On May 3, 2026, Lee Allen Zeno died in Lafayette, Louisiana, at the age of 71. He had played bass in Buckwheat Zydeco’s band for nearly forty years. He had been called “Soul” by people who used that name with the precision and economy that nicknames acquire when they are correct. He had played on Grammy-winning records and Emmy-recognized projects. He had taught at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He had outlasted the cancer for longer than most people outlast it. The Daily Beast and Living Blues and 64 Parishes all confirmed the date.
Zeno’s bass line is not abstract. It is on records that you can buy. It is on tapes the State of Louisiana paid no one to archive systematically and that survive because individual collectors kept them. The rhythm section he anchored ran from approximately 1986 — when Stanley “Buckwheat Zydeco” Dural was building the band that would tour internationally — through the band’s full national run and into the work Buckwheat Jr. has carried since his father’s death in 2016. The rhythm did not break in the handoff. Zeno was one of the reasons it did not break.
He was the third name Black Louisiana lost in six months.
Stephanie Smallwood
Stephanie Smallwood was born February 14, 1958, in Alexandria, Louisiana, to James and Lillian Augustine Smallwood. She graduated from Bolton High School in Alexandria in 1977. She studied Mass Communications at the University of Southwestern Louisiana — the institution now known as the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She fell ill in October 2025. She officially retired from Z105.9 on December 1, 2025. She died in January 2026.
The radio station she worked for is Z105.9 KFXZ, owned by Delta Media Corporation. The station calls itself “The Soul of Southwest Louisiana.” For twelve years on its daily air, Smallwood was the soul of the soul. Her show ran in the morning. Lafayette listeners — Black, Creole, Cajun, every kind of Acadiana driver on a commute — knew her voice before they had finished the first cup of coffee. She was the first African American woman in the Lafayette radio market to host a daily show. That is a one-line entry in the archive. It is a forty-year-deep entry in the lived history of the listeners who waited for it.
Milton Arceneaux, on the board of AOC Community Media at the time of her passing, described her in a public statement: “Stephanie was one of the most powerful people you could meet — not because she demanded attention, but because her presence carried weight.”
The radio station continues. The morning show continues. The first slot a Black woman occupied in the Lafayette daily lineup is not occupied by another Black woman as of this writing.
Bryant Benoit
Bryant Benoit died in 2026, in his mid-fifties, in Lafayette. He was a visual artist working primarily in collage. The Acadiana Center for the Arts called him a documentarian of Creole culture working through what they called “a truly unique lens.” That is not an embellishment. The lens was unique because Benoit refused to flatten the Black Louisiana experience into a single image. His collages layered. They held multiple registers — gospel and street, family and stage, joy and the documented evidence of what joy survives.
His gallery, Benoit Gallery, operated in downtown Lafayette until 2020. It now operates at 1402 North University Avenue, run by his wife, Joey Benoit. In 2024, he received an ArtSpark Lafayette grant — administered by the Acadiana Center for the Arts and the Lafayette Economic Development Authority — to create a series of portraits of influential Black leaders and cultural pioneers. He did not finish the series.
Milton Arceneaux, who knew him, put it this way: “a friend, a culture bearer, and one of the few people the community relied on to represent Creole culture authentically and unapologetically.”
The gallery at 1402 North University Avenue is the address. It is open. The completed portraits are inside. The unfinished ones are also inside.
What the Three Have in Common
Three deaths. Three Black Louisiana cultural workers. Three different art forms — bass guitar, radio voice, collage. None of them retired into a quiet final decade. All of them were producing the week they fell ill.
They share something else. None of the three is the subject of a comprehensive book-length biographical archive published by a Louisiana institution.
There are profiles. The Advocate ran on each of them. KLFY ran on Stephanie. 64 Parishes ran on Lee Allen. The Louisiana Crafts Guild has a directory entry for Benoit. Local funeral homes carry the obituaries. Those records are real. They are also thin.
The University of Louisiana at Lafayette holds Lee Allen Zeno’s faculty record. It does not hold an oral history archive of his forty years on tour with Buckwheat Zydeco. The University of Louisiana at Lafayette is approximately one mile from where Zeno taught. The recording equipment exists. The students existed. The grant funding to capture the interview exists somewhere.
The Z105.9 archive holds Stephanie Smallwood’s broadcast tapes — to whatever extent Delta Media Corporation has retained them. There is no public-facing archive at the station that makes those tapes available to researchers or to the listeners who shaped their mornings around her voice. No state archive has requested them. The Library of Congress American Folklife Center could. None of that has happened publicly.
The Bryant Benoit gallery holds his work. His widow Joey Benoit is, at this writing, the de facto archivist. There is no Louisiana state institution that has opened a formal acquisition conversation with the Benoit estate about preserving the unfinished portrait series, the early collages, or the personal correspondence. The Acadiana Center for the Arts has done meaningful work. The state’s repository institutions — the Hill Memorial Library at LSU, the Amistad Research Center at Tulane, the Louisiana State Archives — have not, as of this writing, formally acquired the Benoit papers.
That is the gap.
What Documenting Actually Looks Like
When the New Orleans Tribune — the first Black daily newspaper in the United States — published its first issue in 1864 from a rented office on South Rampart Street in New Orleans, it did so with two editors, a printing press, and the conviction that what Black Louisianans were doing in 1864 needed to be in the record before the people who did it died. The Tribune was published in French and English. It documented Reconstruction politics, marriages, burials, lawsuits, and the daily commerce of the free Black community in New Orleans. It folded in 1870. By the time it folded, six years of the most consequential period in Louisiana Black history were on paper. The paper survives. The archive is in Tulane’s Amistad Research Center.
Documenting is not a creative choice. Documenting is the answer to who carries the names forward when the people who carried them die.
Lee Allen Zeno appears in Milton Arceneaux’s first book, CREOLE TAPESTRY & LUMINARY VOICES: Magnifying the View of Influence. He appears in Built on Zydeco, the documentary co-directed by Arceneaux and Dustin Cravins, which premiered in March 2026 — six weeks before Zeno’s death. The film captured Zeno’s playing in his last working months. The book captured his name in the same volume as the people he played alongside. Both are forms of acquisition. Both pre-existed the loss. Both will outlast it.
That is what documenting looks like. It is not nostalgia. It is not commemoration. It is the active practice of putting names, dates, addresses, and recordings into a form the next generation can find.
The Practical Question
Vues de Culture, an independent Louisiana cultural nonprofit, was founded to make this kind of acquisition routine — not occasional. The work is documentary film, photography, and cultural programming, told from inside Black Louisiana, made for Black Louisiana audiences first.
There are roughly two hundred Black Louisiana cultural workers in their seventies right now whose primary archive is in their own homes, on their own hard drives, in cassette tapes their grandchildren do not know the contents of. The cost of capturing each one — a four-hour oral history, a digital scan of personal photographs, a clean-master transfer of any audio they hold — is approximately $1,500 per subject. Multiply by two hundred. The total is $300,000.
The University of Louisiana at Lafayette could host the project. The Amistad Research Center at Tulane could host it. The Louisiana State Archives could host it. None of them has it on the public roadmap.
Vues de Culture is filing for 501(c)(3) status in 2026 and entering the major grant cycle in the fall. The institutional framework is being built so that the next time a Lee Allen Zeno or a Stephanie Smallwood or a Bryant Benoit is in their last working year, the recording is already happening.
The names will be remembered. The question is whether the work will be on file when someone goes looking.