the hum / By Bob Doran

Organic Gumbo

Queen Ida plays zydeco, plus back to school, and how to make money with music

(Aug. 21, 2008)  When Ida Guillory was growing up in Lake Charles, La., playing accordion was not considered ladylike. That didn’t stop Ida. She would eventually be crowned Queen of the Zydeco Accordion.

“Music — zydeco music — was in my family as long as I can remember. I had two uncles that played accordion and a cousin who played violin,” she told me when I called her at home in Daly City, south of San Francisco.

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After the family moved from Louisiana to Texas, Ida’s mother would continue to visit their old home in the bayou. “One time she brought back an accordion. She told my brothers, ‘I want you guys to keep the tradition, keep the music going.’ At that time the youngsters in Louisiana weren’t picking it up. Zydeco wasn’t cool. So she brought it home and gave it to the boys. When I was brought up, women didn’t play accordion. Violin and piano were fine, but not accordion — that was too masculine.”

But, after listening to her brother Al develop his chops on the squeezebox, she decided she’d try it out herself. “I borrowed his accordion and went down to the basement where no one could hear. At first I didn’t get it, but I kept trying.”

She didn’t really get into playing seriously until years later when her family left their Texas rice farm behind and relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area. They weren’t the only ones who’d come from Cajun country in East Texas and Louisiana. And when Ida married a Texan in 1950, they started having zydeco parties at home.

“We started with basement parties, then through word of mouth they got larger and larger, and finally we started renting a hall,” she recalled. “At that time I wasn’t playing much. My brother had a band, but I was still trying to learn.”

At some point she started taking a turn on the bandstand on a few songs. At one show, where a reporter happened to be in attendance for a piece on the Bay Area Creole culture, she was introduced, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, as “The Queen of Zydeco.” From the point when that was reported in the paper, she was “Queen” Ida.

In the ’70s, a resurgence of interest in traditional culture brought in new crowds and the band started playing the club circuit. They made a few records, even won a Grammy.

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