Betty LeBlanc
Betty LeBlanc at the 23 Club in Brisbane. Photo by John Noltner.
The daughter of a laborer, Betty LeBlanc grew up in Lafayette, Louisiana, where Sundays were devoted to three things: church, food, and dancing. “Church was No. 1,” she recalls—and afterward her neighbors would host outdoor meals at their homes. “I remember dancing,” she says. “My mom used to tell me, ‘Come on in the house now.’ And I said, ‘No, no, no, Mom. I got one more dance to do.’ And I would just dance the night away.”
LeBlanc moved to San Francisco in 1960. There she found a thriving Creole culture of house parties, social clubs, and church dances where French was spoken and jambalaya was always ready to be dished out. LeBlanc has made her own mark on the scene by organizing Sunday afternoon zydeco dances at the 23 Club, an old cowboy bar in Brisbane, California. In this clip, she talks about the meaning of the word “Creole,” and how it has evolved over the years.
Butch Hebert
Butch Hebert at the No Name Ranch. Photo by John Noltner.
Butch Hebert is part of a rich and little-known tradition of Creole and African-American cowboys. His Louisiana ancestors experienced the terror of the Jim Crow era: one great-grandfather was lynched, and a grandfather was kidnapped and illegally enslaved. The latter escaped and joined his brother in California, where he started his own cab company.
A fan of Roy Rogers when he was a child, Hebert also noticed there were no Black cowboys in popular culture. In his twenties, he met Black cowboys in real life—and decided to become one himself. “I went whole hog into it,” he says, living in a tack room for six months as he studied how to handle horses. Over the past 35 years, he says, cowboying has taught him responsibility, patience, and fearlessless. In this outtake, Hebert talks about the intimate ways that a man and his horse communicate. Six months after our interview, his horse Cheyenne passed away.
Charlmaigne Chavez-Thibodeaux
Charlmaigne Thibodeaux at her home in San Bruno. Photo by John Noltner.
Charlmaigne Chavez-Thibodeaux recalls a Louisiana childhood filled with lalas (Creole music dances) and boucheries (hog-slaughter parties). “Everybody would get together and make cracklings, sauce piquantes, couvillions—anything you could think of with a pig,” she says. “And boudin. And hoghead cheese. Somebody would always bring an accordion or a fiddle or a combination, and we would listen to them play music.” In 1966, when she was a teenager, she and her family moved to the Bay Area, where they reconnected with fellow Creoles at church dances and social clubs. Her parents also held parties in their basement—at the same house where Chavez-Thibodeaux lives today.
Chavez-Thibodeaux is a great lover of Creole cooking, which she has taught at the Augusta Heritage Center of Davis & Elkins College in West Virginia. In this outtake, she talks about cooking for Danny Poullard, the accordionist who performed at many early church dances and who taught a new generation of musicians at his garage jam sessions.
Charlotte Lane
Charlotte Lane in her home in Crockett. Photo by John Noltner.
Charlotte Lane is a first-generation Creole Californian. Her mother migrated from Louisiana in the 1950s, and Lane grew up in San Francisco’s Fillmore district. “Every weekend, our house was the house to be at,” she says. “There was plenty of cooking going on, laughing, and they’d sit there and play dominos, cards, Pokeno—old games that they played back in the country.” Throughout her life, Lane has maintained her love for French Louisiana food and music. She now lives in Crockett, California with washboard player R. C. Carrier. In this outtake, she recalls the gatherings of Creole friends and neighbors from her childhood.
Dana DeSimone
Dana DeSimone at the Eagles Club in Alameda. Photo by John Noltner.
Dana DeSimone’s Friday night dances are some of the most popular events in the Northern California zydeco and Cajun music scene. DeSimone frequently packs Eagles Hall, an old fraternal lodge in Alameda that hosts dances every week of the year. Not only does he organize the gatherings; he also teaches zydeco steps to the newcomers who attend. Eagles Hall is one of the most enduring institutions in the Bay Area’s Louisiana music scene: Over more than 16 years, Eagles Hall has booked just about every band in the region as well as many visiting musicians from Louisiana.
Born in San Francisco to an Irish-Italian working-class family, DeSimone studied a variety of folk-dance styles: Greek, Balkan, clogging, salsa, merengue, country-western, and even belly dancing. He traveled to Southern Appalachia several times to study clogging, and served as artistic director for a local clogging group called the Cornmashers. He performed solo at festivals too. In this outtake, he explains how Louisiana music caught his attention—and bailed him out of a rough time.
Lance Henry & Lisa Mitchell
Lisa Mitchell and Lance Henry are zydeco dance partners and instructors. Photo by John Noltner.
