When a young C.J. Chenier heard his first zydeco record, he wasn’t sure what to make of it.

“It was French and my mom didn’t speak French even though she was from Louisiana,” he said. “She was from a non-French-speaking part of Louisiana. So, most of the songs were in French and the only one I really understood on there was an instrumental.

“I wasn’t resistant to it,” Chenier said. “I just didn’t understand. A lot of it at that time sounded the same to me.”

There’s nothing unusual about a young person failing initially to fully appreciate a style of music that is new to him.

What makes it sort of intriguing in this case is the identity of the artist who made the record: Chenier’s father, Clifton Chenier.

From those exceedingly humble musical beginnings, C.J. Chenier went on to assume his father’s King of Zydeco mantle.

C.J. Chenier and the Red Hot Louisiana Band perform on August 11 at the Foellinger Freimann Botanical Conservatory as part of the Botanical Roots series.

C.J. Chenier was a saxophonist in a funk band in Texas when his dad sent a zydeco summons.

“I was 20 years old,” he recalled. “I was playing in this funk band and we were playing at a bazaar at a Catholic church. A friend of mine’s mom lived down the street and she sent someone to the bazaar to tell me my mom needed me to call her.

“So I went down and called her,” Chenier said. “And that’s the day she said, ‘You’ve got to come home because your daddy wants you to go on the road with him.’”

Chenier’s initial reaction to this directive from his dad was guarded: “I thought, “Man, I gotta go on the road was all them old dudes?’”

But Chenier said his first tour with his dad turned out to be “the best time I ever had in my whole life.”

The phrase “trial by fire” was coined to describe extreme tests of mettle and worthiness. As Chenier prepared to meet up with his father’s band for the first time, he couldn’t have known that what awaited him was something like a trial by zydeco.

“I came from funk,” he said, “and all of a sudden I am taking the place of the greatest zydeco saxophonist I had ever heard, John Hart. I thought he was going to be there but he wasn’t. It was just me. I didn’t know songs. I didn’t know nothing.”

Thankfully, the other band members were patient with Chenier. “They knew I didn’t know nothing,” he said, laughing.

Chenier assumed he’d feel awkward at first performing with the band, but that proved not to be the case.

“I felt real comfortable up there standing next to my dad,” he said. “The way the crowd acted. I had never seen anything like that before. I had been in gigs where they danced a lot. But when we went to places like California and Oregon, people went crazy. It was a new experience for me.”

As Clifton Chenier’s health declined, he pressured his son to become proficient on his instrument: the accordion.

“When I got in the band, he kept telling me, ‘You know you’re going to have to learn that accordion,’” he said. “‘You’re going to have to take over for me some day.’ I kind of started feeling around with it. Let me tell you, that big accordion had way too many buttons on it.”

So Chenier, who’d had some piano training, acquired a smaller accordion and slowly worked his way up to the larger model.

Nine years after C.J. Chenier joined the band, his dad passed away. But Chenier had started taking a lead role long before that.

“When he got sick, man, he started letting me open the shows for him,” he said. “And sometimes he’d be so ill, I’d have to play almost a whole show. So (when he died), it was just a natural thing for us to continue. There was no other way but to keep going. We were red hot.”

Chenier took over officially in 1987 and he said he’s been on the road ever since.

Here’s something that’s interesting to consider: Having grown up in Texas with his mom, Chenier’s familiarity with Louisiana, birthplace of zydeco, is fairly limited.

He said he performs there regularly but he has never spent a significant amount of time there.

The man that the Boston Globe called “the crown prince of zydeco” is a Texan.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Zydeco long ago expanded well beyond the confines of Louisiana, but it wasn’t always thus.

Chenier said that when he first joined his dad’s band, zydeco was a household word…just in an extremely limited number of households.

“He had a massive following in California and Oregon and up in Washington,” he said. “And nobody else was doing the traveling. He was the only one doing it at that time. But if you told people who were weren’t in the mix, ‘I play zydeco music,’ and they’d be like, ‘Zyde-what?’

“Nobody knew,” Chenier said. “Now everybody knows what zydeco is. The musicians went out pounding the pavement and the people got interested and started trying to figure out what it was. It’s the happiest music you can find.”

As C.J. Chenier’s renown grew, musicians like Paul Simon, John Mayall and the Gin Blossoms started asking him to collaborate with them.

“I did a few things,” he said. “It’s all fun.”

Chenier was at the center of some unexpected controversy a few years back when Mike Vital, a distant relative, sued him.

Vital claimed that C.J. Chenier is not Clifton Chenier’s biological son and, therefore, is not entitled to use his last name or to benefit from that last name.

Vital wanted documentation, which Chenier said he provided.

“It was all about greed,” Chenier said. “Somebody trying to be greedy. They tried to accuse me of fraud, basically. When I showed them proof of who I am, I haven’t heard from them for almost three years. In fact, I haven’t heard from them since two months after they filed their suit.

“Some people have ulterior motives,” he said. “They think they can get what you got. They’re just that type of person.”

Chenier said the upcoming concert will be his fourth or fifth performance in Fort Wayne.

“I love coming to Fort Wayne, man,” he said. “I love looking out at the people dancing at the Botanical Gardens and thinking about who is discovering zydeco for the first time.”