The Times- Picayune
New Orleans, LA - Friday May 02, 2003
by Keith O'Brien

Diggin' That Old New Sound: All fiddles and acoustics, Red Stick Ramblers have put new life into Cajun music, staying true to its long-held, 'timeless' traditions but injecting a fresh, frisky feeling

Of all the places where it could have begun, the young band playing old-time Cajun music found themselves here: between a Baskin-Robbins and a Roly Poly sandwich shop. Across a strip mall parking lot from a McDonald's, with one golden arch blinking toward black. Inside a converted daiquiri stand. In front of a bunch of college kids.
And they rocked the place.

Dave Remmetter, owner of Chelsea's Café in Baton Rouge, wasn't surprised. He had seen a few of the newly christened Red Stick Ramblers play before, at open-mike nights or with other bands like the Ramblers' predecessor, Brother Teresa. He knew they were talented, even if most of them were still going to school at Louisiana State University at the time, and he loved their sound.

It was Cajun, swing, hot jazz and gypsy. It was traditional, all fiddles and acoustic guitar, and Remmetter called it "timeless." Others called it a hard sell.

Glen Prejean, then the booking agent at the nearby Varsity Theatre, said even established Cajun and zydeco bands, such as BeauSoleil and Terrance Simien, couldn't draw well in Baton Rouge.

The kids wanted to rock. They wanted to hear the alternative songs on KLSU radio's playlist. They didn't know Django Reinhardt from Dewey Balfa. They wanted the new thing, and the Red Stick Ramblers were so last-century.

But somehow it worked. This straw-hat music, born on the bayous and played on hot nights on sagging porches by men now dead and gone, became a hit among the baseball cap crowd in the college town strip mall. It was old, but they called it fresh. Chelsea's booked them again and again. The Varsity Theatre did the same and Prejean soon found the Red Stick Ramblers were succeeding where other Cajun bands had failed.

"The first few times they played the Varsity, people were driving in from Lafayette and Eunice, friends of theirs," Prejean said. "People were driving in to hear these guys, which is kind of rare for local bands."

Maybe it was because the band's fiddler, Joel Savoy, 22, is the son of famous musicians, Marc and Ann Savoy.
"I'm sure that didn't hurt," admitted Josh Caffery, who plays mandolin and writes songs for the Ramblers.

But there was something else going on when the band hit the scene in Baton Rouge three years ago. Something about these young men playing songs from decades ago made the kids want to get up and dance -- made Cajun hip again -- and it had nothing to do with anyone's famous parents.

It had everything to do with the energy the Ramblers brought to the clubs in Baton Rouge and will bring today to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival for their 3:05 p.m. show on the Sheraton New Orleans Fais Do-Do stage.
It's the new old thing, and the kids dig it.

Cultural dreams

It was a library book and a worried mother who brought them together. Caffery found the book in the LSU library. "Cajun and Creole Music Makers," it was called in English, with the French translation -- "Musiciens cadiens et creoles" -- just below. He checked it out and devoured the stories inside about the great Cajun fiddler Dennis McGee, Michael Doucet of BeauSoleil and a man named Marc Savoy.

Savoy builds accordions outside of Eunice, but that's not what drew Caffery's attention. What interested him about Savoy was his love for Cajun music and local culture, and his work to keep both alive while other musicians were running off to make "cutesy, marketable music."

"The one who is not concerned with whether or not it's marketable is the one I call a traditional musician," Savoy said in the book. Then he ended the chapter talking about his dreams for his culture, his music and his children.

"I hope they can pass on to the next generation other things besides disco music. . . . I hope they will still remember some of the beautiful old Cajun ballads. . . . I hope they will remember that they are direct descendants of a strong people who came to a foreign land and developed the most powerful ethnic culture in America that withstood the test of time for 200 years until along came a generation who thought that the artificial turf on the other side of the fence was grass."

