from OffBeat Magazine 2002...

ANN SAVOY- Cajun Music’s Cultural Ambassador

Outside Looking In Or Inside Looking Out?
Story By Dan Willging Photos By Rick Olivier
 

Ann Savoy’s Cajun odyssey has taken her from the Presbyterian coffeehouses of Virginia to the museums of Paris to her husband Marc’s ancestral home in Prairie Faiguitaique, eight miles east of Eunice. Ann Savoy and the Evangeline Made Band will perform at the French Quarter Festival on Saturday, April 13, at 5:30 p.m. on the Zatarain’s/OffBeat Stage.

Three of her four kids will be returning home from nearby universities and that’s always a treat to have them around. The following morning on Saturday, it’s expected that there will be one hellacious music jam at the Savoy Music Center, the music store run by her husband Marc. Not only will the store’s interior be crammed with local and out-of-town jammers but guaranteed there will be numerous sonic circles playing outside in the parking lot. In the afternoon, Ann’s stellar all-women ensemble, the Magnolia Sisters, will give two performances at the Liberty Theater in downtown Eunice and later that evening, Ann, Marc and fiddler Ken Smith will be playing a Mardi Gras dance at St. Thomas More Catholic Church.

Sunday marks one of Ann’s all-time favorites, the children’s Mardi Gras down the road in Basile. “It is like little kids doing the same thing, going from farm to farm catching and killing chickens,” Ann explains. “It is awesome to see little people in their traditional Mardi Gras costumes. They have these wonderful men that are the capitaines and they sing these beautiful verses of the Mardi Gras song, the old Basile version. They sing it a cappella, you know, just all by themselves. And the kids answer. It is very neat.”

Monday, a.k.a. Lundi Gras, is mostly a hang-out day, at least until that evening when there will be another blow out party at the music store. If time permits, the Savoys hope to catch son Joel gigging with his crowd-pleasing Red Stick Ramblers at Lafayette’s Grant Street Dancehall. On Tuesday, the Savoys will be taking in a few of their favorite Mardi Gras festivities with an out-of-town guest or two. By Wednesday, things may venture back to normalcy as the kids head back to school, friends return home and businesses reopen but for the cyclone-busy Ann, that’s all relative. While there’s always been a steady stream of projects that includes performing and recording with the Magnolia Sisters and the Savoy-Doucet Cajun Band (with Marc and BeauSoleil fiddler Michael Doucet), writing poignant CD liner notes, informative articles and treasured books, lately Ann’s career is riding the biggest wave of ’em all.

In March, one of Ann’s most adventuresome projects to date comes to fruition, signaling the end of a two-year long gestation period with the CD release of Evangeline Made on Vanguard Records. The disc may be the first of its kind ever. Internationally acclaimed pop stars Linda Ronstadt, John Fogerty, Linda Thompson, Patty Griffin, Richard Thompson, David Johansen, Maria McKee, Rodney Crowell and Nick Lowe all pay homage to Cajun music with their heartfelt interpretations and applause worthy French pronunciations. Besides coaxing and mentoring the artists’ French linguistic skills, Ann produced the sessions and accompanied most on guitar before some of Cajun music’s giants lent a hand with the instrumental side of the arrangements. A recently launched promotional web site, www.vanguardrecords.com/evangelinemade recounts the artist’s formative impressions of Louisiana French music that’s replete with pictures and bilingual lyrics. As the release date looms nearer, music journalists from all over the country are dialing Ann for the rest of the story, something she always cheerfully obliges.

The title of the CD may perplex some but it’s actually an imaginative play on words that can be found in a photograph in her 1985 publication Cajun Music: A Reflection of a People Volume I (yes, the book says ’84 but it really came out a year later Ann says). Inside this authoritative opus are not only historical pictures of musicians and instruments but scenes of ordinary Acadiana life such as the unglamorous BBQ stand advertising a local bread company Evangeline Maid. “I was somewhere where there were these cool, charming screen doors that had these loaves of bread and one of them said Evangeline Maid,” Ann explains. “And it was really funky. Then it just popped in my head Made in Evangeline Country and I just decided wouldn’t it be cool to call it Made In Evangeline, Evangeline Made. I wanted to use some of the Evangeline Maid logos because it is spelled differently, you know?”

