The fact that Little Walter spoke French--because he grew up on the outskirts of Acadiana, the French-speaking part of Louisiana--is a fact that should be better known than it is.
He was born in Marksville, which is 60 miles northwest of Lafayette, Louisiana, where the Acadians settled when they migrated south from Canada. I spoke yesterday with a creole (black, French-speaking) colleague of mine at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. She's from Lafayette; I told her that my wife and I were going to visit the area for the first time in a few weeks to attend a celebration of Little Walter at the Acadiana Center in Lafayette. She said, "My uncle knew Little Walter. He used to bring him down to New Orleans to play concerts." Her cousin is Rockin' Dopsie. It's a tight-knit world down there.
In any case, Marksville is a small place and you'd think they'd be all about Little Walter. No! Here's a tourism link:
Is there even a plaque for LW in his own hometown? Seems like that should happen. I think I'll visit there on my way home and see what's going on.
Here's a YouTube video by a young woman who has lots to say about going to Marksville High School. This is creole talk:
My wife and I will be attending the LW celebration on Friday, March 9th at the Acadiana Center in Lafayette. James Cotton is headlining, and Henry Gray the pianist who played with LW, will be there. It's almost sold out:
It's amazing what you can find on YouTube. Here's a travelogue about the trip from Lafayette to Marksville:
And here, my friends, is something different! This is a clip from "Marc's Place," a local theatrical production in Marksville, that dramatizes Little Walter's part in the community's history. If this thread doesn't go viral, I don't know the dirty-south blues harp forum:
Itta Bena and Indianola still fight over B. B. King. The fact that somebody left a town at 12 means little when a town is looking to honor its native sons. When they fail to do that, in America, it's usually for one of two reasons: either the person achieved fame in an area that most locals aren't aware of or don't care about (i.e., blues harmonica players rank low on the totem pole next to football players); or it's about race--i.e., it's about a town not being interested in honoring the achievements of a black citizen. That second reason is less pertinent these days, but it was the main reason for for many decades why achievements such as LW's went unnoticed.
Last Edited by on Feb 18, 2012 8:31 PM
Which explains why he is buried in Cook County,Illinois.
"either the person achieved fame in an area that most locals aren't aware of or don't care about (i.e., blues harmonica players rank low on the totem pole next to football players)" Exactly-like I stated-he did not achieve fame in the place he was born.
Last Edited by on Feb 18, 2012 8:43 PM
In the Acadian communities in Louisiana the diatonic accordion is a big part of the musical culture, which is unusual in the US. The ten right-hand buttons on a diatonic accordion play just like the ten holes of a diatonic: same note layout and pressing on the bellows corresponds to exhaling while pulling corresponds to inhaling. No note bending, however, and you have the ability to switch different banks of reeds on and off to add high and low octaves and tremolo.
I've looked for the influence of Cajun diatonic accordion playing on Little Walter but haven't really come up with anything obvious.This despite statement by people who knew him early on that his playing as a youngster showed that influence.
If you listen to Acadian harmonica players such as Arteleus Mistric, Isom Fontenot, and Jerry Devillier, you hear a style that is unlike other American harmonica styles and is consistent among the three players.
I asked Jerry Devillier (who spent some time when he was younger playing with Fontenot) where he got his harmonica style and his answer was that he learned to play by trying to imitate what his father did on accordion. Jerry owns a diatonic accordion and can play it but I still hear a style that is uniquely a harmonica style, even after listening to all the early greats of Cajun accordion whose records would have been in circulation when Walter was growing up.
So while I too am fascinated by the French/Creole connection in Little Walter (he was also a Catholic who practiced his faith at least some of the time), I think that its expression in his mature output must be rather indirect.
@winslow: My black francophone colleague from Lafayette has a slightly more pronounced francophone edge to her English, but it's within spitting distance of this woman, who sounds nothing like the black Mississippians I've been listening to for the past decade. Marksville, according to my colleague, is right on the edge of Acadiana. So I'm hearing that, especially in the "d"s that she uses in place of "t"s. She's from a borderland.
This seems significant to me because I don't think Little Walter's francophone origins are particularly noticeable in the way he sings or talks on record, but then again, if we knew what to listen for and were actively listening for them, we might begin to hear them. I'll try to find the place in Honeyboy Edwards's autobiograpy where he talks about LW's "frenchy" talk.
Actually, here you go: on p. 197 of the Dirks/Glover bio of LW, the wife of pianist J.D. Nicholson is quoted as saying of Walter in 1959: "When he would go out to play, J.D. didn't always go with him and when Walter came home some nights he would holler for J.D. to take him upstairs because he couldn't walk too good. J.D. would carry him up to his room. He was high, stayed high. Just drinking whiskey, beer whatever and he would speak French! He'd get pretty high sometimes, but he was a good guy."
