Zydeco Party Time

Just in time to celebrate the band's 20th anniversary, Buckwheat Zydeco has formed its own record label, Tomorrow Recordings, which released its latest CD, Trouble.

The band performed the title track, a rock-solid zydeco-blues number, and another song entitled It's So Hard To Stop for CBS News Saturday Morning's "Second Cup Café" segment.

The band's journey actually started more than 20 years ago. Leader Stanley "Buckwheat" Dural Jr. was born in 1947 in Lafayette, Louisiana, a close-knit community where many people expressed their Creole heritage by playing and dancing to zydeco. (Zydeco is the French Louisiana name for a musical style that combines French dance melodies with Caribbean influences and the blues. It's played by small groups featuring the guitar, an accordion and a washboard.)

The son of a zydeco accordionist, Dural began his professional career as an r&b sideman, playing keyboards. In 1971, Dural began leading his own r&b band, Buckwheat & the Hitchhikers.

By the mid-'70s, south Louisiana began to experience a grass-roots cultural renaissance as zydeco and Cajun music, once scorned as overly ethnic, gained appreciation as treasured cultural resources. As the demand grew for zydeco bands, Dural was offered a gig playing organ for the "King of Zydeco," the late Clifton Chenier.

After three years of touring, recording and accordion apprenticeship, Dural left in 1979 to lead his own group. Like Chenier, Buckwheat continued to blend traditional Creole zydeco with the latest black-contemporary styles, drawing on all of his rich and varied musical experience.

Twenty years later, Dural told Saturday Morning, "zydeco music is energetic music" and Buckwheat Zydeco continues to be one of the most popular zydeco bands in the world.

For more information on Buckwheat Zydeco, visit its Web site at www.buckwheatzydeco.com. (Click here for tour dates.)

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