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(ZYE-dih-koh) Southern Louisiana dance music combining the blues, French dance tunes, and Carribean rhythms. This foot-stompin', washboard-scrapin', accordion-squeezin', fiddle sawing music may owe its name to beans -- or has-been beans, anyway. Zydeco supposedly stems from the Creole pronunciation of les haricots, or, in French, "the beans." The reason: this phrase appears frequently in one of the earliest and most popular zydeco songs, a refrain that goes, "Les haricots sont pas salé," or literally, "The beans aren't salty." "Well, yes, Mother, I know he's struggling financially at the moment, but he assures me that any day now he's going to get a big grant to produce a zydeco version of Bach's 'Mass in B Minor'."
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