App Summer Hosts Buckwheat Zydeco Saturday

Louisiana’s own Buckwheat Zydeco will return to An Appalachian Summer Festival this Saturday, July 11, with a performance at Farthing Auditorium. The show starts at 8:00 p.m.

An Appalachian Summer Festival brings the Bayou back to Boone with Buckwheat Zydeco’s return performance to the festival stage at ASU’s Farthing Auditorium on Saturday, July 11, at 8:00 p.m. This performance is a SkyBest Mainstage Series event on the Schaefer Popular Series, with additional sponsorship provided by McDonald’s of Boone.

Buckwheat Zydeco’s trailblazing sound incorporates soul, blues and southwestern Louisiana’s Creole French zydeco music. The band comes from a land of rich cultures and heady influences, and they’ve taken their music to an unprecedented and ever-expanding number of international venues. Proud to be one of these venues, An Appalachian Summer Festival first presented Buckwheat Zydeco in 2006 and welcomes the band back to its stage for the festival’s 25th anniversary season.

Hailing from Lafayette, La., Stanley “Buckwheat” Dural Jr. describes his hometown as “a close-knit community where many black people express their Creole heritage by speaking French, and by playing and dancing to zydeco.” This hybrid genre blends Afro-Caribbean rhythms with blues, soul, rock, country and the French-rooted Cajun music of the Creoles’ white neighbors. The son of a zydeco accordionist, Buckwheat grew up steeped in this culture, absorbing Lafayette’s prodigious output of blues and Gulf Coast “swamp pop.” His stellar career spans decades of critical acclaim, and he has headlined major venues, collaborated with a who’s who of musicians from Eric Clapton to Mavis Staples, and made numerous television appearances, including The Late Show with David Letterman and NBC’s Today show. He was the first zydeco artist signed to a major record label, the first to perform on a national television show, first to launch his own record label, and the first zydeco artist to win an Emmy award. His latest release, Jackpot, was well received by critics and fans alike.

Buckwheat began his professional career as an r&b sideman until 1971 when he began leading his own r&b band, Buckwheat and the Hitch-hikers, playing the contemporary sounds of popular bands as Parliament Funkadelic and Earth, Wind & Fire.  The group scored a regional hit with “It’s Hard to Get.”

By the mid-70s, zydeco and Cajun music experienced a grassroots cultural renaissance and gained appreciation as a treasured cultural resource. As demand grew, Dural was offered a gig playing organ and piano with the King of Zydeco himself, the late, great Clifton Chenier. After three years of touring, recording and accordion apprenticeship, he left in 1979 to lead his own group, Buckwheat Zydeco and the Ils Sont Partis Band. Like Chenier, Buckwheat has continued to blend traditional Creole zydeco with the latest black-contemporary styles, drawing on all of his rich and varied musical experience.

Buckwheat has toured constantly since 1987, headlining major venues, sharing the bill with Wynton Marsalis, Stevie Wonder, Faith Hill, Little Richard and Gloria Estefan and sharing the stage with U2, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Willie Nelson and Dwight Yoakam. He performed at both of President Clinton’s inaugurations and at the closing ceremonies of the Atlanta Summer Olympics.

Tickets for Buckwheat Zydeco are $25 for adults, $15 for ASU students, $16 for students ages 6 to 18 and $10 for kids 12 and under. The festival offers two flexible ticket passes: the “Pick 5” offers a 15 percent discount off of ticket purchases in multiples of five; the “Festival Pass” offers a 25 percent discount and priority seating for those who purchase a ticket to each performance.

For tickets or more information, call 828-262-4046 or click to www.appsummer.org.

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