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Comeaux replied simply, “Do it.” After the performance, Storm walked up to Landry. “He said, ‘I’ve never heard a woman sing that song before,’” Landry says. “And he kind of winked at me and he said, ‘You did it good.’” The next day, Landry brought Storm a copy of her most recent CD and invited him to lunch, and a friendship was born. When asked what she admires about Storm, Landry points to the way he can make any song his own, whether it’s blues, rock or coun- try. “There are no boundaries for Warren. He can do it all.” It’s an equally apt description of the remarkable career of Landry, who admits about South Louisiana music, “I love it all. I want to play it all. I want to express it all.” She grew up in a Cajun household in Breaux Bridge in the 1960s, at a time when the French language in South Louisiana was in danger of dying out. “My parents and all my relatives’ first language was French. When my parents went to school, they’d been punished for speaking French. So the only time they spoke it at home was when they didn’t want us kids to hear what they were saying.” Landry’s dad, a middle-school science teacher and school admin- istrator, had brought home a portable record player. But instead of Cajun recordings, the albums the Landry family spun were by the likes of Storm, Rod Bernard and Tommy McLain — some of the top names in a South Louisiana-born music style that eventually was dubbed “swamp pop.” A potent blend of homegrown Cajun and Creole music with rock and rhythm and blues stylings, swamp pop was most suc- cinctly described by saxophonist Harry Simoneaux as “half Domino and half fais do-do,” underscoring New Orleans pianist Fats Domi- no’s great influence on the sound. As a child, Landry did hear Cajun music on the radio. And she still remembers the day she heard an older man playing accordion at a neighborhood boucherie, after which she informed her mother that someday she’d play accordion, too. But the soundtrack to her teen years was swamp pop. “We would go to Pat’s Showboat,” she remembers. “It was a funky little bar with a kitchen in the back and a small wooden dance floor. And I used to go there when I was 16, and we’d dance to Warren, to T.K. Hulin and to Cookie and the Cupcakes.” Landry never imagined then that, one day, she’d perform the dance tunes she heard at Pat’s Showboat. Then she started playing bass with local bands the Lafayette Rhythm Devils and Bonsoir, Catin. “When I started playing music was when I connected with the Cajun side of me,” she now says. Her commitment to music deepened with her father’s cancer diag- nosis. She began writing songs to sing for him; when he died in 2009, she honored his wish that she record her own compositions. Her 2010 debut album, Should Have Known , was awarded OffBeat magazine’s “Best Country/Folk Album” that year. Her partnership with bandleader Roddie Romero, mean- while, grew from their shared love of swamp pop. One night, the pair duetted during a gig on the swamp pop classic “I’m Leaving It All Up to You” — a Billboard number-one hit for Dale & Grace in 1963 — and found their vocals were perfect matches. Their recording of it became a regional hit, leading to the release of Louisiana Lovin’ last year, a tribute to classic and lesser-known works heard through the years in Louisiana dancehalls and corner bars. (Coincidentally, Warren Storm played drums on that 1963 Dale & Grace hit — but then again, it quickly becomes apparent that Storm played on just about ev- ery swamp pop classic.) Along the way, Landry has also found time to author two chil- dren’s books — The Ghost Tree and Madame Grand Doigt — for

the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press (UL Press). In fact, as her friendship with Warren Storm deepened, the first project they discussed was a book, not a recording. “After we went out to lunch, when I dropped off Warren, I walked in and it’s like walking into a museum,” Landry remembers. “The walls are just filled with awards, and he goes into the closet and pulls out this big ol’ Tupperware bin and starts pulling out pictures of Elvis and Willie Nelson. He begins to tell me his story of when he was 21 and had a number one hit. I come home and I’m all excited and talking to my husband and he says, ‘I think I have a new project for you.’ I called UL Press the next day.” That was last June. Since then, they’ve been meeting every week for interviews, as Storm traces his career from being Warren Schexnider, son of a Cajun musician, to journeying to New Orleans with music legend Bobby Charles to hear rhythm and blues, to his swamp pop stardom. Landry hopes the book will be out in the fall. She isn’t yet sure when their recording will be released. Once they decided to go into the studio to record some of Storm’s classics, they decided they should replicate the method by which they were originally cut: straight to tape, no digital, no overdubs. “This music deserves to be recorded that way,” Landry says. “It has to have that gravelly sound that is real. When you record digitally you can tweak anything.” When she says “tweak,” she nearly spits out the word, as if it might leave a bad taste in her mouth. As for Storm’s response to the recording session? “It came out beautiful,” he says in a recent telephone interview. “Being able to play all this music and love it, that’s what keeps me going. And since I’ve been recording for 60 years, I’ve never had so much fun than I had on that day.” By Thursday evening, Yvette Landry and The Jukes are working a different gig, at Magdalen Square in Abbeville. A live oak canopy shades the square, and catkins form a golden shag rug around the statue of Père Antoine Désiré Mégret, the priest who in 1843 pur- chased this land to start a church. The center of Abbeville has the feel of a small European town, with a central square bordered by St. Mary Magdalen Church on one end and the circa 1937 Frank’s Theatre, which is being restored by funds including those raised tonight at Yvette Landry’s dance, on the other. Landry is here with her mom and her brother; later she’ll coax him to the stage, where he’ll sing a letter-perfect version of John- ny Cash’s “Ring of Fire.” Roddie Romero, Eric Adcock and Derek

56 MAY•JUNE 2019

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