Thibodeaux Was A LaLa Music Legend

BOBBY ARDOIN

Editor/Contributing Writer

Goldman Thibodeaux said he was most pleased when he could watch people gliding across the floor while dancing to his Creole-inspired music that he usually sang in the colloquial French dialect he learned during childhood.

“To see people on the floor dancing, it’s an honor. I always say that when you’re playing you’re not playing for yourself. You’re playing for the people,” Thibodeaux said almost 10 years ago while discussing the essence of his music during a live performance at the Liberty Theater in Eunice.

Thibodeaux, 92, a Creole and Zydeco music legend, died on Monday at his home not far from where he grew up in the rural prairie area west of Lawtell.

During most of his life Thibodeaux was a carpenter, construction worker and farmer, who was content to raise animals and ceremoniously tended to his gardens.

However nearly 40 years ago, Thibodeaux, who always admired the sounds of the Creole-inspired front porch dance music, was inspired by another passion that included learning to play the accordion that he heard all his life.

Mastering the instrument essential to playing Creole-French music eventually triggered a career that not only popularized his talent in the Lewisburg, Lawtell, Mallet and Prairie Ronde areas, but provided him with an entrance onto the national stage.

His musical career with included performing with a number of notable Zydeco talent, earned Thibodeaux a Grammy nomination, several CD’s and 20 consecutive years of performances at the New Orleans Jazz Fest.

Thibodeaux normally appeared with various members of his band, the Lawtell Playboys. During the past 10 years Thibodeaux was also presented with the Folklife Heritage Award and the honored as an Acadian Museum’s Living Legend.

While Thibodeaux, the son of Lewisburg-area sharcroppers, once described his style as a musical confluence of Creole and Rock N’ Roll, he seemed most comfortable on stage singing house dance songs in French and accompanied by the fiddle, washboard, drums and guitar.

“I grew up with the old time music, what you call the long-time-ago Creole. Now the young musicians play it all and what they call Zydeco. In the old times, you used to go out to the nightclubs and play and watch them two-step out on the floor,” said Thibodeaux.

Although Thibodeaux possessed a fondness for rural life on his farm during his later years, Thibodeaux said during a 2015 a Liberty Theater performance that he often felt it necessary to embrace his music, a gesture that he acknowledged kept him from feeling too low.

Funeral services for Thibodeaux will be held Saturday at St. Ann’s Church in Mallet beginning at 10 am. Church visitation will begin at 8:30 am. Burial will follow in the church cemetery.

Sibille Funeral Home in Opelousas is in charge of the services.