When it comes to music, CC Adcock is a lifer. “I’m just a junkie, man,” the producer and guitarist proclaims matter-of-factly. “I remember jamming with my friends when I was 13 and it wasn’t enough for me. I had to take it further.”
And taken it further he has. As a teenager, the gifted six-string slinger from America’s Deep South backed legendary bluesman Bo Diddley. At 22, he was signed to Island Records and had apprenticeships under Denny Cordell and Jack Nitzsche on the art of production. He’s also worked with music mogul Seymour Stein and soundtracked the HBO series, True Blood.
His championing of roots music has made him synonymous with the blues, swamp pop and zydeco genres, while his production CV boasts Robert Plant, Florence and the Machine, and now The Rolling Stones, amongst its number.
The latter is why I find the tousled-haired, charismatic Adcock sat across me over Zoom, fresh from learning that this latest effort has garnered a 2026 Grammy nomination under the Best Regional Roots Album category.
It has come about out of celebration of legendary zydeco musician Clifton Chenier. The accordionist and vocalist passed away in 1987 aged 62 but is forever known as the King of Zydeco. A Tribute to the King of the Zydeco, released last summer to mark his centenary, features The Rolling Stones, Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, Los Lobos, and many more.
The Stones’ contribution, ‘Zydeco Sont Pas Salés’ (the song from which the genre takes its name), is a garrulous gambol into the tush-shaking zydeco orbit, thrusting the folk-dance concoction into a thrilling Anglo-American space. Making it was both an honour and a source of happy stress for Adcock.
“What do you do to produce Keith Richards?!” Adcock pleads, both incredulously and rhetorically at the same time. It’s a question he was confronted by when it came to producing the Stones’ first music since 2023’s Hackney Diamonds.
“Keith’s next to you in the control room and he’s got that guitar you had a poster of above your bed when you were a boy,” he regales, “and I couldn’t even look at him.”
Adcock, no stranger to working with the greats, was bamboozled by having a bona fide hero next to him. So, he improvised. He asked Keith’s longtime manager Jane Rose, who was also present, to dance (“I just thought ‘fuck it!’,” he says. “Jane and I danced around the studio while Keith did his thing – we had a lot of fun!”).
‘Zydeco Sont Pas Sales’, the song picked by frontman Mick Jagger, is ordinarily a bare beast, comprised of only accordion, rubboard and vocals. It certainly doesn’t feature guitars. In fact, as Adcock quips, it’s traditionally the point in a four-hour zydeco set where the guitarist and bass player “go take a piss”. This posed a conundrum when it came to the idea of a Stones’ makeover.
To quell any fears, he enlisted his Lil’ Band O’ Gold bandmate, Steve Riley, for accordion duties, while legendary sticksman Robert St. Julien provided the popcorn backbeat shuffle.
St. Julien is not only the drummer largely responsible for the modern zydeco beat, but one of Chenier’s last surviving bandmates. Atop all this, Jagger’s deliciously delirious blues harp rests, fighting against a feverish guitar maelstrom conjured by his Stones cohorts.
“It was a music that was close to them,” explains Adcock, who worked up a sketch of the song at home in Lafayette. Jagger placed his imprint first. What was shocking was that the rock legend didn’t just present an approximation of the native tongue. “It was perfect mid-century Creole French,” Adcock marvels. “Plus, his vocal was absolutely fantastic.”
The language was so on point that when Adcock spun it for zydeco purists at Louisiana radio stations, they chuckled over hearing the sort of pitch-perfect old Creole French that their grandparents spoke. “They also put out a call to arms to younger generations,” shares Adcock. “They were going, ‘Hey, if Mick Jagger can sing like this and get it right, you boys who come from here need to do right too’,” he says.
Growing up in Louisiana Bayous, Adcock was beguiled by the swamp-boogie sounds that emitted from every bandstand, porch and flatbed trailer you could find. The piquancy of the blues and African dance influences were so warm they could set damp wood ablaze.