Needless to say, the entire Savoy household is ecstatic at the prospect of outside-the-culture artists honoring Cajun music. “It should make the Cajun people proud,” Joel says beaming at his mother’s latest accomplishment.
 

THE DIVINE SISTERHOOD

This summer will likely also mark another first for Ann as she makes her major motion screen debut in the Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, the adaptation of Rebecca Well’s best-selling novel set in a “sleepy Louisiana parish.” The movie features such stars as Sandra Bullock, Ashley Judd, Ellen Burstyn, Maggie Smith as well as Ann herself who plays a scene as a Cajun woman bandleader leading a string band in the ’40s, a concept she finds intriguing. Not only is it Ann’s debut but Joel’s as well. “I am the singer and the guitar player,” Ann states modestly “Joel is playing fiddle, standing by me and he has on a World War II uniform. It is supposed to be like the mother and the son is going away to war. I mean we kind of look alike and so you can see that by looking at us…”

Besides acting in the scenes, Ann collaborated on the soundtrack with prolific producer T-Bone Burnett who last year gave bluegrass a shot in the arm by producing the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack. For the Ya-Ya soundtrack, Ann and Joel flew to Nashville to record a trio of songs, “It’s a Sin To Tell A Lie,” “Lulu’s Back In Town,” and “It’s So Sad,” all tunes stemming from Cajun music’s first heroine Cleoma Breaux. The easy-to-work-with Tom Waits band provided the necessary backup support. “That was just an amazing experience. I can not say that enough.”

And if you think that’s all, you certainly don’t know Ann Savoy very well. In the midst of all this, she managed to squeeze in a consulting role in the Cajun-zydeco segment of American Roots Music PBS series that aired nationally on October 29th in most major markets. In the documentary, there’s a scene where she plays guitar while Marc plays accordion outside on the couple’s screened porch that’s followed by a short interview. Additionally, many of the old black-and-white photographs of the departed Cajun-Creole musicians shown in the film either came from Ann’s extensive photograph collection or were ones she shot herself.

Looking back, the brainchild behind American Roots Music, producer/director Jim Brown of the New York-based The Ginger Group Productions reflects on what drew him to Ann’s understated talents. “When we began talking to people, Ann was certainly one of the top two or three people on our list to talk with,” Brown says. “The fact that she had done that book, she really had looked at something we were looking at, which was the emergence in chronology of Cajun culture… And for the book [American Roots Music, published by Rolling Stone Press], we had seen what she had in her files so we let her write the chapter on Cajun music.”

Wise move. Chapter Five, Cajun and Zydeco: The Music of French Southwest Louisiana of American Roots Music is just another example that oozes with Ann’s trademark, “make it beautiful and make it accurate” as Marc describes his wife’s uncompromising quality in doing things. In the chapter, Ann lets the story take center stage, whisking the reader away as she astutely traces the history and culture associated with Cajun, Creole and zydeco music into its modern day form. No matter how familiar you are with the story, Ann delivers countless interesting points along the way such as the Hackberry Ramblers being the first Cajun group to adopt a band name or how early-day fiddlers broke strings when attempting to tune to the new fangled German accordions. Simply put, Ann’s writing is inspiring and never contrivingly complex. Words flow seamlessly into sentences; sentences meld into paragraphs and paragraphs become pages. It’s the inspired work of an authority, for Ann it’s just another joyous day to create another piece of art.
 

PICTURE PERFECT

Not only has Ann’s trophy-winning journalistic skills served the culture well but add to the list her photography acumen and vast collection of rare photos of Cajun-Creole musicians. Years ago, before anyone would realize the historical significance of preserving old photographs, Ann had the foresight to rescue the photographs and make copy negatives before they inexplicably disappeared. “It’s weird,” Ann discloses about the negative reactions encountered while collecting prized photos. “And I said ‘Look, I am the only one to rescue all this stuff.’ Some of the pictures that I copied, some of the houses burned down with all the pictures in them shortly thereafter or the people died and their photo collections disappeared. I had borrowed the photos and made copy negatives of them before they disappeared so I have an amazing collection of old pictures.”