The Honeyboy quote is on p. 20 in Dirks/Glover:
"When he first came to Helena, you could hear he WAS a harp player. He had that Cajunly sound, that Louisiana thing. He come from Marksville; a lot of Frenchmen live there--he was a Frenchman himself, Creole, talked all that funny talk I couldn't understand. What I mean by Cajun style, [the] French would play the push-box [accordion], he played the harmonica with the style of that, that chromatic [harmonica] sound. On account of he's a Frenchman, he blow like that. But blues was the only style he liked, so that gave him a push off the other harp [style]. He was playing straight notes, mixing the shit quite a bit."
More research on this fascinating point is clearly needed.
Last Edited by on Feb 19, 2012 9:23 AM
I hate to reverse-hijack a thread that I started, but it was the four words I placed in the title that are what I hoped this thread would mostly turn out to be about: Little Walter spoke French. He was bilingual. For all the talk that has circulated around him on this forum--provoking some sort of dispute almost every day--that is a fact that has, to my knowledge,been almost entirely overlooked.
It wasn't overlooked in the Dirks/Glover bio, of course, but it's a fact that seems to have fallen by the wayside when people talk about the sources and nature of his genius. Yet the truth is that "other" languages--spoken, musical--often end up playing a role in innovation. Jack Kerouac's native language was joual, a French-Canadian dialect, and some scholars have traced his Joycean wordplay to that fact. Paul Butterfield played the flute, and that fact almost surely helped him think differently about the harmonica.
Little Walter was a migrant to Chicago; like most migrants, he put aside some of his earlier acculturation as he took on big-city attitudes. But as the first quote in Dirks/Glover suggests, childhood ways can come back in times of stress, or as people age. And as Honeyboy suggests, LW's approach to the harp may--I'll stress MAY, since Winslow doubts this--have incorporated some of the regional accordion sound.
I plan to ask my Creole colleague, who specializes in cultural studies of her people, to give me some more stories. And I promise that I'll visit Marksville on my way home from the Little Walter celebration in francophone Lafayette (85% of the population speaks French or is bilingual) and report on what I find.
Vive Petite Waltair!
Last Edited by on Feb 19, 2012 12:21 PM
I hear an accent in Little Walter' singing that isn't "American."
Years ago I knew a woman from Trinidad. She could speak standard English, but when she let down her guard, certain vowels would change and her w's would turn into v's. I occasionally hear something similar in Walter's singing. I don't hear that in the young woman from Marksville High, and this may be because Walter had a stronger grounding in the French-based patois o the region. Perhaps Creole speech is dying out in that area now and its influence has lessened.
Last Edited by on Feb 19, 2012 12:34 PM
-- Marion "Little Walter" Jacobs is widely considered the greatest blues harmonica player ever. A Creole who could speak French, he was born in Marksville, Louisiana in 1930. He took up the harmonica as a child, at first playing polkas and waltzes, and by the time he was 12 he was on his own, working the sidewalks and bars of New Orleans with his instrument. He had also discovered the music of John Lee Williamson, and modeled his early blues style on that of Williamson's.
I didn't hear much creole either, except for those d's, like "ovah deah" for "over there" I didn't know that was a creole thing but it makes sense. It definitely is a NOLA and South Louisiana thing.
Trinidad has an amazing amount of dialects for how small it is, and always has since the time of the sugar plantations, where blacks, asians, latinos, and east indians all worked side by side in the fields. ---------- Shane,
Something funny about all this. Websites mostly don't evoke the points discussed, but if they do:
-french websites claim that LW was under creole, cajun and accordion influences -american websites say that solely his own genius has been working. I assume that science could never prove anything, for the question is likely very subjective. Jazz influence is however confirmed.
"Le Bon Dieu met la main" : "The Good God puts his hand" (Never heard that expression, is it cajun ?).
Interesting that LW spoke french when he was high ; the possible influence of accordion is interesting too : I'd like to learn diatonic accordion myself.
Maybe a comparison could be made with Johnny Sansone's playing, as he plays both instruments.
Apparently a third of a million people in Louisiana speak a form of French (either colonial, Creole or Cajun French) today. The 2 administrative languages of Louisiana are English & French.
Cajun & Creole French speakers would appear to have quite different historical & cultural roots. None of this in itself means that Cajun accordian had no effect on LW (we can only go by what we hear in his recorded work) & but neither does it automatically link a French speaking Louisiana native to Cajun culture/roots. ---------- www.myspace.com/markburness
Last Edited by on Feb 21, 2012 8:24 AM
Yes, like SBW (I) twenty years earlier, I think. Little Walter loved bottles (but one at a time) and brawls. He died the morning after the fight, due to a clot in his brains; police reports read: natural causes of death! He died of a clot, but he was not one...