“Music was just all around [me] growing up,” he says. When he was five, Adcock was moved into a converted room in the family’s attic to make way for his younger brother’s arrival. He sought comfort by dialling into Baton Rouge’s WLCS radio station. “It could be scary [up there], but I had that radio. And I just loved songs,” he recalls.
A family friend gifted the young music obsessive a nylon-string guitar when he was about eight and he quickly learnt Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ and Chuck Berry’s ‘Rock and Roll Music’. Progress was swift. Naturally a leftie, his classical tutor’s head was so cooked in trying to transpose the shapes from right to left, that he demanded Adcock start learning the instrument over again right-handed.
This didn’t dent his chops. A visiting Bo Diddley was so impressed by the teenage Adcock’s command of the instrument that he invited the youngster to back him for a couple of shows. They parted ways with the offer that should Adcock ever find himself in LA, he should give him a call.
Sure enough, Adcock ended up in LA. Diddley, perhaps unsurprisingly, never answered. Undeterred by the empty promise, Adcock cracked on and made musical strides of his own, which ultimately led him back to Diddley. Their professional relationship resumed for a while.
To pay for his bills in between shows, he bagged a part-time gig sweeping film sets. It was there that he met striking bohemian Englishman Tarka Cordell. He, too, was a budding blues guitarist. A bromance blossomed between them and a lifelong friendship marked by music, madcaps and hijinks (tragically, Tarka would take his own life in 2008).
It was Tarka’s introduction to his father, the esteemed music producer Denny Cordell – responsible for Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, amongst others – which set Adcock down the production road and also got him signed to Island Records as an artist in his own right.
“It wasn’t long before I realised that the only reason I was working was because I had this special thing from where I was from back in Lafayette, Louisiana,” Adcock remembers. “That made me want to rededicate myself, before I grew too old and my playing style became too permanent.” It was upon his return home that he worked with fabled musician Buckwheat Zydeco and the guitarist Paul “Lil’ Buck” Sinegal (who he calls “my mentor”).
All the while, his production tutelage continued under Wall of Sound orchestrator and Phil Spector associate, Jack Nitzsche (a “genius-level musician”). Nitzsche produced the Stones and Neil Young, and what Adcock learned in his company has stuck with him.
Time in Adcock’s company is a whirlwind. He’s an encyclopaedia on the American South’s musical heritage. He’s also a hoot, veering from colourful self-deprecating anecdotes to insightful reveries on all manner of topics. What is above-all clear is that the music burns bright within him.
“I just love going to the source, man. If I’d have grown up in Italy or in England or at a different time period, I would have probably still dug the same music,” he enthuses. “I just happened to like that stuff and was lucky enough to have it down my street.”
For now, Adcock is buzzing over A Tribute to the King of Zydeco’s success, and thrilled that proceeds from the album are going to the Clifton Chenier Memorial Scholarship to help young kids learn zydeco accordion.
There’s also the matter of having worked with his heroes. “I’m really proud that [‘Zydeco Sont Pas Salés’] sounds like The Rolling Stones,” he says. “And that’s really because everything they touch sounds like The Rolling Stones.”
Adcock hopes to manifest recording the group again one day, and this time free from the shackles of a tribute album. “This track came together really easily. I would love to do it again and do it without one hand tied behind my back,” he considers.
It would be a win-win for everyone if this outing is anything to go by. “Everybody’s playing [The Rolling Stones version of ‘Zydeco Sont Pas Salés’] down in Louisiana,” Adcock reveals with a proud smile. “It’s packing the dancefloors down there.”
It’s easy to see why. The CC Adcock and Stones union has produced a track that explodes with so much life, it not only revives Chenier’s spirit, it all but plants a spade in the ground and exhumes his body. It’s no more than what the infectious zydeco genre, and Clifton Chenier, deserve.
