Azizi, I stand corrected. I knew about the African origins of many of those words, including (of course) gumbo and goobers.

Ever since I read and understood that insight about how syntax and grammar can exist deeper in the mind, and therefore survive longer, than vocabulary ~ since digesting that idea, I can't pass up every opportunity to try explaining it to anyone and everyone.

I think this phenomemon is most evident in cultures where the downtrodden/defeated population is slowest to adopt the oppressor's language, and you see several consecutive generations speaking their own "dying" language within their own community while learning the boss-man's tongue only very gradually, just enough to follow orders. People continue to think, and to formulate their sentences, in the patterns of the old language, even as they slowly change over to the new language's vocabulary and gradually forget the words from their parents' and grandparents' language. (Most of the words, anyway.)

This quite obviously happened among the earliest African-Americans bound in slavery, to the Irish oppressed in their own country, and (albeit to a lesser extent) to the Cajun people in Louisiana.

What eventually develops is a special, unique brand of the "new" language (in all three of these cases, English) that is very clearly characteristic of the ethnic/cultural/national group in question, and which "sounds" either incorrect, or highly poetic, or both, to outsiders.

Oh yeah ~ back to Zydeco.

Many of Clifton Chenier's most successful songs were direct translation of Fats Domono hits into the French language. Once upon a time I could rattle off a list of titles, but can't think of any at the moment. Whether these particular songs qwualify as true "Zydeco" or not depends upon how strictly one defines the term, but they're not all that much different from even the "purest" examples of Zydeco.

(Incidentally, FWIW, Antoine "Fats" Domino comes from a French-speaking Creole family that moved to New Orleans from rural south-central Louisiana only a few years before he was born.)