Text and photos by Philip Cartelli

“Over the past five or six years there’s been something of a rebirth of young Cajun bands who try to do the real thing… keepin’ it French,” explains Wilson Savoy, a twenty-six year old accordionist with an easygoing manner and a pushed-back baseball cap permanently perched on his head.  I’m in Louisiana on the trail of the younger purveyors of a local music that has earned recent acclaim, both from listeners in the U.S. and abroad, and among the living descendants of one of the country’s last remaining tight-knit local cultures. This isn’t in New Orleans, though, but a three-and-a-half hour Greyhound bus ride and a world away in the cultural capital of southwest Louisiana, the city of Lafayette.

On the back porch of the Grant Street Dancehall, a local watering hole and live music venue, I sit down with Wilson Savoy, whose Pine Leaf Boys were nominated for a Grammy this year (they lost), to talk about the latest wave of a music most call “Cajun.” “There aren’t many cultural musics that are indigenous to America,” he begins. “People can come out and learn about this melting pot in Louisiana, about the people who have all come here. You got the Spaniards, the Native Americans, the blacks, the (French) whites and all these people who got together in Louisiana and mingled and made this mélange of different kinds of ingredients that now is known as Cajun music. It’s a great music, it’s bluesy, it’s a party music…and I think if it doesn’t make you want to dance then you better check your pulse ‘cause you’re probably not alive.”  He will later admit, “A lot of people just think that Cajun is a kind of seasoning.” 

A few weeks after our conversation, the Pine Leaf Boys are playing to a crowd at DBA, a club on Frenchman Street in New Orleans. The audience is a mix of New Orleans’ downtown scenesters, uptown yuppies and some passersby, different from the less cosmopolitan denizens of Lafayette. Wilson Savoy speaks into the microphone, “We’re gonna play a song right now, it’s called ‘Les Petites et les Grosses.’ If you speak French you might know that means ‘the little ones and the big fat ones.’ If you don’t know what that means you can just wonder what we’re talking about.” He grins slyly, then drawls, “We’re talking about buying cattle, of course.” The crowd whoops and the band launches into a classic up-tempo Cajun two-step.  

With around 100,000 inhabitants, Lafayette clocks in as the biggest city of Acadiana, or simply “Cajun country,” which earned its name from the inhabitants who have called it home for some 250 years since their expulsion from British Canada following the French and Indian War.  With a historic downtown area that thrives on youthful energy from the University of Louisiana campus a few blocks away, the so-called “hub city” may not be as picturesque as surrounding older Cajun towns, but it gets its fair share of visitors; on weekends the bars and clubs of Jefferson Street are mobbed.  In homage to the region’s historic inhabitants, street signs and municipal buildings are marked in both French and English. 

Cajun music sounds roughly like a cross between country, bluegrass and southern rock with elements of Celtic (a result of the ancestry of the original French immigrants to Canada) and Caribbean music (from the region’s important Afro-Creole population) thrown in. It is difficult to describe its energy in words, especially the updated brand of traditional Cajun music performed by Lafayette-area groups like the Pine Leaf Boys, the Lost Bayou Ramblers and Feufollet, layered with rhythms and melodies that are as infectiously catchy as anyone could hope to dance to on a Saturday night. 

The majority of the young musicians who have re-popularized the genre among Acadiana’s youth are aged between 20 and 30 and come from musical families. Wilson Savoy’s parents are Marc and Ann Savoy, veteran Cajun instrumentalist-singers and folklorists in their own right. The uncle of Lost Bayou Ramblers’ Louis and André Michot is Bobby Michot, another legendary performer. Some of the members of Feufollet, several of whom are still working toward their undergraduate degrees at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette, have been performing in public since adolescence. What separates the revolutionary dynamic of this Cajun new wave from other rejuvenations of American traditional music is the participation and enthusiasm of local youth—as fans.

