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Tab Benoit: When a Cajun Man Gets the Blues |
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Saturday, 31 December 2005 09:59 |
Tab Benoit
When a Cajun Man Gets the Blues
By John Sinclair
Southwestern Louisiana has had the blues ever since the first African slaves were dragged there to work the sugar cane fields and otherwise provide the labor for the white settlers who would reap billions of dollars of profits from the richness of the land. Before long the African-American laborers and their masters would be joined by a numerous contingent of French-Canadian farmers who had been driven from their adopted homeland by the British victors after the French & Indian War of the 1760s.
The Acadian refugees who would be called Cajuns brought their French music with them and played it on fiddles, triangles and little accordions for dancing, romancing and otherwise celebrating their meager existence on this difficult planet. The slaves and their African-American descendants developed spirituals and blues out of their own ancestral musical experience and played them on banjos and guitars and little harmonicas to their hearts delight.
Over the decades the two groups underwent some serious intermingling, and by the early 20th century there were black men playing French music on fiddles and accordions, and there were Cajuns playing the blues. By the middle of the century African-American musicians like Clifton Chenier and Boozoo Chavis had created a new musical form they called zydeco which merged French music with the blues and electrified both the accordion and the guitar, adding the scrubboard to the blues rhythm section of drum kit and electric bass to drive rural dancers into a natural frenzy.
Zydeco, like the blues, emerged from the desperate agricultural life of share-croppers and canefield workers who had little beyond their wild cultural practices, bedrock religious beliefs and deep sense of community to sustain them. A corruption of the Cajun French phrase les haricots ne c est pas de sel ( the snapbeans don t have no salt ), the name of the music itself refers to people who not only have no meat to put with the beans, but they re too poor even to buy some salt. And zydeco's first hit, Boozoo's Paper in My Shoe, references the state of need which forces field workers to line the soles of their shoes with paper because they can t afford to buy a new pair, or even to have the old ones resoled. And that's the blues for real.
Tab Benoit is a Cajun man who's definitely got the blues. Born and raised in modest circumstances in Houma, Louisiana, Tab got the blues when he started hanging out at Tabby Thomas Blues Box in Baton Rouge, where he took the chance of playing with Tabby, Raful Neal, Henry Gray and the other regularly featured stars of the nightly blues sets at this important local African-American cultural center.
Tab was given a warm and welcome reception by the veteran bluesmen because they liked his playing as well as his sincere and respectful approach to their idiom. They schooled the young Cajun boy from the sticks and taught him well indeed, and before much longer he was fielding a working band of his own usually just his powerful guitar and mighty voice backed by bass and drums, stripped down to traveling size and ready to go.
Since then Tab Benoit has stalked blues audiences all over America, taking his trio in relentless pursuit of more and more people to listen and dance to their music. He landed a recording contract with the tiny Texas-based Justice label in the early 1990s and released a series of very well-received CDs that served to enhance his reputation and introduce him to an ever-expanding pool of music lovers all over the world.
When Justice went under, Tab graduated to Vanguard Records and continued to document his musical growth, beautifully represented on the album called These Blues Are All Mine. Now he's moved all the way into the first rank of modern blues recording with the fine offering from Telarc Records now in hand, impeccably produced by Randy Labbe and packed with attractive Benoit originals and funky south Louisiana covers.
Here Tab's soulful, expressive voice and stinging, singing guitar stay front and center all the way, propelled by the sensitive accompaniment of drummer Daryl White and bassist Carl Dufrene, and there are great new Tab Benoit compositions like the autobiographical When a Cajun Man Gets the Blues and a driving Fast and Free.
Tab's reverence for the indigenous music of his Louisiana homeland and his mastery of the idiom are wonderfully demonstrated on the great Li l Bob & the Lollipops anthem called I Got Loaded, Professor Longhair's little-known classic Her Mind Is Gone (first recorded for Mercury Records half a century ago), and the Boozoo Chavis tribute Dog Hill. Otis Redding, one of Tab's major vocal influences, gets a special salute with an impassioned reading of his timeless These Arms of Mine.
There's no mistaking the maturity and level of mastery evident in Tab's music now: he plays guitar very well in a variety of settings, from slow blues and swampy ballads to brisk shuffles and a propulsive take on the zydeco style where Tab's guitar produces the irresistible sound and drive of both the accordion and the rubboard. His singing is as heartfelt and convincing as could be desired, and he fuses his disparate musical interests into a distinctive personal approach that's stamped with his own artistic signature from the first note to the last.
Tab's a beautiful person too, a guy whose personality is inextricably rooted in the soil and the deep sense of community south Louisiana is noted for and whose feet are firmly on the ground at all times. Indeed, when Tab started to garner widespread critical acclaim for his work in the blues, he reached back and brought his mentors Tabby Thomas, Raful Neal and Henry Gray to the Hosue of Blues in New Orleans and made a record featuring the bunch of them together, just like the old days at Tabby's Blues Box in Baton Rouge.
Tab Benoit will never forget where he's come from, and where he's going is perfectly evident on the recording you now hold in your hot little hand: Tab's going for the heart of the blues, and he knows just how to keep it beating well into the 21st century. Enjoy his work, and keep your eyes and ears on this young man, because he's going to go a long way with the blues before his time is done.
Boston
October 4, 2001
(c) 2001, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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