INTERVIEW: Waylon Thibodeaux brings his rock-infused fiddle playing to French Quarter Fest

With his eyes closed and head slightly turn toward the sky, Waylon Thibodeaux holds his fiddle with an effortlessness that speaks to his years of playing and mastering the traditional instrument. He’s a professional through and through.

The musician has been enlivening the sounds of Cajun music for years, and there’s no signs of stopping. Thibodeaux and his band are set to play the Chevron Cajun/Zydeco Showcase at 2 p.m. Thursday, April 6 at the French Quarter Festival in New Orleans.

“My Cajun music isn’t really hardcore traditional, and the zydeco music that I do, that’s all blended in together,” Thibodeaux said recently in a phone interview. “I do a little bit of swamp pop because where we lived at down in Houma, [Louisiana,] the accordion wasn’t really prevalent in the Cajun music, and we had more people singing like country music but in French. So that was all part of my growing up is listening to that.”

Thibodeaux and his family lived close enough to New Orleans that the Crescent City also influenced his style. He would hear the jazz musicians of the great metropolitan area, and those sounds creeped into his music. In many ways, his style is a gumbo of influences, and fans can check out the tunes on his recordings, which include Papa Thibodeaux, In Jackson Square and Tu Me Fais Crier!, among others.

There’s one more ingredient that the fiddler would like to add to his recipe: blues music.

“Well, I’ve started a blues project that I’m very interested in completing,” he said. “I thought that maybe I’d do some blues and explore that genre a little bit and add some fiddle that people haven’t heard a lot of in some blues music, so I started an album probably about a year ago or so. And I’m looking to complete that hopefully this year, and that will give a little something different for everyone.”

Thibodeaux grew up in a household that valued the art of music. His mother and father loved to dance at fairs, festivals and weddings, and a young Thibodeaux would sit nearby and watch the musicians bringing the tunes to life. At first, he became interested in the drums, but then later he heard a fiddle player by the name of Johnny Gimble from Texas.

“He’s a western swing fiddle player, and I just fell in love with the fiddle,” he said. “I asked my parents to get me a fiddle, and they did. So I was able to learn the fiddle.”

He instantly took to the instrument and became a young phenom. There were many recognitions over the years, including being named Louisiana’s state fiddle champion at age 16. “That was great,” he said. “One of the prizes was to be able to perform at the World’s Fair in 1984 in New Orleans, so I was able to do a week’s worth of concerts there at the World’s Fair.”

In the intervening years, Thibodeaux made the rounds of New Orleans venues. In fact, he played Bourbon Street for 27 years and was able to have his music exposed to a cross-section of tourists from around the country and around the world.

“I still have people come all the time from other states and from other countries asking me if I am going to be down on Bourbon Street performing, and I quit playing Bourbon Street about four years ago because it was just so hard after a while,” he said. “I just needed to take a break from that. Well, just recently in the last month or so, a friend of mine asked me to go help him out on Bourbon Street, so I started playing a little bit more on Bourbon Street there the last couple of months. And that’s been a lot of fun, and I’ve been putting the word out that I’m on Bourbon Street a little bit now. And people still come to find us.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Waylon Thibodeaux will play the Chevron Cajun/Zydeco Showcase 2 p.m. Thursday, April 6 at the French Quarter Fest in New Orleans. Click here for more information.