In Lafayette, Opelousas, Eunice and other nearby towns it’s possible to go to a “French dance” or fais do-do and see three generations dancing side by side, from geriatrics who speak English as their second language to college kids majoring in French and Francophone studies. “Where else in the world do you have great-grandma gettin’ out on the dance floor with great-grandson?” challenged Brett Broussard, a local boat captain and born and bred Cajun music fan. When I ask why young people are still drawn to a music that is largely played the same way it was seventy years ago, Broussard fixes me with serious eyes and responds with conviction, “Because they love life. Veut la vie.”

In the 1970s and 80s, partially influenced by the folk movement of the 60s, young Cajuns like Michael Doucet (of Beausoleil) and Zachary Richard participated in an updating of Cajun music, repopularizing its traditional form among their generation. While local youth may appreciate the practiced stylings of older musicians, they pack the floor to see younger groups like the Pine Leaf Boys (whose guitarist sports a mohawk) and other younger, mostly male, ensembles whose members may or may not have reputations as local heartthrobs.

Wilson Savoy explains the Pine Leaf Boys’ role in this phenomenon. “We’re out there trying to show people that you can come out on a Friday night to a bar, get drunk and dance to Cajun music and it’s cool. All the young people know that, hey, we can all go out booty-dancing on the strip (Lafayette’s Jefferson Street) or we can go to a Cajun nightclub and there’ll be a lot of hot girls there: let’s go there. When you get beer and hot girls involved then you get the young people involved.”

Steve Riley of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana is, at the age of 39, one of the direct forerunners of these young Cajun musicians.  Twenty years ago he began performing with the Mamou Playboys and has since been lauded for creating a resilient updated style of Cajun music with modern production quality that—literally—rocks.  I asked Steve to weigh in on the current generation and discuss the enduring popularity of Cajun music in and around Lafayette.  “I hear a lot of us in them,” Steve says of Feufollet (he’s produced several of their albums).  “They might hate me for sayin’ that, but I do.  It’s a nice feeling to hear what they’re doing.  They’re great musicians, they’re great songwriters, and they’re so much younger than we are…it’s just amazing.” 

Riley goes on to describe the musical versatility of the Pine Leaf Boys’ Wilson Savoy on accordion and fiddle, adding, “He’s so good at the piano that I’m starting a band with him.”  He laughs.  “These kids are so damn good I gotta start bands with ‘em!”  “There’s a cool, very vibrant scene in Lafayette and it’s been pretty much spearheaded by this younger generation.” 

“Let’s go to Lafayette,” begin the French lyrics of the first Cajun song ever recorded in 1928, although the current de facto center of Acadiana was not always one of the area’s main cultural hubs. The Lost Bayou Ramblers’ Louis and André Michot explained to me that the city’s importance was determined by its status as a major business center, particularly in the first half of the last century when oil companies began moving into southern Louisiana, bringing with them rapid modernization and Americanization. “To be able to make a living as a musician you need to be in a place where there’s a lot of demand and money for it,” summarizes Louis.  Among the different groups, the Lost Bayou Ramblers create a sonic ambiance that is, according to Riley, “like old ‘50s Cajun music.”  The experience of hearing Louis’ twangy vocals, while his brother André trades his accordion for a lap steel guitar and Alain LaFleur strums his standup bass, does conjure the image of an old-time Texas string band—except the lyrics are in French and drummer Chris Courville sometimes wears a t-shirt on stage that reads, “Let’s Mess With Texas.” 

Aside from the economic necessity of being based in a city, Feufollet’s Chris Segura offers, “The community of musicians is very tight around here,” with members of different bands subbing in for one another and collaborating on different occasions. The Pine Leaf Boys’ Jon Bertrand started out playing for the Lost Bayou Ramblers and Wilson Savoy has recorded a concept album with the Ramblers as the “Mello Joy Boys,” not to mention Savoy, Cedric Watson and Louis Michot’s earlier collaborative effort as the Savoy-Michot Band. The relationships of young professional Lafayette-area musicians are near-incestuous but they keep them clean—not one of the groups I interviewed voiced any complaints or competitiveness.

