Terrance Simien is a Grammy Award–winning accordionist, singer, and Creole culture advocate. With more than forty years of touring in forty-five countries, he plays zydeco music seasoned with reggae, funk, and roots styles, which helped expose zydeco to new audiences. Simien’s music was featured in Disney’s New Orleans–themed animated film The Princess and the Frog (2009) and its 2024 spin-off attraction at Walt Disney World, Tiana’s Bayou Adventure.

Beginnings

Born September 3, 1965, in the St. Landry Parish hamlet of Mallet, Simien is an eighth-generation Louisiana Creole. At fifteen, Simien learned the accordion by imitating songs that pioneer zydeco DJ Luke Collins played on radio station KEUN in Eunice.

Simien started his first band, the Mallet Playboys, in 1983, joining the Sam Brothers Five as the only other teenage zydeco band. A performance at the 1984 World’s Fair in New Orleans launched Simien and his band before applauding urban crowds instead of dancers at the rural zydeco dance halls. Success continued with a national booking contract and his first movie appearance and soundtrack performance in the New Orleans–based film The Big Easy (1986). Worldwide tours followed, including stage and studio performances with Los Lobos, Robert Palmer, the Dave Matthews Band, The Meters, and many others.

Continued Success

In 2007 Simien’s Live! Worldwide album claimed the first Grammy in the Best Zydeco or Cajun Music Album category. The win capped a seven-year campaign by Simien and his business partner and wife, Cynthia, to establish a category for zydeco and Cajun artists. In subsequent years BeauSoleil avec Michael Doucet, Buckwheat Zydeco, and Chubby Carrier and the Bayou Swamp Band won before the Recording Academy eliminated the category during a consolidation effort. The Recording Academy introduced a Best Regional Roots album category in 2012, which Simien and the Zydeco Experience’s 2013 Dockside Sessions album won in 2014. By then Simien was seven years into his Creole advocacy and performing arts program, Creole for Kidz and the History of Zydeco. This interactive program, which focuses on the history and evolution of zydeco, has reached more than 500,000 students, from kindergarten to college, throughout the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, Africa, Australia, Russia, and Ukraine.

Simien has contributed to the preservation of Louisiana’s Black musical culture, which includes jazz, blues, rhythm and blues (R&B), brass bands, gospel, hip hop, and bounce. His advocacy helped establish Allen Toussaint’s original 1975 “Southern Nights” as Louisiana’s first state song written by a Black composer. Simien and his wife also helped curate a zydeco exhibit at the National Museum of African American Music in Nashville, Tennessee.

Written by Randy Newman, the song “Gonna Take You There” from The Princess and the Frog is a sing-along request at Simien’s worldwide children’s performances and is part of the soundtrack for the theme park ride, Tiana’s Bayou Adventure. Simien also performs with his daughter Marcella, a self-described “psychedelic soul” artist and Memphis College of Art graduate.

With a voice reminiscent of Sam Cooke and Aaron Neville, Simien continues to build a lengthy resume. 2024 marked his band’s thirty-eighth appearance at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.