When Wayne Toups first started playing music on stage, television still came to your house through an antenna, phones were attached to walls and had rotary dials, and Richard Nixon was still a viable politician.
Now, almost a half-century later, the Cajun music icon says he’s still learning new tricks. “I’ve continued to progress, and I’ve continued to be innovative,” he said between sips of coffee at a café in Lafayette, Louisiana’s River Ranch neighborhood. “I’ve got a wonderful band. We sound the same as we did 30 years ago, maybe a little better. But we’ve learned some things.” They’ve learned their strengths and weaknesses. “I can’t play traditional like Steve Riley or Marc Savoy,” Toups said. “I’m built to play accordion more bluesy, with more rock edge, like where the saxophone or the second lead guitar would be.”
His accordion style developed at a time when Cajun music was virtually unknown outside a 100-mile radius of Lafayette and Clifton Chenier was still perfecting the hybrid that would become Zydeco with his Red Hot Band. “I first started learning to play accordion in 1972,” Toups said. “All my heroes in the Cajun tradition were like Iry LeJeune, Lawrence Walker, Aldous Roger, Belton Richard.”
Morphing the genre — adding elements of rhythm and blues, more “edge” (more aggressive playing), and heavier bass attack, was because of Richard’s influence. “Belton was the innovator,” Toups explained. “He showed me the light of what I could change if I wanted to change. He showed everybody the light.”
It was a break in playing professionally in the late 1970s that set him up to make a larger impact on the genre in the 1980s. After a half-dozen years working in Louisiana’s oilfields, the oil slump that hit the region in the early ‘80s pushed him back into performing. “When I got back into music in ‘83, I started developing a style of vocal, little more bluesier French,” Toups said. “It’s not that some of the old Cajuns didn’t have that blues, but they didn’t have the chord structure to follow it. That was the structure it was supposed to be back then.”
After a return to the stage with the band Cajun Creole, he formed Zydecajun in late 1985. Zydecajun, “was a Zydeco-Cajun infused, rhythm-and-blues, southern rock type of feel. The faster songs, we started playing with a little bit more edge.”
That, he said, garnered him an entirely new generation of listeners. “The younger generation, they got on it,” Toups said. “Now, I caught some flak from the traditionalists. The waltzes were fine, though. They enjoyed that because it had a little ‘hop’ to it.”
The pandemic has decimated Zydecajun’s nearly 100 gigs-a-year touring schedule. “A lot of bands aren’t working. Some guys, they are doing solo stuff. I can’t do that. That’s not how I was built. I’m built to be part of a band,” said.
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