Paul "Lil' Buck" Sinegal

Paul "Lil' Buck" Sinegal (born January 14, 1944) is an American blues and zydeco guitarist and singer.

Biography

He was born Paul Alton Senegal in Lafayette, Louisiana. According to researchers Bob Eagle and Eric LeBlanc, the spelling "Sinegal" rather than "Senegal" was the result of a passport error which he never corrected. He was nicknamed "Little Buck" (for buckwheat) or "Lil' Buck" because of his short size.^[1] His mother Odette Broussard played guitar, and in the late 1950s he began performing with such artists as Carol Fran, James "Thunderbird" Davis, Lee Dorsey, and Joe Tex.

He became a session musician at Excello Records, working with Slim Harpo, Lazy Lester and others, and also recorded with Rockin' Dopsie, Katie Webster, and Lil' Bob.^[1][2] In the late 1960s, he recorded his own instrumentals, including "Cat Scream" and "Monkey in a Sack", for the La Louisiane record label.^[3]

He joined Clifton Chenier's band in 1969, and toured regularly with him in Europe and elsewhere over the next decade. Later, in the 1980s and 1990s, he also toured internationally with Buckwheat Zydeco and with Rockin' Dopsie. He founded the Cowboy Stew Blues Revue with C. C. Adcock. In 1999, he released the album The Buck Starts Here, featuring songs predominantly written with, and produced by, Allen Toussaint.^[2] Critic Richie Unterberger described the record as "a fairly straight blues album with faint or nonexistent traces of zydeco",^[4] and Sinegal has commented: "I am probably more known as a zydeco guitarist... [but] I've always been a bluesman... Zydeco is the blues. It's basically blues played with accordion. Clifton Chenier's music was blues throughout."^[3]

Sinegal was inducted into the Louisiana Blues Hall of Fame in 1999.^[3]

References