Month: July 2020

By Dominick Cross

When Rod Bernard died this month, swamp pop music lost a pioneer and Shane K. Bernard lost a father.

Bernard, who died July 12, 2020, was 79.

For me, as a journalist, one of the biggest drags of the occupation is to interview the friends, and, especially, family members of someone who has died. I’ve always been uncomfortable with such an assignment; they’ve always made me feel like an interloper.

So when I hadn’t heard back from Shane K. Bernard after a few days, I was quietly relieved. Still, I was content to talk to others about his father and had enough for a story.

And then he returned the call.

Bernard apologized and said he had been dealing with the details and such related to his father’s passing. For me, it is totally understandable and no apology necessary.

In the process of our conversation, Bernard began talking about his father’s death, and I mean the moment thereof, and I felt he needn’t recall the ordeal; I didn’t want to put him through it again.

However, Bernard, historian and curator to McIlhenny Company and Avery Island, Inc., and author of several books, including Swamp Pop: Cajun and Creole Rhythm and Blues (University Press of Mississippi), saw it differently.

In an email after the interview, Bernard wrote: “By the way, I didn’t mind telling you about Dad’s final moments: the point of it was, he was fine one minute, walking around the house, and then short of breath the next. Within a minute or so he lost consciousness and never re-woke. He did not suffer, and went quickly. 

“I wouldn’t mind if his fans knew that, as I know it might give them some relief to know it was not a bad ending to his life.”

Rod Bernard’s death is not at all related to the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic.

“He’d been having trouble in recent months with his vocal cords just as far as speaking,” said Shane Bernard. “He didn’t speak above a loud whisper, if that’s such a thing. But he had good days and bad days.”

Bernard noted that his father’s last public performance was in 2015 at the Ponderosa Stomp, an American roots music festival. “And he was supposed to sing, as I remember, three songs. But he ran out of breath into the second song and managed to finish it.

“But he couldn’t sing the third song,” said Bernard. “So he kind of gave up singing at that point.”

It would be the last time Rod Bernard would perform in public. However, it wasn’t the first time he’d stopped singing.

It was 1975 and “dad was still, you know, flirting with the idea of becoming a big star and he’d thought about moving to Nashville and that sort of thing,” said Shane Bernard.

In the meantime, Rod Bernard had a career going at KLFY-TV 10 that would go on for 30 years. He was an advertising executive and on-air talent, including the host of Saturday Hop, a teen dance program that once featured Little Richard with Jimi Hendrix in tow.

The Bernards lived in Lafayette. A friend and neighbor was a Lafayette native who would move to Nashville and make a name for himself as a country music singer and songwriter.

Bernard said his father asked his friend to write him a song.

“My dad said, ‘If you could write me a hit song, I think that if I recorded it, it would restart my music career just because of the small amount of name recognition I already have from 1959,’” said Bernard, referring to the song “This Should Go On Forever” that put the local singer on Dick Clark’s TV program, American Bandstand.

The songwriter had written song that he believed to be a hit and gave it to his friend.

Rod Bernard recorded the song.

However, a session musician at the time, said Shane Bernard, also liked the song and wanted to record it himself.

This person, Bernard said, asked the recording engineer for a copy of the master tape and re-cut the song with his own band. He got the song leased to a major label “and it became a national hit,” said Bernard. “And, he released it before dad’s version.

“That’s not illegal, but it was highly unethical,” said Bernard. As a result, it managed to put an end to his father’s aspirations to go big time. “I noticed, all of a sudden, music wasn’t fun anymore after that.

“He did it for money, playing on the weekend, but he really didn’t enjoy it anymore,” the son said. “I never even really ever heard him listening to music all that much.”

About a decade later, Oscar “Ric” Bernard, who’d played lead guitar and bass in his brother Rod’s band, exacted a small measure of revenge on the singer who absconded with his brother’s song.

Oscar Bernard graduated as a physics major from University of Southwestern Louisiana and went to work for Boeing “and was subcontracted to NASA on the Apollo missions,” said Shane Bernard. “He’s just a brilliant guy.”

“I asked him for music lessons one time when I was in high school. I just wanted to learn how to play ‘Smoke on the Water,’” Bernard recalled. What he got instead was a lesson in music theory. “We never touched the guitar.”

After Oscar Bernard left aerospace, he worked as a petroleum engineer and lived in Houston.

As it happened, Uncle Oscar was tooling around in his car and came upon a honky tonk with a familiar name on its marquee.

