Accordionist, singer and bandleader Buckwheat Zydeco Jr. comes by his mastery of south Louisiana dance music both naturally and as a result of hard work that started early. He is the son and grandson of zydeco accordion players, and his son plays rub-board, as he himself did in his late, great father’s band.

 

The original Buckwheat Zydeco played keyboards with Clifton Chenier who was to zydeco what Muddy Waters was to the blues. Buckwheat shifted to accordion with his own Ils Sont Partis (“they’re off!”) band.

 

Buckwheat Jr. learned from both his father and Chenier, a neighbor in Lafayette, and was touring with his father by 17. The New York Times hailed Buckwheat Zydeco & the seven-piece Ils Sont Partis band as ‘one of the best bands in America. A down-home and high-powered celebration, meaty and muscular with a fine-tuned sense of dynamics…propulsive rhythms, incendiary performances.”

 

Inheriting the band from his late father (RIP, aged 68), Buckwheat Jr. continues his father’s Grammy-winning, party-down ways. Buckwheat won the 2010 Grammy for Best Zydeco or Cajun Music Album; Buckwheat Jr. won the 2024 Grammy for Best Regional Roots Music Album.

 

Buckwheat Jr. explained (before a show at the Smith Center in Las Vegas),  “Zydeco is Creole music – Black, traditional Creole music from Southwest Louisiana, played with accordion, washboard, guitar, bass, drums and horns.”

 

He also explained, “My dad used to say, ‘Just be you and make people happy,’ and that’s what I’ve been doing. It doesn’t matter if I’m in Lafayette, Louisiana, or Switzerland or Brazil, there’s something about the accordion … When I get up there, I play the music and people are gonna dance and have a good time.”

 

Buckwheat Zydeco Jr. plays the piano accordion, like his father, grandfather and neighbor Clifton Chenier, while his son Kyle Anthony Dural plays rub-board, a corrugated metal panel worn on the chest and scratched with thimble fingertips to pump out high-pitched beats.