Looking for some other triple row players besides:

Rockin' Dopsie
Dwayne Dopsie
Geno Delafose
John Delafose
Fernest Arcenaux
Chubby Carrier
Roy Carrier
Andre Thierry
Terrence Simien
Queen Ida
Zydeco Joe
Thomas Big Hat Fields
Keith Frank
Boozoo
Beau Jacque

With possibly accessible playing styles.

I can see why you would want some more names - that's a lot of 70's and 80's players you got there (with some notable exceptions). Most of 'em are dead or retired!

Get with the times, man! (I kid, I kid)

So, here's a couple more:

Chris Ardoin (my current fave)
Step Rideau (my other current fave)
Brian Jack (my other, other current fave)
Zydeco Force/Jeffrey Broussard

That's all I can think of right now.

As for accessible playing styles, I don't know. The old school guys are more accessible.

What's the goal? Even the old school and other guys you named would keep you busy for YEARS working through their stuff.

For me, I find that it can take weeks and weeks of steady practice to master a single song up to tempo, and that's *after* I spent many hours picking out the notes one at a time with one of the Slowdowner programs. A case in point, I wanted to add Keith Frank's song "Somethin' Cookin' in the Kitchen" recently. I have loved the song for over ten years and listened to it a thousand times but never tried to play it. It doesn't sound too hard, but when I started picking out the notes, I noticed that he had some subtleties that weren't that obvious. I got lucky and had the notes figured out after only a couple hours. But, when I went to play it up to tempo - it was train wreck city. A couple of the licks were different enough from anything I had played before, so I didn't have the muscle memory for it. So, I slowed it down, and I have been playing it over and over and over - a little bit every day for the last 3 weeks, and I still don't quite have it!

Not sure how that relates to your question, but there it is.

Yeah..plenty of material there to refer to...but additionally..

I seem to recall Cedric Watson playing some nice, and different, 2 ROW Creole stuff recently on his CD...that may be useful...perhaps check out Youtube or Cedric's web site.


Also, Leroy Thomas MAY have some 3 row stuff..he usually flips between single row and Piano Accordion but worth a little detective work perhaps?

Queen Ida did 3 row stuff exclusively, and Terrance Simien of course still does...

I guess for me going in the deep end with the big guns like Dopsie etc. would just about turn you off the instrument out of frustration..but I think the guys and gals above MAY be more user friendly?

I have never seen Leroy play a triple row, but maybe he does. Lately, I have not even seen him use a piano accordion.

Here's a couple more I remembered:

Lil' Pookie
Horace Trahan

I'm sure I will think of more.

I've got some videos of Horace playing last year. I'll dig those out.

Not talking about Dwayne Dopsie. Rockin' Dopsie. He's much more accessible. When I listen to Dwayne, though he's amazing, I find myself looking for the hook in the melody and not finding it.

Relates fine to my question. Funny, I talked to Dwight Carrier tonight at a club. But he ran off before I could ask him for some lessons. We started talking about the FR-18.

Even Rockin' Dopsie seems accessible. The chords are gonna be harder for me though, or blends. As usual.

A lot of the roots zydeco sounds are from derivatives of stuff Clifton Chenier played along with chitlin' circuit blues standards common in the day. In searching for technique, your current list of popular three-row zydeco players (along with the tex-mex crowd like Steve Jordan, for example) provide a lot of the hard examples that, once learned, demonstrate a new skill understanding of the box. The challenge for the player is to find tunes relevant to their skill level and make the tune "their own". With basic technique, you often find that each new tune you learn is the result of a new way to reach a note. But this is not a race to make things complex. Consider there are the tune "players" and the tune "composers". Aldus Roger never wrote songs, but Lawrence Walker did. So did Belton Richard. But the fancy technique is from Aldus. For three-rows, Jeff Broussard has amazing technique. Does he write many tunes, like Keith Frank? Keith's tunes always seem like he fooled around with a riff till he got it into form. And, like "Cookin in the Kitchen", a new tune and technique are born. But Jeff can mimick that tune or any other tune on the spot. So are you a player of someone else's style or, now that you have the basics or,are you also contributing to the creative process? I love Step Rideau because he creates originality with standard approaches. For us, on this forum, some of this is easier said than done however, style is part of the process. And that process can be a lifetime. One day you'll finish a set, after years of theoretical non-appreciation, and some Zydeco beauty will come up and say "I just love the way you play, how long have you been playing the concertina?"

Lol. Concertina!