A souped-up accordion and a fearless attitude have taken Renée de la Prade to a number of locales she’s always wanted to see—and a few she’d rather not see again.

When the Georgia Straight reaches the self-proclaimed “stomp fox of the squeezebox”, her band Whiskey and Women has just finished a European jaunt that encompassed Sweden, France, and Germany. The response to the trio’s punky zydeco approach was overwhelmingly positive, she says, unlike the reaction she met during an earlier swing through Louisiana.

“I went down to New Orleans with my little sister Rosie,” she recalls, on the line from her Bay Area home. “And Rosie had a house to stay at, but it was filthy, and the people who lived there were these dysfunctional, drunk gutter punks covered with tattoos. It was so nasty I couldn’t stay there more than one or two nights, and meanwhile I tried to do some dishes for these poor souls who couldn’t clean up after themselves. I came back from the store with dish soap, a sponge, and ice cream to make friends with them, but they were just ungrateful!”

So ungrateful, she adds, that they mocked her housekeeping skills, despite their own lack of same. But de la Prade has since had her revenge.

“I didn’t say anything in the moment; I was super-quiet,” she explains. “And then I was like, ‘I’m writing a song about you guys. This sucks, so I’m going to make fun of you.’ ”

The result was “Gutter Punk”, which is definitely among the highlights of de la Prade’s repertoire. Characterized by a romping zydeco beat and the immortal couplet “I love your hat and your dungarees/But it’s hard to be a hottie when you smell like pee,” it typifies her happily snotty attitude while showing off the modifications she’s made to her instrument in order to make it more useful to the modern-day musician.

“Before I played accordion I played guitar for 10 years, and the kind of guitar I was learning was rock guitar,” says de la Prade, who moonlights in accordion repair in Oakland. “But when I moved to the accordion, I listened to the way that other accordionists used the left hand and I was like, ‘Man, that doesn’t rock at all!’ So I took out the original reeds and replaced them with bass notes and chords. When you listen to my left hand I’m playing punk-rock riffs, but then on the right side I’m playing traditional melodies.”

The woman behind the annual Accordion Babes pinup calendar describes her music as an amalgam of zydeco, Celtic, blues, punk, and old-school rock ’n’ roll. Her performance style, she adds, was honed on the street.

“The fact that the accordion is a great instrument for busking meant that I had incentive to practise, because I was paying the rent with my practice time,” she says with a laugh. “I got really good doing that. I mean, you do that for 11 years, you can pick up a lot of repertoire. And then if you pack me into a tutu and some thigh-high tights, with that punk-rock attitude and purple hair, I do pretty good with my crazy, rockin’, sexy energy.”