Houston: Silver Slipper Lounge

On Saturday nights at the Silver Slipper Lounge, Houston’s ground zero for zydeco music, Clifton Chenier strapped on his accordion and played until the walls sweated — still standing after more than sixty years in Frenchtown.

The Silver Slipper Lounge opened in 1962 in Houston’s Fifth Ward, in the neighborhood that Creole families from Southwest Louisiana had claimed as their own and named Frenchtown. This was the world Clifton Chenier moved through when he relocated to Houston — a city with the industry jobs, the Creole community, and the club circuit that let him work year-round. The Silver Slipper was his room. The combination of accordion, washboard, electric guitar, and Chenier’s bruising, exuberant voice filled that space the way nothing else could.

Zydeco wasn’t yet the word people used. In Frenchtown they called it la-la music, Creole music, the music from back home. Chenier was electrifying it, hardening it with rhythm and blues, pushing it toward what we now recognize as zydeco — and the Silver Slipper was where much of that evolution happened, in front of a dancing crowd that had no idea it was witnessing the birth of a genre.

Chenier went on to record “Squeeze Box Boogie” and “Zydeco Sont Pas Salé” and win the first zydeco Grammy ever awarded, in 1983. But he never stopped coming back to Fifth Ward. The neighborhood was the source, and he knew it.

The Silver Slipper is still there on Saturday nights, one of the few original Frenchtown venues to survive urban renewal, the oil bust, and time. The Continental Zydeco Ballroom, which ran the same circuit until 1997, tells the larger story of the neighborhood that made this music. If you go to the Silver Slipper, go to dance.