Irván Perez, 85, singer who preserved Islenos culture in La.
WASHINGTON - Irván J. Perez, 85, whose haunting a cappella songs in the disappearing Islenos language told tales of fishing, trapping, and life in the swamps of southern Louisiana, died after a heart attack Jan. 8 at Tulane University Medical Center in New Orleans.
Mr. Perez, a 1991 winner of the National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship, sang decimas, distinctive narrative songs in 10-line stanzas, that recounted fishing stories, disclosed raunchy misbehavior of spouses, and wryly reported the problems of working for welfare using an unreliable truck. Some of the songs date from the Middle Ages, and others Mr. Perez wrote to preserve his community's unusual history.
Mr. Perez was a descendant of Canary Islanders who settled in the St. Bernard Parish swamplands of Louisiana in the late 1700s. He was considered the best singer of decimas in the Americas and one of the world's few remaining speakers of the dialect, a combination of 18th-century maritime Spanish, antiquated formal Spanish, and snippets of Louisiana's Cajun French.
Known as Pooka, Mr. Perez had a high, fluttery tenor voice perfect for singing decimas from 16th-century Spain and 20th-century Louisiana that offered advice from those who survived hurricanes, unfaithful lovers, and hard times.
"If you ever heard Irván's singing, you'd never forget it," said Allison Pena, cultural anthropologist at the Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve.
Many people heard him, at Carnegie Hall, Wolf Trap's National Folk Festival, and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. He appeared in a 1999 PBS series, "River of Song: A Musical Journey," which also features an audio clip of his singing, as does the Folklife in Education Project of the Louisiana Division of the Arts.
Researchers from around the world went to his home on Delacroix Island to study the language, songs, and culture that Mr. Perez worked assiduously to preserve. He welcomed Spanish and Canarian researchers at his home and assisted Samuel Armistead of the University of California at Davis in documenting the words to the old and new decimas.
"He was an absolutely marvelous informant," said Armistead, who has researched and written about the three tiny remnants of Spanish-speaking communities in Louisiana. "Here's a guy who grew up with the perspective of a muskrat trapper or shrimp trawler who didn't know English until he went to school. . . . As soon as I talked to him, I said, 'Wow, this guy might as well have a university degree.' "
A native of Delacroix Island, about 30 miles and a world away from the hustle of New Orleans, Mr. Perez grew up with his immediate and extended family around him. He saw plenty of hard times, but "took almost everything in stride," said Carol Nunez, one of his four daughters.
His father, Serafin Perez, who taught him to sing and carve wooden ducks, lost his home and 80 decoys in 1965's Hurricane Betsy. When Hurricane Katrina, which Louisianans simply call "the storm," came through, Mr. Perez lost his home, recordings of his father's singing, and most of his woodworking tools. Through it all, he absorbed the decimas like the bowls of shrimp jambalaya and plates of crabmeat casserole his wife cooked.
His education in the art came at five local dance halls, where between the tunes on Saturday nights, someone would sing a decima about his brother-in-law, an aging playboy who never grew up. Another sang the humorous tale of a crab fisherman bedeviled by bees and attacked by a partner who thought he was rabid. One from the diaspora began:
Farewell, impossible Spain! Your sons are leaving you to look for work in unknown lands. In Brazil, Buenos Aires, Mexico, Chile and Panama; Without work, every day, they are departing.
Mr. Perez became an expert wood carver, creating realistically textured wild fowl and songbirds from cypress roots. He painted his work with oil pigments that he mixed.
Some were decoys, but many were sold to support his family. Some have been exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution.
