My Guest tonite - Cajun Queen - Anne Savoy

Ann Savoy is a musician, an author, a record producer, and a photographer. Perhaps her most well known endeavor is the acclaimed release “Adieu False Heart”, a CD of duets with the legendary Linda Ronstadt. As a musician she, has played guitar, fiddle, and accordion and traveled throughout the world with her husband accordionist Marc Savoy and fiddler Michael Doucet in the Savoy Doucet Cajun Band, with her all-woman band The Magnolia Sisters. and with Marc and their talented sons in the Savoy Family Band.


She appears with her son Joel in the film Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood and performs three of the twelve cuts on the accompanying soundtrack on Sony Music. She has recorded twelve CDs on the Arhoolie, Rounder, and Vanguard labels. She workied with renowned producer T Bone Burnett as associate music producer for the Sony film “All The King’s Men”, composing a song for the film which is performed by Ann Savoy and her Sleeplss Knights, her vintage style jazz group. Ann has appeared in many documentaries on the subject of Cajun music, including the PBS series American Roots Music, and with her husband was the subject of Les Blank’s film,”Marc and Ann”.

She has worked as an record producer for Vanguard Records, for whom she produced the Grammy nominated tribute to Cajun music, Evangeline Made, featuring, among others, pop and folk idols Linda Ronstadt, John Fogerty, Richard and Linda Thompson, Nick Lowe, and Rodney Crowell performing traditional Cajun tunes. Her second project for Vanguard, a tribute to Creole and Zydeco, entitled Creole Bred, came out in May 2004.

In 2010 her band The Magnolia Sisters received a Grammy nomination for their CD Stripped Down.

As a writer, she is the author of the Botkin award winning book, Cajun Music, A Reflection of a People, a book which chronicles the history of Cajun and Zydeco music through interviews, biographies, historic and current photographs, and song transcriptions. She wrote the chapter on Cajun and Zydeco in the book, American Roots Music, Rolling Stone Press, as well as authoring numerous articles on Cajun music and historic CD booklets.

For more, go to www.womad.co.nz