Today her photo library is a valuable resource that has been drawn upon nationally by not only American Roots Music but also Alan Lomax’s American Patchwork series and other sundry book and CD projects.

Lately, it seems there’s no shortage of opportunities. Just the other day, Time-Life Music inquired if Savoy would be interested in writing the liner notes for an upcoming double-disc Cajun-zydeco music collection. Excited, surprised, nonetheless it was an unexpected phone call. “Something totally out of the blue,” Ann says quietly. “I don’t even know how they found me. I can’t figure it out.”

Add the fact that she is actively involved in Arhoolie Records’ plans to release a Savoy-Doucet Cajun Band Best Of disc, it’s a pretty full life at that. “It is the most amazing part of my life, I tell you what,” Savoy says laughing. “I thought my life was exciting now and it’s getting beyond that.”

Though she may not be certain how others continue to find out about her palette of talents, she pinpoints the pivotal time when Vanguard Records’ Steve Buckingham approached her about being an executive record producer. “That is about when I can see things start changing a lot,” Ann states modestly. “Now it has gone into another different direction, more like ideas, writing, my photo collection, producing and all kinds of different facets of this. I love that so much, using different things I know how to do.”

Though she is not one to toot her own horn, it seems that rest of the world is finally discovering what Acadiana music circles have known for some time: Ann Allen Savoy is indeed a cultural spokesperson, one whose importance continues to grow as time marches on. The most mind boggling thing about all this is that she isn’t even Cajun, even though her husband Marc is and their children are the seventh generation to live upon the family land in Prairie Faiguitaique, a hamlet eight miles east of Eunice. Nevertheless, Savoy embraced the culture and by now she and the culture are virtually one.
 

A NATURALIZED CAJUN

Where this naturalized Cajun does hail from is a mere 1,143 miles away in the Virginia capital city of Richmond. Her musical journey was off and running the day her father brought home a ukulele. “Actually it was a TV Pal plastic baritone ukulele my dad brought home and said, ‘Hey Ann and Jane, could y’all play that?’ I started playing bar chords on it. I learned very fast and soon I was finger picking on four strings. I just started doing all this stuff on this funny little guitar. So finally my mother said, ‘I guess I have to get you a real guitar.’ So when I was 12, they got me a wooden guitar, a Goya.

“I was so thrilled. I thought this was the gift from heaven. I just played the guitar all the time.”

Besides providing musical instruments, both her parents and her grandparents had a profound effect by constantly offering encouragement. “Everything I would do, they would just flip over,” Ann recalls. “They would stand around and we were the entertainment. I would pick my guitar and they just thought I was the most wonderful thing to ever exist. I think that had such a great effect on our lives. They made us feel like we could do anything basically. They would always support us in the arts.”

It didn’t hurt that music was always heard around the house. Her parents’ record collection was sizable, ranging from folk revivalists Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, Josh White to the man himself, Frank Sinatra, and even Dixieland jazz icons Al Hirt and Pete Fountain, who were among her father’s favorites.

Around the same time Ann would tap into another one of her lifelong loves, photography. Under the mentoring of neighborhood pal Raleigh Powell, she ultimately blossomed into the crafty photographer she’s known as today. Between the two, that’s how Ann spent her youth.

Tragedy struck at age 13 when her father T.W. Allen unexpectedly passed away. To cope with the grief, Ann’s mother Millie taught art in the Swiss Alps to students with cerebral palsy. There, the three of them lived in a quaint Swiss chalet and another one of Ann’s journeys began to take root, the French language. No gentle an-hour-a-day French class here, instead Ann was dunked headfirst into a French baptism by fire.

“Suddenly I was thrown into a French speaking community. It just became a part of my life. From then on, my whole life took this path having to do with French.”

A year later, the three of them returned home. By now, Ann was fluent in French and quite proficient on guitar. Though she was underage to play the smoky bars, she wasn’t too young for the area’s youth coffeehouses that were sponsored by the local Presbyterian churches.

