ShareThisBy RICK MASSIMO
Sunday, October 15, 2006
Whether she's working alone or as part of a larger ensemble (the latter often including her husband, the matchless accordionist Marc Savoy), singer-guitarist Ann Savoy is one of the most tireless performers and historians of Cajun and American roots music.
Savoy is also part of The Magnolia Sisters, an all-female Cajun group that recently released "Rabbit Rabbit," a collection of Louisianan children's songs. The group, which includes Jane Vidrine, Tina Pilione, Lisa Trahan Reed and Christine Balfa, has three previous records to its credit. They are working on a new album due out this year.
She's also associate music producer for the upcoming movie "All the King's Men," which will feature a French jazz song by Ann Savoy and Her Sleepless Nights, which she describes as The Red Stick Ramblers along with her sons Joel and Wilson Savoy.
This year, Savoy and Linda Ronstadt put out their second record together, "Adieu False Heart," a lovely collection of songs by writers as diverse as Richard Thompson and Bill Monroe and a cover of The Left Banke's "Walk Away Renee."
Ann and Marc Savoy still play occasionally with longtime collaborator Michael Doucet, of Beausoleil, and are getting together a winter tour of Scotland.
And the Savoy Family Cajun Band (Ann, Wilson, Joel and Marc Savoy) are going into the studio next week to work on a new record too.
Is that all?
Ann Savoy laughs and says, "I'm that kind of person; I'm always inventing projects if there aren't any. . . . It's been a flurry, and it's been too much fun."
The plan is for the new family-band record to revive the tradition of Cajun treatments of popular songs, in this case music "more in the Ray Charles line," Savoy explains, featuring Wilson on the piano. "We want to show more of what we can do on this CD, because my boys have so many musical talents."
Playing in a family band, Savoy says, has its own rewards.
"It's extremely tight, because we've been playing music together since before they were born. They've been hearing this music since they were in the womb; it's a thing that's in their brains and in their hearts, the rhythm of us."
But while Savoy's children may have heard Cajun music in the womb, she didn't. She's not Cajun by birth, and she grew up in Richmond, Va.
She'd played music since she was 10 years old and was always interested in the roots of American music, though, and when she met Marc Savoy at the National Folk Festival at Wolf Trap, "it just struck a chord with me. . . . I basically fell in love with the whole culture, and married Marc."
Marc Savoy encouraged her to sing, and to learn Cajun-style guitar from the masters. "Marc was a well-known musician, and he said 'Come play with me,' and I loved the music, and it was just something that happened."
Soon she noticed that audiences wanted to know what the songs were about, so she wrote the landmark book "Cajun Music: A Reflection of a People," which included song lyrics and interviews with the early figures of Cajun music.
"I thought, 'Here's something that could be my life's work _ collecting these beautiful old songs and writing them down.' "
At the same time, Savoy says that "Adieu False Heart" was an important record to make, calling it "a vehicle for other roots music that I love. . . . I've come to a point in life where I want to speak all sides of my personality."
Two or three decades ago, Cajun music and culture were on the decline in Louisiana. But the resurgence that began thanks to the efforts of people such as the Savoys and Doucet is still growing, she says, particularly in Lafayette, La. "It's the young hub of Cajun music right now. And it's definitely a very, very vibrant scene now."
She says she sees second-generation players coming up now _ the children of the musicians who were on the scene in the '70s. "And they're making that scene rock. . . . It's suddenly become cool among the intellectual, arty crowd to play Cajun music. And that's a really new development."
Among the high society of Louisiana, she says, Cajun music is still considered a lower-class art form. "I don't know that that's ever going to change. . . . The Cajuns were basically rural people; it wasn't your high-society art crowd who played it. And it'll always be that. It's the music of tough, hardcore, hard-working people. And that's what it is, and if you change that it'll turn into something it isn't and never was intended to be."
