About Buckwheat Zydeco
Buckwheat Zydeco (born Stanley Dural Jr.; November 14, 1947 – September 24, 2016), was an American accordionist and zydeco musician. He was one of the few zydeco artists to achieve mainstream success. His music group was formally billed as Buckwheat Zydeco and Ils Sont Partis Band ("Ils Sont Partis" being French for "They have left," or a race announcer's "And they're off!"), but they often performed as merely Buckwheat Zydeco. The New York Times said: "Stanley 'Buckwheat' Dural leads one of the best bands in America. A down-home and high-powered celebration, meaty and muscular with a fine-tuned sense of dynamics…propulsive rhythms, incendiary performances." USA Today called him "a zydeco trailblazer." Buckwheat Zydeco performed with famous musicians such as Eric Clapton (with whom he also recorded), U2 and the Boston Pops. The band performed at the closing ceremonies of the 1996 Summer Olympics to a worldwide audience of three billion people. Buckwheat performed for President Clinton twice, celebrating both of his inaugurations. The band appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman, CNN, The Today Show, MTV, NBC News, CBS Morning News, National Public Radio's Mountain Stage, and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. In 1971, he founded Buckwheat & the Hitchhikers, a funk band that he led for five years before switching to zydeco. His music group was formally billed as Buckwheat Zydeco and Ils Sont Partis Band, but they often performed as merely Buckwheat Zydeco.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.