“It was really cool so that is where we would all hang out, drink coffee and play music on Saturday nights,” says Ann, adding (jokingly) that the church-sponsored coffeehouses were an intellectual form of Protestantism. By the end of high school, she had become accomplished enough to teach guitar at community centers as well as conduct private lessons at home.

Ann continued to play coffeehouses while majoring in French at Mary Baldwin College, a private women’s college in the Shenendoah valley. Her junior year was spent in Paris studying all things French, everything from early-to-modern literature to early-to-modern art with an emphasis on surrealism. “ I had to go to Paris because I wanted to see where they all were,” says Ann referring to France’s hotbed legacy of artists and writers. “Can you imagine living in Paris, studying painting and literature and then you walk outside into the Louvre, there are all the paintings you are talking about? The same thing with architecture, because they have something of every period there of history. It is just the most incredible, cultural situation you can imagine.”

As her musical tastes continued to expand while in college, Ann delved deeper and deeper into the deans of American music like Bessie Smith, Memphis Minnie, Charley Patton, and Robert Johnson.
 

CALL IT FATE

And then it happened. Call it the inevitable, call it fate, call it whatever. Ann became hypnotized by the intoxicating Cajun-Creole music of Southwest Louisiana.

“I got this 45 of Clifton Chenier on Arhoolie. I heard this thing and I just flipped. It just knocked me cuckoo. That was before I met any Cajun people or anything.” Ann’s love for the culture was sealed when a Cajun friend Linda Firmin, showed her a film of Les Blank, a cult filmmaker who later would become close friends with the Savoys. An excursion to Washington netted Cleoma Breaux’s white album on Arhoolie and after that there was no turning back.

“I just went ‘that’s it,’” Ann says. “Where are these people?”

It wouldn’t be long before she would know. The same friend that planted that formative seed invited her to a Wolftrap festival featuring Marc Savoy, the Balfa Brothers and Michael Doucet with his Cajun-fusion band Coteau. “And [Linda] said, you gotta meet Marc. You are going to like him. I fell in love with him instantly.”

Soon thereafter Ann trekked to the Pelican State, soaking it all in and of course, rapping with Marc about music. Though Marc states there are plenty of similarities with his wife of 25 years, there’re also plenty of differences like the dozen-year age gap and their musical backgrounds.

“My interest in music was just old guys who lived across the field who played music,” says Marc. “You go hear these old-timers and if you hang around them a while, you start whistling their tunes, you pick up an instrument and you play it. It was as simple as that.

“But the thing that I need to know about music was when I began building more accordions in different keys and repairing piano key accordions, I need to know about chord theory, the way that the scales worked. And Ann said ‘I can show you that. It’s very simple.’ She sat down with a piece of paper and showed me how it worked. I had learned a lot of this stuff before but I didn’t know why it worked this way. She showed me the relationship between the first, third and fifth, what made a major chord, what made a minor chord, which is applicable to tuning instruments. It was such an eye-opener for me.”

It was also an eye-opener for Marc the first time she met his parents. “It never dawned on me that she might want to move and live here, with me of all people. When I brought her to the house, my father immediately said, ‘Oh, you like flowers and plants? Come outside and I will show you my garden,’ because she had said something about Mama’s flowers. Immediately, she walks out before Mama even had a chance to talk to her. The minute they walked out, Mama grabbed me by the elbow and said ‘That’s the girl you are going to marry.’ I turned around and I said ‘You got to be kidding, of course not. She’s not from here and she’s way too young. She is a city girl from a sophisticated family in Richmond. She doesn’t want to move down here.’”

Though Ann might have figured out what all this meant, Marc wasn’t quite the quick study to realize the significance of all this. “My qualities had had no value before to a lot of people,” Marc says referring to how his peers didn’t share the same cultural values. “And she was the opposite. The things that I valued dear to my heart, she felt the same about.”

In the fall of 1976, the couple married in Ann’s mother’s backyard, reciting their vows in French.
 

