Totally Shuffled Day 81/366 Boozoo Chavais-Paper In My Shoes-extract

Boozoo Chavais-Paper In My Shoes-Folk Star single

What a bloke Boozoo Chavais was. He was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana in 1931 and died in 2001 in Austin, Texas. He is considered one of the greatest zydeco players of all time, but prior to taking up his instrument, he was a horse trainer and, as a teenager, a successful jockey. When he started playing the accordion he became very popular, very quickly. This was possibly helped by a flamboyant stage presence. Boozoo was not his real name, not even Americans would lumber a baby with that name. His real name was Wilson Anthony Chavais. Anyway, Boozoo (let’s stick with that) was so exuberant when playing on stage that he always wore a plastic butchers apron to prevent the copious amounts of sweat he produced ruining his beloved accordion. He wrote many zydeco songs that became classics and used to tell his bands not to bother if the songs didn’t sound quite right. “If it’s wrong, do it wrong, with me. If I’m wrong, you wrong too!” Maybe more musicians should take a leaf out of Boozoo’s book.

“Paper in My Shoes” was originally released as a single in 1955 and was his first single and a massive hit at the time. It sold over 135,000 copies in the U.S.-roughly equivalent to 6 million today. I can’t make out what Boozoo is singing on this except for the repeated assertion that he’s got some paper in his shoes. He sounds quite happy about that, so I do think it’s the 1955 equivalent of having to wear odor-eaters. Some of the song is sung in French/Creole, so it’s a mystery to me. He does helpfully keep switching into English though, so the question “what’s your momma gonna do?” is asked, as well as the assurance of “but don’t you worry about your baby”. These two phrases are fairly generic I guess, but they may have some more specific relevance in the context of having paper in your shoes. I love the fact that Boozoo sings in more than one language, and seemingly at random during this track. It’s not as if the verses are in French and the chorus is in English, it seems to be as the feeling takes him. It would be like the Manic Street Preachers singing in both Welsh and English within one song and it getting to number one in the charts as well.

(After digging around the wonder that is the internet, wearing paper in your shoes is, in relation to the cultural norms of Cajun tradition existing in 1955, something to do with voodoo rather than bad feet. It’s a sort of charm. Women used to write the name of who they wished to entrance on slips of violet paper and place it in their shoes with a dab of love potion, just to be doubly sure. Alternatively, if there was someone you wished to have power and dominance over, then again, writing their names on paper and walking around with it in your loafers usually did the trick).  

This writing is extracted from "Totally Shuffled -A Year of Listening to Music on a Broken iPod" - you can get/see it here;

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00CJYZ3CA