The Kingdom of Zydeco by Michael Tisserand

Author:Michael Tisserand [Tisserand, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61145-615-8
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2011-06-19T04:00:00+00:00

Sid Williams may have built a zydeco empire on Martin Luther King Drive, but the success of the Zydeco Cha Chas has also helped a third brother establish his domain in St. Martinville. Guitarist Dennis Paul Williams has performed with Nathan from the beginning, and he is also a painter who stores his works in six buildings along Port Street, not far from the family’s first home.

Dennis Williams’ work is exhibited in galleries around the world, and he recently contributed the official poster to Lafayette’s Festival International. He also has a portrait of fiddler Canray Fontenot currently hanging in El Sid O’s. A deeply religious man, he draws a clear connection between his work and his childhood experiences in St. Martinville. Most of his paintings depict females, he explains, because he believes that when he was a child the Virgin Mary healed him of congenital heart disease.

“I can remember when I was eight or nine, I asked Mama why she used to dress me in blue and white,” he says one afternoon in his St. Martinville home. “She told me that those were the colors of the Virgin Mary, and that one day the doctor had told her that I wasn’t going to make it. On that day she sold me to the saints.” He pulls out a purple rosary and places it on a table. “That day was the beginning of wisdom for me.”

Dennis was schooled in the lore of traditional remedies. As a child, he used to crawl under houses to gather dirt-daubers — mud wasp nests — for a local treater to use as medicine. He also began collecting pencil lead off the streets, and he first painted with twigs and thorns. He even invented his own method for keeping his watercolors free of roaches: mix them with Joy detergent. But he received little encouragement for his innovations. “We were all considered lower class — the troublemakers,” he explains. A teacher told him that art was no good for him, and kicked Dennis out of the program. He adds that support finally came, from professors at the University of Southwestern Louisiana.

Dennis plays both guitar and triangle for the Zydeco Cha Chas. “After our father died,” he says, “Sid made workaholics out of all of us.” Family relations are close, he says, and he remembers the months when his brother Nathan was hospitalized with his thyroid condition. “They tried to make me leave the hospital,” he says. “But I slept on the window ledge. I read in the Bible that you should anoint the sick with oil, so I went down to the gift store and got a bottle of baby oil, and I greased his head like a pig, and I prayed. And when the nurse came to see him, he was a different man.”

When he paints, Williams says, he listens to both zydeco and Handel’s Messiah. He admits that some people at his church criticize him for playing at clubs. “But when I’ve got my guitar, it’s a revival for me,” he says.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.