THE CAJUN WILDS

Given that the untamed wilds of Cajun country might have necessitated some serious adjustment for a normal Américain (American), for Ann, the opposite held true. She marveled at the antiquated French, hanging with every word and quickly picking up the old-world terminology regarding plants and animals. Though Eunice might have been worlds away from Richmond, Virginia, Ann saw beauty in practically everything but also saw the reality of it too.

“[Cajun music] was associated with a few negative things like lack of education that happened because the people spoke French and they didn’t want to go to school speaking English. A lot of people would look at these clubs where the Cajun music was happening and they would say ‘Is this where I want my child to hang out?’ It was rough. It wasn’t exactly a thing you would strive for.

“But when you come from, say a more middle-class or upper-class situation and you come into this world where the people have been poor and they live and play hard, it is just something so alive and vital about it. It is just something, the tenacity of the Cajun culture and the French language. It just touches your heart so much. It is like the way it continued to fight its way in existence, fight its poverty and the stigma that people were trying to attach to it. The people had this fierce independence. They would not give up their culture, you know? That is what moved me so much. I love the wild, untouched-ness of this world.

“One of the things that Marc said that I thought was profound was when I said to Marc, ‘You really hang around with a pretty wild backwoods crowd over here. That is kind of interesting to me that you do that.’ ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I like them because whenever something comes out of their mouth, it wasn’t because they heard it on TV or read it somewhere. It is right out of their framework of ideas. It is original. Everything they say is just totally fresh. It is out of their own experience, which is their Cajun upbringing and all.”

Despite the fact that Savoy found people her own age hard to relate to, especially in terms of Cajun music, she fit right in with the music’s best, hanging out with Dennis McGee, Sady Courville, Dewey and Rodney Balfa, Rodney Miller, Bois Sec Ardoin, Cheese Reed and others on a regular basis. Marc took his bride everywhere including the jam parties where squirrel or dove gumbos would periodically be the culinary delights. “Marc always wanted me with him all the time. So I would go in these places where no women were ever there. It was just a wild scene, I tell you,” Ann says about those “wild boy parties” where heavy drinking, joke telling and prank pulling made for moments that last a lifetime.

The Cajun rhythm guitar style she learned to play wasn’t like anything she had done in all her years of playing. “Marc said ‘You got to play rhythm guitar and I am going to get the best rhythm guitar player to come over here and show you how to do it.’ He called this guy Gary Moreau who was a Coca-Cola salesman. He parked his Coke truck out in front, came in and showed me how to play Cajun rhythm guitar, just the bar chords.

“It is this certain way it has to sound. The first beat has to sustain, and it is a lot trickier than it looks. Then you mute the other beats. For a two-step, you go sustain, mute, sustain, mute. This was the preferred style of guitar for the dancehall dance. There are other styles of playing Cajun guitar but that’s the one that all the accordion players at that time wanted.”

While it takes considerable strength to play a four-hour dance filled with bar chords, the end result is a style that’s very danceable, taking the place of a bass, a snare drum and a bass drum. As a rhythm guitarist, Savoy is one of the music’s finest. “It is not a languorous, sitting-around-playing-something pretty thing. It is a ‘get after it’ type of music. I came here filled with gentle linger of gothic Richmond, Virginia and had to turn into a Cajun wild woman. It was like ‘come on, beat on it Annie. Beat on it Annie!’ I was like oh my God; I better know these songs. If I wanted to please my husband, I had to get with it fast.”
 

CAJUN REFLECTIONS

Besides playing the music from the moment she arrived, Ann also began documenting it extensively, instantly recognizing its cultural relevance. Oftentimes when the Savoys toured with other musicians such as the Balfas, McGee, Courville, DL Menard, Doc Guidry and Dick Richard, fans would always inquire about the song’s lyrics. So it was then that Ann began collecting and stuffing notebooks with lyrics.

The original idea of Cajun Music: A Reflection of a People Volume I changed from publishing a song book to an encompassing book documenting all cultural facets when Ann was visiting a musician one day.

