Right away, what you can’t help but notice is how much zydeco and blues artist Major Handy and his wife, Frances Ayres Handy, complement one another. From separate worlds, these two Louisianans found each other — and unyielding love.
They have survived life’s ups and downs since their first encounter more than two decades ago.
He is low-key; she is feisty. They are a testament that opposites attract. And yet they are one and the same.
At age 69, she apologizes for her appearance and the compact shoulder bag of oxygen, and explains that her cancer treatment has damaged her lungs. At age 77, he sits quietly nearby, and shares that he is still recovering from a stroke that left him nearly paralyzed. He wasn’t certain if he would ever walk again, let alone perform.
But there is strength in their struggles, and laughter in their legacy. It’s as if they have nothing to hide.
Such candor caught StoryCorps’ attention when the national nonprofit came to town last year to capture Lafayette residents’ stories for posterity’s sake. Theirs is one of the rare stories that StoryCorps chose to document further with an additional interview, set up to air on National Public Radio.
While the StoryCorps mobile road crew collects conversations across the country, there is also a team that gets the stories broadcast on NPR. What leaped out of the Handy’s original testimony was the couple’s “affectionate nature of their love for each other,” according to producer Jey Born in New York.
Born also cites the couple’s openness and honesty about being in a biracial relationship.
StoryCorps wanted more. And it was not only because their recording was of “a universal message that is really relatable,” but also because their story was under-represented in the media landscape. And yet it is “really rare” — less than one percent — for StoryCorps to follow up with participants for a more in-depth conversation, Born notes.
“It is safe to say it’s an unusual thing for somebody to be invited back a second time,” she says. “The Handys had that sort of magic recipe of both their storytelling and their love for each other.”
Born says one of StoryCorps’ goals is to document relationships, particularly people’s relationships to one another. Despite racism, she notes, the Handys “transcended those barriers that hold so many of us back to find that love for each other.”
The Handys were such an unlikely couple for their stars to align. The daughter of an oilfield businessman, Frances Handy admits that she finds it shocking today to realize how little she knew about racial issues growing up in Lake Charles, and poses that her husband did not encounter racism until he was an adult because he grew up in the remote St Martin Parish community of Catahoula.
“His childhood sounds so lovely because they lived out in the country—he only was around Black folks, he went to school with Black folks,” she muses, “so he wasn’t like Martin Luther King’s son driving by, you know, the country fair and the places that he couldn’t go in because they were so far out in the country.”
“So by the time he was really able to see any of that,” she adds, “he was a grown man, and he was going into Vietnam, he went to Vietnam, and so there, the racism wasn’t a thing either.”
“Evidently, that’s what you think,” he interjects. “It was.”
But he quickly clarifies, noting the reason that he did not encounter much racism then was because he was not on the battlefield.
“Honey,” she retorts, “any information that I give, have, about you came from you—so there!”
If Major and Frances Handy had met decades earlier, or even later, their paths may have never crossed. But life has a way of throwing curve balls.
It would take two prior marriages for him, and one for her, and offspring for both, for their paths to cross under the most unlikely circumstances.
Zydeco—that was what brought them together. And that was an anomaly on its own because the popular genre was on neither’s radar at one time or another.
Growing up, he dreamed about writing his own music. A self-taught guitarist, he was part of the rhythm ’n blues era. However, it was not hard to recognize the growing popularity of zydeco music, and he soon became a self-taught accordionist.
A one-man band for years, he was so versatile that he was able to play and record all of the instruments needed for his soundtracks.
His band, Major Handy and the Louisiana Blues Band, is part of his livelihood, and Frances Handy is the manager, but she is more like his group’s den mother. Through the years, she has even enjoyed performing with her husband.
Frances first encountered zydeco dancing one evening at Randol’s Restaurant. She spotted a couple doing a dance she had never seen before. What is that dance? she wanted to know immediately because she was only familiar with Cajun dancing. The reply: The zydeco. She followed a Quebec tourist’s recommendation to go to Richard’s Club in St. Landry Parish to witness authentic zydeco dancing, and ended up becoming a regular there.
The love mushroomed into a business: zydeco tours, dance workshops, and even cruises. Booking Major Handy for one of her events was how the two met. In the beginning, it was a friendship that led to their romance and commitment for life.
But they hadn’t planned on getting married.
However, one day Major Handy called Frances: “Hey Babe, you wanna get married?” he asks.
“I sure do,” she replies.
And that was that.
“Between the two of them, they carry an encyclopedia of cultural and musical knowledge,” says Cheryl Devall, general manager of KRVS. The local NPR affiliate partnered with StoryCorps for the couple’s followup interview, as it did for their 2023 visit.
Devall first met Frances in the mid-1990s when she was operating her zydeco-themed tours.
“Separately and together, they’re delightful,” she says of the Handys. “Thoughtful, funny and so obviously sweet on each other. What’s not to like?”