Lafayette’s youthful spirit has certainly been part of the engine behind the recent popularity of groups like the Ramblers, and there are local institutions that keep that engine going. One is the Blue Moon Saloon, a guesthouse—slash—integral music venue and bar located in downtown Lafayette.  It hosts mostly local, mostly Cajun musicians on Wednesday through Sunday nights. Louis describes the open-air club as a “diverse place for all kinds of people from all around to come” to enjoy Cajun music in as authentic an environment as one can find in the 21^st century USA. On an average performance night the Blue Moon’s consciously rustic back porch may be packed with an assemblage of locals and tourists swigging High Life and dancing right in front of the stage—the show normally goes right on past its scheduled 11pm ending time and guests and musicians stay on to chat and drink more beers afterwards. In addition to laying claim to being the first band to perform at the Blue Moon on the night of its opening in 2002, the Lost Bayou Ramblers recorded their recent Grammy-nominated CD there (like the Pine Leaf Boys they didn’t win).  By way of his own endorsement, Cedric Watson notes, “nobody drops beers bottles on the dance floor.” 

Another local institution is Valcour Records, part-run by Joel Savoy, Wilson’s brother. Within two years of its founding, Valcour has already carved a niche—and maybe more—for itself in southern Louisiana as the producer of vintage-style Cajun and Creole albums, all recorded within the same time span as its existence and by musicians too young to remember when Jimmy Carter was president.  Steve Riley claims to me that there is as much relative abundance of quality music in Lafayette as in New Orleans, a bold assertion that just may be true. 

This music is not, however, 100% Cajun. First there’s the point that Louis Michot brings up, when he wonders rhetorically, “How could we avoid putting our own influences in the music?” A range of modern and older influences are obvious on these groups’ recent albums, none more so than Feufollet’s Cow Island Hop, which was more closely influenced by contemporary indie rock sounds than by the Cajun musical trinity of vocals-accordion-fiddle.

One local influence that exists both apart and within the Cajun sound and affiliated black culture is the music of Louisiana Creoles, many of whom have French roots similar to those of Cajuns while also sharing some traits with their distant relations in the French Caribbean. For over a century, Creoles have shared a region, an economy and a musical tradition with the Cajun people, but have largely lived apart. Examples of cross-racial collaboration are rare and mostly recent, including that of Cajun accordion and “old-style” singer Jesse Légé with Edward Poullard, a Creole fiddler.

Cedric Watson of the Pine Leaf Boys is currently one of the leading performers of the Creole sound in southwestern Louisiana, though he hails from eastern Texas. Among some locals he is considered the second coming of veteran Creole musicians like Ed Poullard, Canray Fontenot and Amede Ardoin (who, in the 1930s was in the midst of a historic collaboration with Cajun fiddler Dennis McGee when he was brutally beaten for having unclear relations with a white woman). Watson’s vocal, fiddle and accordion contributions to the Pine Leaf Boys’ two albums have paved the way for his first solo album which combines the sounds of zydeco (an updated Creole music blended with 1960s-era R&B and soul) and La La, a Creole music from the ‘30s into which he has breathed new life.

Watson confessed to me his affection for African, Haitian and other Caribbean musics, which inform his style mostly in solo shows, when he can be seen belting out Boozoo Chavis’ zydeco-blues anthem, “Tee Black,” with his frequent accompanist Rasta Mike on washboard, and a Haitian kadans-influenced accordion solo. Watson also plays an integral role in the Pine Leaf Boys, and his soulful rendition of the waltz, “Musician With a Broken Heart,” is a bona fide crowd pleaser at the Boys’ live shows. “Let’s face it,” says Steve Riley.  “There are no Creole kids playing Cajun fiddle…at least not like he is.  He stands alone.” 

I asked Riley about the state of Cajun music three years after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita ripped through Louisiana’s coast, destroying several towns and drastically affecting the fishing industry upon which many Cajuns depended. “Music has always served the function down here of getting people through hard times,” he responded. “It’s part of so many aspects of life. I remember after Katrina we went and played in New Orleans and the place was packed. It was packed with people who you wouldn’t usually see coming to hear Cajun music.” He continued, “Back to back hurricanes down here and all that destruction might actually have led to the re-energized music scene” and associated culture. Go to downtown Lafayette and “you can hear twenty-somethings hanging around, speaking French in coffeehouses. It’s pretty cool.” 

First published: www.afropop.org