Born Wilson Anthony Chavis, the Louisiana musician stood among the earliest architects of zydeco, the regional blend of Cajun traditions and blues that took shape in the southwestern part of the state. His own 1954 composition “Paper in My Shoes” became the genre’s first commercial success, yet distrust of record companies led him to withdraw from both performing and recording for three decades. Speaking to the 1990 volume The New Folk Music, he recalled the episode in detail: “I got gypped out of my record. I get frustrated, sometimes. I love to play, but, when I get to thinking about 1955… They stole my record. They said that it only sold 150,000 copies. But, my cousin, who used to live in Boston, checked it out. It sold over a million copies. I was supposed to have a gold record.”
Once away from music he concentrated on breeding and training champion racehorses between Shreveport and Lafayette in Louisiana and Texas. Only in 1984 did he re-enter the studio, signing a five-year deal with Maison de Soul that yielded the albums Louisiana Zydeco Music, Boozoo Zydeco!, Zydeco Homebrew, and Zydeco Trail Ride. Keyboardist Terry Adams of NRBQ produced the 1997 release Hey, Do Right; the same group had already saluted Chavis with their 1989 track “Boozoo, That’s Who.”
Fronting his longtime group the Majic Sounds, he delivered widely noted sets at both the Newport Folk Festival and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. The New York Times described one such appearance: “(Chavis is) chaos on two feet. A little bullet of a man, he runs around onstage, shouting and yelling…(his) music can achieve a trancelike intensity.” Reviewing a Southwest Louisiana Zydeco Music Festival performance, Paul Scott observed, “There are a lot of Boozoo prototypes coming out. They may be smoother than Boozoo but they try to get his hard accordion; that rough, raw, style; and his sore throat type of singing. And with that single-note and triple-note accordion, he’s doing a lot to bring a return to basic zydeco.”
The son of tenant farmers, Chavis received his nickname in childhood. His mother supported the household by cleaning homes and selling barbecue at racetracks, eventually purchasing a three-acre parcel where the family settled in 1944. An accordion passed down from his father became his instrument; largely self-taught, he soon performed at local barn dances and at the club his mother opened, frequently joining Morris Chenier and sons Clifton and Cleveland onstage. In 1994 he appeared in Robert Mugge’s documentary video The Kingdom of Zydeco, and four years later he was inducted into the Zydeco Hall of Fame. He continued issuing recordings into the new century, releasing Johnnie Billy Goat in fall 2000. On May 5, 2001, complications from a heart attack suffered the previous month proved fatal.