“I saw somebody’s scrapbook of their old pictures. And I said ‘My God, these are the most amazing pictures.’ These pictures tell the story of this music. And when you would look at a picture and you would see their yard, their house, the clothes they were wearing or their dog or their kids. Something about those pictures, they just told everything.”

“The stark beauty and the haunting quality of these photographs and the looks on their faces and everything about it. I said ‘That’ s it.’ I am going to make it a big picture book. It has to be with the songs. Then I started talking to them and they would tell me stories I couldn’t believe. You would read their chapters, like Amédé Ardoin. It’s stuff that no film has ever been made that is that fantastic.”

Being the wife of a respected musician/ accordion builder/music store retailer allowed her easier access to those musicians she hadn’t already met. In addition to taping the interviews and photographing the subjects, Savoy also filmed the proceedings. Still, it wasn’t an overnight process to complete the book. Ann says it took a decade, a painstaking ordeal since this was before PCs were powerful enough to manipulate mountainous graphic files.

A few days during the week and each night after the Savoy progeny were tucked under the covers, Ann would toil away on her book, pasting up every note, every interview and every picture by hand.

“I almost went crazy,” Ann reveals. “It was really quite the labor of love. I was determined. I really don’t think I could have done it. That’s why I was so thrilled when it came out.”

Hence, the book dubbed “the best Cajun book that has ever been written” by folklorist Alan Lomax has had a major impact that is still felt 17 years and six editions later. From start to finish, the book evolves into a captivating journey. There are discourses on the history and its instrumentation, playing techniques and styles as well as the songs that are transcribed into its written musical notation and bilingual lyrics. Insightful interviews with various Cajun, Creole and zydeco luminaries become the book’s heart and soul by telling their stories in their own words. Additionally, Ann snapped many of the subject’s pictures in black-and-white that, along with the collected ancient photos, gave the book a historical scrapbook feel.

“After I wrote it, a lot of people would tell me that it ended up being an anthropological work,” says Ann. “It just had so much to say.”

Amazingly, it took someone from outside the culture to be among the first to document its inner beauty and in doing so, capturing it in a way that was previously never expressed.
 

THIS CRAZY CULTURE

“I have been living here for 62 years in this crazy culture,” says Marc. “I don’t understand how she can come here and spend 25 years and focus on the true essence of this culture and at the same time have the rare ability to express it in such an insightful way that I learn who my culture is every time I read her writing. Every time I read something she has written I am like, how in the devil did you do this? How did you connect with this?”

“I feel that I am both, the insider that is ensconced in the culture, and also the person watching it as an outsider.”

In early August, Ann will teach a course titled Evolution of Cajun and Creole Music at Cajun-Creole Week at the Augusta Heritage Center located on the Davis & Elkins College campus in Elkins, West Virginia. There she will show rare footage of those interviews that were part of the book’s research. Each film segment will include a featured musician playing a signature piece of his music, followed by various instructors teaching the same song. Similar to her existing body of work, this one too is bound to be a powerful presentation.

Analyzing her mother’s success, Sarah Savoy, a senior at University of Louisiana at Lafayette feels her mom inspires others to look around and see what else there is. ”People outside of here look at her and say oh wow, this is really cool, she can bring this to a different level to where we can understand it and relate to it more.”

Echoing sentiments similar to those of his sister, Joel pauses and thoughtfully adds he would like to follow closer in her footsteps. “A lot of people around here tend to be more closed minded about all kinds of things, especially different kinds of music. She has lived here for more than 25 years. She can choose to look at it from an outsider’s point of view or from an insider’s. She is both, you know. I think it just gives her a better perspective on this culture.”

Through her passion and years of living in the cradle of French Louisiana, the truth of the matter is Ann Savoy sees it from all perspectives, outside-in to inside-out and every angle in between. “Outsiders see this culture as more of a treasure than the ones that have actually been raised within it,” she notes. “So I still do treasure it and see it as something unique that has to be guarded. As an insider, I live within its daily problems that are part of this culture but then you get all the joys of it too. I feel that I am both, the insider that is ensconced in the culture, and also the person watching it as an outsider. I feel I have both of those people in me. And they are always both alive.”
 
 
 

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