Blank's interest in the various cultures of Louisiana began when he was a college student at Tulane University in New Orleans, years before he became a filmmaker. Some of his earliest documentaries were about music and musicians, such as Dizzy Gillespie (1965), The Blues Accordin' to Lightnin' Hopkins (1968) and Spend it All (1971), about Cajun culture and music. After working on the latter, Blank applied for a grant to make a film about the music and culture of French-speaking black people in southwest Louisiana. As he researched the subject, he focused on two musicians, zydeco king Clifton Chenier, and Ardoin, whose country Creole musical style pre-dates zydeco. Blank quickly realized that those were two distinct stories and styles, and that each one should be a separate film. Both were released in 1973, and Blank regarded them as companion films: Hot Pepper the Chenier film, and Dry Wood. The title is the translation of "Bois Sec," the French nickname that Ardoin, a sharecropper's son, earned as a child because, he says, he was always the first one to run inside from the cotton fields when it rained, so he stayed dry.
Ardoin learned to play the accordion as a child, but he did not begin performing regularly until he was in his thirties, when he teamed up with fiddler and fellow sharecropper Canray Fontenot and they began playing at local dance halls. By the time Blank arrived with Maureen Gosling, his sound recorder (and later longtime editor), Ardoin's and Fontenot's partnership had endured for decades. The filmmakers lived in Ardoin's home in the village of Duralde, and spent more than three months shooting. Gosling later recalled that "it meant we could really sink into the place," and that their subjects eventually "let their guard down and were authentic."
Reviews of Dry Wood noted that the film was a look at a culture and way of life that went far beyond a standard musical biography. J. Hoberman wrote in American Film magazine that the film "is an almost continual round of barbecues, exposition on sausage making, and demonstration of gumbo preparation where Blank gets so close to the action that he's almost using his lens to stir the pot." Vincent Canby of the New York Times noted, "Although the film was made within the last several years, it has the air of someone's remembering events of long ago. This is...due in part to the seemingly stable quality of lives being explored, as well as to Mr. Blank's manner, which is to pay almost as much attention to the landscapes, seasons and weather as to people."
In 1986, Ardoin and Fontenot received the National Endowment for the Arts' highest award for American traditional arts, The National Heritage Fellowship, and continued to perform at folk festivals and concerts. Fontenot died in 1995, and Ardoin kept playing with a younger generation of musicians, releasing an album with Christine Balfa in 1998. He died in 2007 at the age of 91.
Director: Les Blank
Producer: Les Blank
Cinematography: Les Blank
Editor: Les Blank, Maureen Gosling
Music: Antoine "Bois Sec" Ardoin, Canray Fontenot
37 minutes
by Margarita Landazuri
