MOVIE REVIEW : Going to the Roots of Cajun, Zydeco Music

Hard to believe that part of what we now think of as raw American country-roots music might have filtered down to us from France and Canada.

But as the ample use of English subtitles make clear in “I Went to the Dance,” an often-fascinating documentary on Louisiana’s Cajun and zydeco music playing today through Thursday at the Nuart, the French-speaking are indeed responsible for one of our most raucous and not-so-indigenous strains of music.

Cajun and zydeco have had an incalculable influence on country, Western swing, the blues, even rock ‘n’ roll. Amazingly, in pockets here and there the music (like the Cajun patois) survives in its unbastardized form, as well as in its many permutations, like the feverish rock-zydeco blend alchemized by Wayne Toups & the Zydecajuns seen near picture’s end. Film makers Les Blank (“Burden of Dreams”), Chris Strachwitz and Maureen Gosling have done an exhaustive job of finding both survivors of the pre-hillbilly music days and modern archivists and players.

Exhaustive, and perhaps a little exhausting too, at least for viewers not as dedicated to the subject. If “I Went to the Dance” has a failing, it might be in its concentration on the micro and not the macro, and in never quite convincing us how this music reflects this people’s relationship with the outside world, or how such regional purity can survive in the age of the global village.

Little matter. Musicologists will have a much better time with it than armchair anthropologists, relishing the ample explanations of just what it is in the eighth notes that makes Cajun music Cajun, or history lessons on why the accordion came to dominate the fiddle (the latter used to get drowned out by hand clapping in the pre-electric days), or demonstrations of the indestructibility of said accordion by a man standing on one in a (oops) manure-covered yard. Performance footage of the late Clifton Chenier and dozens of other leading lights past and present is equally invaluable.