Search online for California zydeco videos and you’ll inevitably stumble upon the smooth moves of dance partners Lisa Mitchell and Lance Henry. The duo came to zydeco separately and have been dancing together for three years. It fills their lives: The weekend before our interview, they had each danced for 13 hours at events around the Bay Area.
Mitchell discovered zydeco at an outdoor concert about 12 years ago; she was hooked after the very first song. Henry, whose mother is Creole, grew up hearing the accordion music of Queen Ida. He preferred jazz as an youngster but awoke to the joyfulness of zydeco at Ardenwood, a California festival, when he was 17. (He still attends.) In this clip, they talk about the emotional power of the dance—and recall one particularly crowd-wowing moment.
Lena Pitre
Lena Pitre holding a picture of her grandson Andre Thierry. Photo by Barry Yeoman.
Known universally as Mama Lena, 82-year-old Lena Pitre is considered the matriarch of Northern California’s Creole community. Raised in Soileau, Louisiana, Pitre recalls a childhood of poverty and hard work, but nonetheless one filled with music, dance, and “good times.” In the 1960s, she moved to the Bay Area—her husband Houston worked in construction, and there were more job opportunities out West. Shortly after their arrival, the couple began organizing the dances at St. Mark’s Catholic Church in Richmond. On the days surrounding the dances, they hosted jam sessions in their back yard featuring visiting performers from Louisiana.
Pitre is the grandmother of two young zydeco musicians: washboard player Jason Thierry and accordion player Andre Thierry. In this clip, she recounts the hardships of life in the country—and describes the rules that young men followed at the zydeco dances of her childhood.
Linda Francis
Linda Francis, a zydeco dance instructor, in the California hills near her home in Pinole. Photo by John Noltner.
Linda Francis has done ballroom, square dancing, and country-western dancing, but it wasn’t until 1998 that she first heard zydeco. She and a friend were at a festival in Mountain View, California, when they saw the Louisiana band Geno Delafose & French Rockin’ Boogie. “We were just bouncing around, loving the music,” she recalls. “We looked at each other and said, ‘Wow, what is this?’”
Soon afterward, with a friend’s encouragement, Francis began taking zydeco dance lessons and attending the popular dances at Eagles Hall in Alameda, Ashkenaz in Berkeley, and the 23 Club in Brisbane. “It’s hard to be depressed when you’re listening to zydeco music,” she says. “No matter how hard the week is, when we go dancing Friday night, it’s like the cares are just lifted away.” Before long, she was attending several zydeco and Cajun-music dances a week. Now she teaches the dance professionally. In this outtake, she explains how she made the leap from casual dancer to instructor.
Ray Stevens
Ray Stevens at his home in Berkeley. Photo by John Noltner.
Ray Stevens knew from a young age that his future didn’t lie in the rice fields of Louisiana. He joined the Navy as a teenager, but found the military to be rigidly segregated. “You had to refer to all white people as Mister,” he says. “I didn’t like that either. There was some rebellion going on among the Blacks in the Navy in World War II. I got close the radicals, which attracted me as a young man. They discharged all 150 of us in one day.” Afterward, he moved to Michigan to work in automobile manufacturing. When he returned to Lake Charles for a family visit in 1944, a racist police officer chased him out of town. Stevens caught a train to Oakland and has lived in the Bay Area ever since. He worked at the Naval Supply Center for 35 years.
Stevens danced to zydeco for more than 75 years. He is a treasured member of the Louisiana Creole community, but considers himself Black rather than Creole. He believes the word “Creole” has been used to divide light-skinned Blacks from dark-skinned ones like himself. In this clip, he explains how zydeco developed its rhythm—and why “everything on the hog is good.”
Warren Semien
Warren and Peggy Semien in their home in San Francisco. Photo by Barry Yeoman.
Like many Creole migrants, Warren Semien made a two-hop migration: first from Lebeau, Louisiana to Port Arthur, Texas, and then to San Francisco, where his grandfather and other relatives lived. He moved into Bayview-Hunters Point, a neighborhood filled with former Louisianans, and found satisfying work with an airline. Later he took a job with the San Francisco Municipal Railway transit system, from which he retired.
Arriving in California in 1966, Semien was happy to find a thriving zydeco culture in the Bay Area’s Catholic churches. “The glue was through the church,” he says—it was the primary institution that kept Creoles together. Considering zydeco “sacred,” he has worked to maintain the church-dance tradition in his adopted city. Once or twice a year, Semien organizes a fundraising dance at St. Paul of the Shipwreck Catholic Church in San Francisco. In this outtake, he talks about the racial climate in the Louisiana he left behind and describes his career in California with the airline.
Note: These bios were accurate in January 2012. Ray Stevens died in 2024.