One morning, not long after reading Savoy's words, Caffery and fellow Brother Teresa band member Richard Burgess got into Caffery's pickup and drove to meet the man and hear the music that local musicians play on Saturdays at Savoy's place. Ann Savoy, Marc's wife and a talented musician in her own right, took notice of them. It was hard not to, she said.

They were young and, she decided, good looking. Clearly not from there and, perhaps most intriguing, they were asking her about Dennis McGee albums. Immediately, her thoughts turned to her son, Joel.

That fall, he had started school at LSU and his mother was worried that he wouldn't find people who liked the kind of music he liked -- and music, she said, was his life. Joel had grown up on it. In his mother's mind it's like he was always there, lying on the floor in his pajamas, coloring with crayons at the feet of legends picking away the old Cajun tunes. Later, he and his buddy Linzay Young even picked up fiddles and played along. They knew and loved McGee, labeled "the dean of Cajun fiddlers" in the book Caffery found in the library. McGee had even played at those Saturday morning jams.

"You know our house," Ann Savoy said. "All the great fiddlers came through. . . . All the great fiddlers would be around our house for parties." She gave Caffery and Burgess her son's phone number and then kept asking Joel, "Did those guys call you?"

They finally did, and Savoy went to check out Brother Teresa, Caffery's bluegrass band, playing over at Chelsea's. He had to stand outside and listen from the patio, being too young to get into the bar.

That old sound

Savoy joined the band and got older. Burgess and Caffery graduated and moved on. They got newspaper jobs in Lafayette, Brother Teresa disbanded and in its place Savoy, Young, drummer Glen Fields and guitarist Chas Justus filled time jamming together.

It might have gone on like that -- Savoy said he is happy playing "on the street for enough money to buy a pitcher of beer." But Justus, who admits he'd play with anyone if they agreed to drive him to practice, answered an ad placed by a bassist looking for a gig. Ricky Rees, at 34 the oldest of the bunch, joined the band for jam sessions and soon Caffery found himself back in Baton Rouge, standing in Chelsea's as his old band mates took to the stage under a new name: the Red Stick Ramblers.

Rees said they settled on the name because they wanted something that sounded old -- something like the Hackberry Ramblers, for example -- and also something that would say a little bit about who they are and where they're from, even if most of them hail from Eunice and Lafayette and Breaux Bridge, rather than Baton Rouge itself.

Then they made another decision. They would wear suits. They would look good. "Look slick and get chicks," Young joked. "For pride," Savoy said. Because that was the way it used to be and that was the way they wanted it to be again. They would be the answer to sloppy grunge and jam bands. The opposite of what Savoy's father had once bemoaned in that book. The opposite of "cutesy" and country pop songs and 20-minute jam songs framed around three chords.

That first night at Chelsea's, though, none of this mattered much. They just wanted to stretch out the 15 songs they knew and get through the night. They must have done something right. Prejean, the booking agent at the larger and nearby Varsity Theatre, said it wasn't long before he heard the people talking: "I saw the Ramblers last night. . . .They were great. . . .Place was packed."

He booked them.

"All of a sudden, it was hip," Prejean said. The band hit the festival circuit and released a CD in early 2002 filled with originals, traditionals and new arrangements of old songs. Local critics praised it. Local fans, in New Orleans at least, took a little longer to notice.

"I remember one of the first times we played in New Orleans," Caffery recalled. "The night before, we had played in Lafayette and had something like 375 people come out. We had just released our first CD. There was a huge crowd. It filled the Grant Street Dance Hall and we had a slammin' show.

"The next night, we played a little joint in New Orleans and two people came. Literally. Two people came. And we knew them. So we didn't make them pay."

These days, the Ramblers admit they're thinking bigger, thinking about reaching out to a wider audience. This summer, they say, they will launch the biggest tour of their lives, riding, all six of them, inside a Chevrolet Suburban from coast to coast.

"We're not trying to change the world or anything," Savoy said. Nor are the Ramblers leaving Louisiana to peer at the grass on the other side of the fence.

They know it's artificial turf, like Marc Savoy warned. They're just waiting for everyone else to take a closer look and figure it out for themselves.