La LOUISIANE, Fall 1995

The Magazine of the University of Southwestern Louisiana

Those Mysterious Green Beans

by Sarah Spell-Johnson

In French, green beans are les haricots.  The two words are connected with a "z" sound since the "h' is not pronounced.  So, les haricots sounds a lot like. ..zydeco.  According to Dr. Barry Ancelet, this is no coincidence.

Zydeco music, he explained, takes its name from the common musical complaint, les haricots sont pas salé--the beans aren't salty.  In fact, the title of zydeco king Clifton Chenier's trademark song, "Zydeco est pas salé," expressed just that sentiment.

Ancelet was curious about why references to bland beans cropped up so frequently in traditional Creole music in choruses and refrains that seemingly had little to do with the songs' topics.

He begin listening to and studying The Lomax Collection, which includes some early Creole, as well as Cajun, music.

These eleven reels of tape were, for me, easily the most important sounds I ever heard in terms of understanding where Cajun--and zydeco--music came from," said Ancelet.   "When I heard (the tapes), all of a sudden all kinds of things became clear.   It was the first time we had ever heard juré."

Juré is an African-influenced tradition of lively songs accompanied by improvised percussion "instruments" -- clapping hands, stamping feet, and spoons raked across corrugated washboards.  It developed among slaves during the pre-Civil War period, and is the basis not only of zydeco music, but of African-American spirituals or "shouts" as well.

And what did juré singers ding about?  Beans.

Ancelet picked up an important clue to this mystery in 1980, when Pierre LaSelve, a French ethnomusicologist, visited him.  LaSelve brought with him folk recordings from islands in the Indian Ocean.  Ancelet began to play one of the tapes.

"This is what I heard: 'Cari zydeco.'  And I asked myself, 'What are people in the Indian Ocean doing singing about zydeco?'" Ancelet said.

He learned from LaSelve that singing about beans is part of a musical tradition called "sége zarico" which exists on several Creole-speaking islands in the Indian Ocean.  The traditional dance associated with this music re-enacts the planting of beans.  A woman walking backward pretends to make a hole with her heel by stamping on the floor and a man walking toward her places an imaginary seed in the hole and covers it with his foot.

Ancelet saw an "obvious connection between beans and dance, harvest and courtship rituals among Indian Ocean Creoles."

He consulted linguistic dictionaries and found words similar to "zydeco" in the languages of Western Africa, especially in regions from which slaves were brought to both the Indian Ocean and to Louisiana.

It became clear to Ancelet that references to unsalted beans in zydeco music are often made by a singer lamenting hard times--or a romance that's lost its flavor.

If not for Ancelet's diligent research, and a little luck, unsalted beans might have remained an integral, if misunderstood, component of Creole music.