"I like to whip up a little 'cowboy stew' when I'm home," Williams explains, "first I take me some onions, celery, bell pepper and cook that down with some little cut-up 'TABASCO' peppers and then I add my roux and seasoning and cook down some more. I throw in pig's feet, 'white' liver, some cow tail and 'merit guts' (tripe) and cook all that down for a long, long time. Man, that cowboy stew so good you got to take your shoes off to eat it!"
At only 33 years old Nathan Williams has earned a reputation as one of zydeco music's most respected players with five albums to his credit. With his hard-hitting band, The Zydeco Cha Chas (named after a Clifton Chenier song), Williams can cover a more complex musical landscape than the one-chord grooves that dominate the zydeco repertoire. He works the piano accordion in the style of his muse, the late Mr. Chenier, while opening up the traditional zydeco canon to new styles and sounds.
Nathan's first champion was his older brother (and zydeco impresario) Sid Williams. Sensing lil' bro's musical potential, Sid arranged accordion lessons with veteran Stanley "Buckwheat Zydeco" Dural. Young Nathan augmented that instruction with some long nights spent woodshedding under a lonely oak tree, a practice technique suggested to him by the master Chenier himself. It wasn't long before Nathan and his band were playing free Friday night shows at the new El Sid O's Zydeco and Blues Club in Lafayette. Brother Sid stamped out a couple of singles on his fledling record label and Nathan had made it to the radio.
Rounder Records producer Scott Billington teamed up Nathan and band with the legendary Boozoo Chavis for one of the Live at Richard's Club records and followed that with Steady Rock, his first solo l.p. The upbeat ska-flavored title cut of Steady Rock enabled Williams and Billington to address the main dilemna of tradition-based music: how to push into new and inventive directions while staying true to the roots.
His follow-up l.p. was built around another instant classic by r&b songwriter Paul Kelly: "Your Mama Don't Know". A blue-collar regimen of touring regularly took the Zydeco Cha Chas from New England to California and back home in a month. On one overseas trip to Istanbul, blues guitarist Johnny Copeland suggested Williams cut a record with local Cajun players. The final result of that turkish-coffee-fueled conversation is the magnificent new Creole Crossroads album with fiddler Michael Doucet of Beausoleil. The record is a powerful cross-cultural collaboration that radiates the beauty of both Black Creole and French Acadian cultures.
On his Follow Me Chicken album Nathan Williams returns to the food/music crossroads with a typical compassion and humor:
"Don't kill that chicken in the barnyard, baby, that chicken's too small to fry,
Don't kill that chicken in the barnyard, baby, that chicken's too young to die..."
