Clifton Chenier was born in June 1925 in Leonville, Louisiana, a French-speaking farm kid who shadowed his sharecropper father Joseph at Creole dances where the diatonic button accordion and his uncle's fiddle ruled. This episode explains how the radio pulled his ear toward the electric blues of Muddy Waters, Lightnin' Hopkins and Peetie Wheatstraw, and how, after long shifts at a Gulf oil refinery in Port Arthur, Texas, he and his brother Cleveland began playing impromptu dance parties in the dirt parking lot outside the gates around 1950. When a wooden washboard could not keep up with the volume of the new music, Chenier sketched a wearable corrugated metal vest and had Port Arthur metalworker Willie Landry hammer it into reality, creating the vest frottoir, or rubboard, that Cleveland scraped with bottle openers to give zydeco its heartbeat. ...