Freddie Cecchini plays the scrub-board, “Frattoir,” he corrects me for the record, with Pittsburgh’s Zydeco Dogz.

He is known as Frisco Freddie, scrub-board player and legendary Zydeco dancer. He dresses the part: cowboy boots and hat, jeans, brightly colored print shirt, complementary bandana at his neck.

He says, “Yeah-U-Right,” frequently. He yells, barks and hoots at appropriate moments in the music. There are a lot of dogs in Zydeco music.

He dances while he plays the board, a very light piece of corrugated metal with the horizontal ridges of an old-fashioned washboard. It is curved to hook over his shoulders. The ribbed playing surface covers his torso. He clatters the bluesy dance rhythms with two metal spoons he has bent and wrapped in adhesive tape for the right fit and sound.

He knows what he’s doing. The first thing I want to know is why a Zydeco musician from Pittsburgh is called Frisco Freddie. Freddie lived in San Francisco for thirty years and was an avid sailor. He was sailing in the Sea of Cortes in Mexico when another skipper was trying to reach him and couldn’t remember the name of his boat (the usual way to make radio contact). All he could remember was “Freddie from San Francisco” so he put out a call for “Frisco Freddie.”

Freddie has always enjoyed nicknames, and this one got around the sailing community. A couple of weeks later, Freddie went to a club in Brisbane, California where he lived, to hear a band called Motordude Zydeco and see what Zydeco dancing was like.

He and his friends were greeted at the door by the leader of the house band, “A big, guy in a white cowboy hat. He put out his hand and said, “I’m Billy Wilson, Motordude Zydeco.” It just came to me to shake his hand and say, “I’m Frisco Freddie, and I love Zydeco music,” even though I only thought I knew what it was. He stood back and smiled and said, “I like that.”

At the beginning of the first set, Billy Wilson said from the stage, “I want to welcome Frisco Freddie who loves the music. Show him a good time,” So Freddie was introduced to the Zydeco dance crowd that night with a name that stuck and that he brought back home to Pittsburgh ten years ago.

Author… Carolyn Luck