“It’s the guy who stole the song,” said Shane Bernard. “So Oscar stops and he goes in. And in-between songs, Oscar goes up to the guy.” He asked the singer if he recorded the song in question.

The singer was thrilled that he was remembered for the song.

“And Uncle Oscar says, ‘Well, I’m Rod Bernard’s brother.’ And the guy goes, ‘Aw, man. I’m so sorry about what happened,’” said Benard. “And then my uncle said, ‘Your mom must be proud of you.’ And then he walked out.”

Just prior to the unethical incident, the swamp pop crooner and the King of Zydeco, Clifton Chenier, got together to record “Boogie in Black & White,” a 10-song album with R&B, rock and roll and blues.

At the time of the 1976 recording, Chenier was in-between contracts, “So dad said, ‘Hey, man, while you’re free, could we do an album together because I’ve always wanted to do that because you’re one of my heroes,’” Bernard said. “They both grew up in Opelousas and they knew each other.”

Rod Bernard had a novel approach to the recording.

“Then dad says, ‘Let’s not even really rehearse. Let’s just get together and jam and we’ll do the cuts live. We won’t worry about messing up or anything.’ So that’s what happened.”

“If you notice,” he said. “There’s not zydeco or swamp pop. They’re sort of blues, ’50’s R&B recordings.”

The songs include “Kansas City,” “My Babe,” “Shake, Rattle & Roll,” “Baby, What You Want Me to Do?” and “My Babe,” and may well have been selected by Rod Bernard.

Shane Bernard said he found a song list the elder Bernard wrote in a notebook.

“So it looks like he was putting together a track listing of things he wanted to record,” said Bernard. “And he even wrote the lyrics down and the key of the song and everything. So that’s why I think he chose the tracks.”

In it’s own way, the album, recorded live over two-nights in Ville Platte for Floyd Soileau’s Jin label, was more than songs on vinyl, it was also a statement about race relations.

Music writer Michael Tisserand wrote: “The title of their project made it clear that the musicians had succeeded in crossing the color barrier.”

And the racial make-up of the musicians on the album seem to back that up with Rod Bernard, vocals; Clifton Chenier, vocals/accordion; Warren Storm, drums; Cleveland Chenier, scrub board; Glenn Himel, piano; James Stelly, guitar; Joe Hill, bass; and John Hart, sax.

In his tribute to Bernard on the commission’s website blog, Herman Fuselier, music writer and executive director of the St. Landry Tourist Commission, also made note of the collaboration.

“The title raised some eyebrows as public schools had just been integrated six years earlier,” Fuselier wrote. Read more here.

While the originators of the swamp pop are aging (yet, some still recording, such as Tommy McClain with Warren Storm on drums) and, sadly, even dying (such as Huey “Cookie” Thierry, Lil’ Alfred, Clint West and Bobby Charles), what does the future portend for the genre?

“Actually, I find swamp pop to be in much better shape now than when I wrote my book (‘Swamp Pop,’ 1996). It seemed a lot closer to dying out back then,” said Bernard. “My wife is a big swamp pop fan and so are her parents. They’re from down around Franklin.”

Bernard said the Franklin area and Morgan City and “on the east side of the Atchafalaya, people are swamp pop nuts. Even today,” he said. “I can’t even explain it because, from my research, swamp pop seems to be born and developed primarily on the west side of the Atchafalaya and even as far west as East Texas.

“If I had to pinpoint an area where swamp pop came from, I would say it was around Opelousas, Eunice, that area,” Bernard continued. “That’s kind of borne out by Earl King who said that he first heard that sound in the Eunice area.”

Swamp pop gigs were regular at night clubs and dancehalls in the region and thereabouts, such as the Southern Club, the Green Lantern and the Step-In.

“Now, swamp pop is really big on the other side of the Atchafalaya while it’s not so big here anymore,” said Bernard, adding that a number of radio stations from Morgan City and eastward “play a huge amount of swamp pop.

“They have a lot of swamp pop concerts, a lot of swamp pop shows at night clubs, and you’ve got this younger generation (Ryan Foret & Foret Tradition) that came along,” he said. “And there are other second and third generation swamp pop bands that are very popular and very active from Morgan City east to the New Orleans area.”

While it has been some 45 years since Rod Bernard’s interest in music had waned, that all changed, and, not too long ago.

“He did start again, recently, because my son, who’s 15, is becoming a pretty good guitarist,” Bernard said. “So he and my dad would shut themselves up in a room at my house and listen to the blues and rhythm & blues from the ’50s, early ’60’s.

“It was basically my dad introducing my son to music that my dad really liked.”