Bayou squeezebox in the Bay Area is the main theme of Mark F. DeWitt's ethnographic study Cajun and Zydeco Dance Music in Northern California: Modern Pleasures in a Postmodern World. With this publication, DeWitt adds to a growing body of academic writing featuring the accordion and the moves it inspires on the dance floor.Footnote ¹ Most closely aligned with historiographical music ethnographies such as those by Susan Gedutis and Peter Manuel, DeWitt's study focuses on the relationship among music, movement, and identity.Footnote ² Participatory art forms such as social dance may be the ideal laboratory for such experiments, and DeWitt gives us a valuable perspective on a unique and fascinating scene.

The ethnographic interviews that constitute the core of this study were all conducted with musicians and dancers who either migrated from “Cajun country” as children or adults, were born in California to Louisiana migrant families, or learned the music and dance in California despite a non-Louisianan background. DeWitt sets up his exploration of Cajun and zydeco music in chapter 1 with an insightful deconstruction of Mary Chapin Carpenter's hit song “Down at the Twist and Shout” as performed by the Grammy-winning Cajun band Beausoleil. DeWitt uses the song and reactions to it from both Louisianans and “Northerners” as a way to introduce many of the themes that he explores throughout the study: the problematic insider-outsider dichotomy; notions of authenticity; the intersections between migrant communities and folk revivalists; and, most significantly, the historical trajectory of Cajun and Creole music making in the United States.

DeWitt is clearly as interested in writing an alternate, migratory history of Louisiana French music as he is in engaging with the specific experiences of Cajun and zydeco music and dance enthusiasts in Northern California. To him, “the unique value and interest of the northern California scene . . . [is] twofold. One aspect is the significance of some of the individuals involved to the history of Louisiana French music as a whole. . . . The second aspect of the scene's uniqueness is its setting in northern California” (243). Although all his subjects and interviewees share a common connection to the San Francisco Bay Area, DeWitt's narrative is not entirely focused on Northern California. His most passionate, urgent, and eloquent writing is concentrated in chapter 2, “Identity Issues, Research Methods, and Ethnography,” and revolves around the discrimination and segregation along racial, linguistic, and socioeconomic lines historically faced by Cajuns (white Francophones) and Creoles (mixed-race Francophones) in Louisiana. Indeed, in his analysis of interviews with Louisiana-born musicians and dancers, DeWitt consistently returns to their lives before leaving Louisiana, examining how their attitudes and musical practices evolved once they found themselves in their new environment. DeWitt is particularly concerned with demonstrating how the historical narrative that emerges through these life histories supports an anti-essentialist conception of identity that directly combats the discriminatory attitudes that many of these Cajun and Creole musicians face.

Another, and related, theme of the book, concerns the ongoing dialogue among practitioners about musical, social, and stylistic authenticity and separation: “[To] make much over who or what is Cajun and who or what is Creole is to revert to an essentialist view of identity that reinscribes racism, among other things. I find that splitting hairs over whether a particular musical performance should be considered Cajun music or zydeco to be equally futile, and for the same reasons” (246–47). Curiously, the inverse of this sentiment is expressed by the subtitle of the book, “Modern Pleasures in a Postmodern World.” These “modern pleasures,” DeWitt tells us, are precisely those that “are to be taken in modern, essentialist views of identity,” pleasures indulged in by those (presumably non-Louisianan) Cajun and Creole dance and music enthusiasts who seek to “maintain the notion of a permanent and continuing identity while living in modern society where ways of life change at an ever-accelerating rate” (24–25). I say “presumably non-Louisianan” because DeWitt never specifically ties this interesting theoretical thread to anyone in particular. I assume that he means the profiled Californians who came to Cajun and zydeco music through chance musical encounters or through involvement with folk dance clubs such as Berkeley's famous Ashkenaz, because he generally portrays them as having adopted their participation in Louisiana French music and dance as a lifestyle choice. I wonder if he means to associate these “modern pleasures” with his Louisianan interlocutors at all, as the Cajun and Creole musicians and dancers are almost universally shown to be sophisticated cultural critics, suspicious of these very essentialist notions and acutely aware and accepting of their hybrid identities.

This question points to the book's main weakness: although it is ethnographically rich, it is analytically uneven. Chapter 3, “Music, Dance, and Social Capital,” introduces the theoretical structure of the study, primarily built on sociologist Robert Putnam's notion of social capital and the distinction between “bonding,” which “allows individuals to get by,” and “bridging,” which “allows them to get ahead” (44). Although DeWitt aptly suggests how these concepts could be applied to music and dance communities in general and how they have historically functioned in Cajun and Creole communities, the idea disappears for the next five chapters, resurfacing only in his general remarks in the book's concluding pages. “There seems to be a happy medium between an extreme of bonding social capital, where group membership is closed and hostile attitudes toward outsiders develop, and a watered-down bridging situation where ties are so weak and trust among actors so low that group action becomes impossible. So far the northern California dance scene has managed to find such a middle ground” (241).

I suspect that some of this lack of theoretical coherence can be blamed on an awkward transition from a denser doctoral dissertation to a leaner book manuscript. There are some examples of slipshod editing, such as the occasional reference to a quote that has not yet occurred, and DeWitt's practice of using only one endnote number per paragraph is sometimes confusing.

The bulk of DeWitt's study—chapters 4 through 8—is taken up by profiles of musicians and dancers and discussion of how their stories work together to form a coherent narrative related to each chapter's main theme. The book's greatest strength is DeWitt's skill at telling individual stories and tying them into the larger historical narrative. As in any ethnography worth its weight, some of the most eloquent interpretations of the meaning of Cajun and zydeco music and dance come from DeWitt's informants, and he has a talent for summarizing these tales in a meaningful way: “Dana DeSimone said that dancing saved his life, Delilah Lewis said with some irony that the fiddle ‘ruined’ her life, and I think they were both pointing to the same thing, [another informant's] ‘pathways for our own emotions and lives’” (245).

Despite many tantalizing quotes and intriguing reflections from dancers, dance teachers, and DeWitt's own dancing experiences, there is a regrettable lack of engagement in DeWitt's book with the bodily, phenomenal experience of dancing. DeWitt gives us little idea of the feeling of Cajun or zydeco dancing, what the dances look like, or how they differ. For that matter, he doesn't tell us much about what the music sounds like: there are only two short transcriptions, and there is no CD or curated website accompanying the book.

I believe that the enduring value of Cajun and Zydeco Dance Music in Northern California will be twofold: as an ethnographic history of Louisiana Cajun and zydeco music and dance in a migratory context; and as a snapshot in time and place, a collection of memories and thoughts by Louisiana migrants and their Californian friends and neighbors about the music and dance that brought them together. From a scholarly and humanistic point of view, the venture is a worthy one; but those in search of a study that combines rich ethnography with profound theoretical and analytical insight may wish to give this book a thorough squeeze, then roll on elsewhere.