DAPHNE, Ala. — Despite a reduced schedule and poor weather, the sixth annual Daphne Zydeco And Crawfish Festival drew almost 900 visitors to the Daphne Civic Center over the weekend.

Saved by a last-minute plan to reduce the event from three to two days and to cut some of the outdoor activities featured in previous years, the festival drew attendees from as far afield as New York, Pennsylvania and California.

“This is the first year the attendance was down, perhaps because of the oil spill,” said Acting Civic Center Director Deni Biggs. But she added that with the number advance ticket sales and estimates of attendance over the weekend, she believed the event would be self-supporting.

The two-day event featured a strong line-up of bands from Louisiana, the home of Zydeco music, including Geno Delafose, Curley Taylor and Leon Chavis. The growth in popularity of Zydeco music has been built largely on the strength of local dance clubs, according to dance teacher, Mike Humphries, from Baton Rouge, La., who together with his wife Liz, have attended all of the Daphne festivals since their inception.

The Humphries worked on a dance floor set up in the lobby of the Civic Center for the entire event teaching 30-minute classes aimed at all levels of experience.

“It ain’t nothing but a two step,” Liz Humphries told a nervous class of beginners on Friday night. “Just a two step done in place; unlike Cajun dancing where you parade around the edge of the dance floor, in Zydeco you dance closer and in place. The trick is the faster the music the shorter your step.”

It was the offer of dance instruction that drew Amy Small of Osark Ala., to the Daphne event. She first heard Zydeco at a local festival “but I am a country dancer and came here this weekend for the dance lessons,” she said. “This is such great music to dance to.”

Though both stem from Louisiana, Zydeco differs from Cajun because of its use of rhythm and blues elements, according to Small. “You hear more fiddle in Cajun and it is more based on country while the blues sounds are there in Zydeco,” she said.

Dance clubs from across the region were in evidence with a contingent of 60 traveling from the Zydeco dance club in Birmingham, Ala. As each song started, the dance floor in front of the main stage would fill up with couples.

Mike Humphries said that while he thought the reduced schedule may have reduced the numbers of traveling dancers, “we saw more people from Mobile than ever this year.”

Humphries says that the Zydeco festival circuit is growing nation-wide. He will be teaching at events in Connecticut, Iowa and Minnesota this year, far from the music’s roots along the bayou.