me a long, long time to get all this together.
You know, all these little separate things
that would have been available in a large city
were not to be found here
in this rural farming community of Eunice.
*
So we have to make all our components,
but we buy the bellows and the reeds,
the internal reeds from Italy and all the metal hardware,
which is made of brass.
This is made on this antiquated greasy-looking machine here
that's a called a punch press.
[punch press clattering]
By hand it would take me an hour to make 20 pieces,
but when I got this machine, I said,
"Wow, I'm leaving the Stone Age
and entering the Industrial Revolution."
[tapping hammer]
[blows]
There you go. Repeat seven more times.
- So 532 pieces assembling into a little tiny wooden box
to make music to make the people dance.
[cheerful Cajun music]
Started in 1960, and I'm still here building accordions.
Not a bad job.
*
- Ann Savoy: Marc, Dewey Balfa, D.L. Menard.
They were the early pioneers of Cajun music
and the first ones to be heard outside of the state.
But you never heard about it much until about 1964
when suddenly, you know,
the Cajuns started going to Newport, Rhode Island,
to the folk festival there,
and the northerners got interested, and it was like,
"All right, this is gonna really start happening.
- I always felt in my heart
one of these days that would really explode,
this thing called Cajunism.
And in 1965, I started at the Savoy Music Center.
Every Saturday morning for 54 years,
I opened the doors to the older generation.
[Cajun music]
*
And the audience seemed to appreciate the gems
that were there.
*
- None of Cajun music was written on paper ever,
that oral tradition passing down and down and down
just by people hanging out together
and listening to each other.
Cajun music reflects the deep soul of these people.
*
- Go, Coz.
*
- When I was ten years old,
I bought my first harmonica here at Marc Savoy's for $3,
and I saved money to buy it, and then when I got older--
- Bye-bye Coz. - Buh-bye.
When I got old enough, I bought my accordion.
[drill whirring]
- Okay, now this should free the--
okay, let's look at this side here.
Yeah. Here are the reeds.
There's actually three different octaves.
There's a high octave or the piccolo octave here,
one row of bassoon octaves, a real low octave.
And as you can tell, they're huge.
[octave vibrating]
And what we have here are the switches.
You'll notice if I lower one of these stops here,
you see the--the block go down.
Well, what that does, it's shuts the air off
to that particular bank of reeds.
Okay the innards, the plate.
We build and glue up something like this.
It has the dividers like you see right here.
So when you lower the stop, when you lower the knob on top,
you can see what happens.
See, as it stops the air from flowing through the reeds.
[sander whirring]
Sometimes I'll make an accordion,
and it's by far the best one I've ever built
or one of the best.
And why is it better?
You know, I don't know.
I don't know, because everything is the same.
But for some mysterious little something or other,
it's superior.
[cheery accordion music]
You know, I've spent so many years
tinkering with this, you know,
and I feel like it is a part of who I am.
*
- Ann Savoy: Marc and I are from very different worlds.
I'm from Richmond, Virginia.
And my mother sang well,
and my father had a little Dixieland band.
I just caught onto the guitar quickly.
It seemed to be me.
My father passed away when I was 13.
And my mother said, "Let's go on an adventure.
Let's go live in Switzerland for a year."
So I had to learn French.
In college, I went wild over French literature.
I did my junior year abroad in Paris.
I came back to America,
and I went to the National Folk Festival.
And there were these musicians speaking
very old-style French.
And I thought, "Who are these people?"
You know? And so I realized it was the Cajuns.
And Marc was like, "You have to come visit Louisiana,
"oak trees, moss dripping, these beautiful old houses.
Come with me fishing on the bayous"
and totally snowed me.
*
- She arrived, and my mother caught me by the arm,
and she said, "That's the girl you're gonna marry."
I said, "No way."
I said, "She's too young."
She said, "I'm telling you,
that's the girl you're gonna marry."
The rest is history.
[cheerful accordion music]
*
- The way I started playing Cajun music
was that Marc just trained me
to be the rhythm guitar player.
And that I knew French. I could sing the songs.
[singing in French]
- We've traveled the world with Cajun music.
I guess we've been to every foreign country
that has a name.
- It smells amazing.
So we're using a whole lot of roux in this gumbo,
'cause we like a nice thick, dark brown gumbo.
- Not quite ready; there's some roux that's not diluted.
[peppers crunching]
- We have four children.
The first one is Sarah Savoy.
She's a wonderful mother and a great performer.
She has a Cajun band in France.
- * Da-da-da-dum
- Ready for the veggies.
[light guitar music]
My second child, Joel.
He's a very talented violin player and jazz guitar player,
got his own recording studio.
- Joel Savoy: I grew up in a household that was filled with music.
My siblings and I have toured a whole lot with the family.
I definitely do think that I have the best parents
in the world.
[violin music]
When I wanted to play punk-rock, my dad,
he gave me a giant amp, and he gave me that.
Even though he hates that kind of music,
you know, he was supportive.
- Okay, now we can play music.
[cheerful Cajun music]
*
- After Joel came Wilson 18 months later
and he can play any instrument he puts his hands on
extremely well.
*
- Anytime you want to get really good at something,
you've got to get obsessed with it.
And that's how all of us in the family
got good at what we do.
- [singing in French]
*
- Wilson Savoy: In my family, there's no showman.
They believe in just playing music,
just straight face playing.
That's great, but that's not my personality.
I have much more of an outgoing personality.
When I play music, I want to have fun.
[upbeat music]
*
La Poussiere, it's one of the oldest
dance halls in Louisiana.
*
* Ooh
And people, and they dance all night long
to Cajun music.
*
So it's folk music, but we just decide to play it
with a little bit more oomph
and rock and roll elements to it...
*
Take it a little bit farther to make it our own.
*
* Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah *
[both singing in French]
*
- Gabrielle's my little girl.
She was quite a bit later after the other batch.
She's very in touch with the current culture,
but she's actually very, very Cajun.
- Gabrielle Savoy: Art has always been a way just to tell my story
in a way that is different from the rest of my family.
[both singing in French]
I got into photography, and that became a way
that I could express my experiences here
in Southwest Louisiana.
*
I started taking these photographs
of Joel's Mardi Gras run out here,
which is just the most surreal event ever.
*
Growing up I was always proud
that my parents could do what they loved to do
and that my mom adopted this culture as her own
and it became a part of who she is.
- She wrote the most influential book
about Cajun music ever written,
interviewed all the old legends
and took pictures of them.
Nobody was doing that.
[Cajun music]
*
- One of my special love musical projects
is my band called the Magnolia Sisters
that Jane Vidrine and I started 37 years back.
*
We were both young mothers.
So we would just get in the kitchen
with our new babies and let the babies play on the floor,
and we'd play instruments.
- We also like to dig through archives
and old song books and everything.
So we had old French songs spread all over Ann's kitchen
and kids and their toys.
[both singing in French]
*
- Those songs are literally from the time
of Louis the 14th,
and there's songs that I found as women we relate to.
Some of the songs are about love.
Some are about women being taken advantage of.
Women always were an important part of Cajun music.
A lot of women played the accordion in their homes
while the food was cooking.
*
- But it's not very normal to have a Cajun band
that's comprised of all women.
The Magnolia sisters really broke the mold.
*
[cheery Cajun music]
*
- For me, hopefully I'll just continue doing what I'm doing,
getting together with my friends
and my family and playing music together,
making instruments,
opening up the store on Saturday morning
and let all the guys come in,
and let them do their thing.
People like it, glory be.
If they don't, we'll continue doing it the way we do it.
[cheery Cajun music]
*
[cheers and applause]