Louisana's Cajun Dancers, Drinkers & Contemplators of the Stars

The music—syncopated drumbeats, a swinging fiddle, the asthmatic whine of an accordion—sounds like an echo from the darkened parking lot, a mimicry of a tinny, distant amusement-park ride.  Indeed, the recreated Cajun village through which one passes to reach the music, its eleven houses built from mud walls and hand-hewn cypress timbers, does nothing to disabuse the notion; what feels strange are the people in modern clothing, not everything else. 

Approaching the stage, the speakers begin to rumble one’s insides.  A group of unexpectedly young people onstage rock out; one saws away furiously at a fiddle, another bangs feverishly on drums.  A mild-looking kid hems and haws passionately at an accordion, his face contorted with feeling.  Music tumbles out of f-holes and voice boxes and amplifiers, cresting and crashing, waxing and waning, and the crowd responds accordingly, dancing to the bouncy tunes and musing to the ballads. 

Even a visiting writer, road-weary and alone, can’t help but be drawn in.  Night’s breezes wick off the day’s sweat, wafting at once coolness and warmth, like a whisper blown sweetly into an ear.  I spend the first few minutes standing around awkwardly, as everyone else seems to have come with friends, until it occurs to me that being a reporter is the world’s best excuse for talking to strangers, and I hasten to.

A group of disheveled-looking college students, stoned, dreadlocked and flower-bedecked, is heaped on a picnic blanket.  “We love the music, the heritage, the dancing, the being outdoors,” says Lacey Dupré-Bacqué, a master’s student in organic gardening at LSU.  “This corner of Louisiana is special because our traditions are rich, abundant, still very much alive, and maintained by young people.” Indeed, smatterings of French—both Parisian and Acadian—erupt at random.  “Ever Cajun-danced?” asks Lacey.  Before I have a chance to stammer anything about possessing congenital left feet, she’s pulled me to the dance floor and whirls me around until we’re both breathless and likely bleeding at the toes. 

Jeremiah Ariaz, a young art professor who’s just moved to Baton Rouge from Los Angeles, was surprised by how deeply he enjoyed the Cajun music festivals he began attending.  “The South has a very distinct culture that’s absent in a lot of parts of the country,” he says.  “But people here embrace it.  It makes for a lot of fun.” 

“Festivals are magical,” adds Lydia Harrison, an old-time fiddler from upstate New York who’s come to Blackpot to play.  “They create community.  People come to play, people come to listen, people come to dance.  People come to be exhilarated, rejuvenated.”

I wander over to a woman representing a health-food store in Lafayette.  She’s handing out samples of blueberry granola, sesame pretzels, and shots of a vile, minerally orange syrup advertised as “liquid sunshine.”  I didn’t realize that Lafayette was a hippie town, I tell her.  “Oh, it isn’t,” she assures me.  “But you know, it’s at festivals that everyone intersects: the hippies, the old-timers, the families.” 

Glenn Fields, the force behind Blackpot, drums for the Red Stick Ramblers, a Cajun band that travels 200 days a year and headlined the festival.  “We play so many festivals that we wanted to take our favorite elements of the ones we like—the camping, the cookoffs—and combine them into one.”  He and the other organizers called their friends and put together a lineup fifteen bands strong.  “It seems like the popularity of Cajun music and culture swings back and forth—there was an upswing in the 60s, in the 80s, and now the pendulum’s swinging back: it’s hip again.” 

Fellow organizer Jillian Johnson, who plays ukulele for a totally rocking, all-girl old-time harmony band called the Figs, notes that Louisiana sees an average of seventeen festivals a month.  Today’s Cajun fans, she adds, are increasingly more educated and worldly-wise than audiences of yore, but nonetheless appreciate the traditions. “Compared to the country musicians of the past, who actually toiled in the fields, we’re approaching Cajun music from a much more intellectual perspective,” she points out.  “We all have cell phones and email accounts, but the music’s still relevant.” 

Jillian and Glenn aren’t kidding about the intellectual perspective bit.  When I ask for a primer on Cajun music—what separates it from zydeco, say, or old-time, or Western swing (not like I knew what any of these were), they set off on a rapid-fire exchange, alternately finishing each other’s sentences and disagreeing.  It goes something like this:

“So, the early songs were a mixture of reels and jigs and contredanses and la la, which is snare drum and accordion with a really simple melody line—”
“But of course there were other folk influences, like African music, that’s where the trancelike rhythms come from—”
“The songs were all in Cajun French at first, mainly ballads, with themes like death or solitude because of the exile—”
“You’d have fiddles as the original instrument, then accordion came later, with the Germans—”
“And then banjos and mandolins and keyboards, that was a Western swing influence, you know, the Texas stuff—”
“They wanted to take the old music and make it hip, adding swing, slide guitar, country, a blues influence, mazurkas maybe—”
“Whereas zydeco, on the other hand, is Cajun-influenced but Creole-based; highly syncopated, fast-paced, dominated by the accordion—”
“You know the king, Clifton Chenier?  Of course you know the king—”
“Of course she doesn’t know the king, man.  Look at her, she’s overwhelmed.”

I am.  Thankfully, it’s time to dance again, this time with an older man named Harold who’s taught Cajun dance for many years.  I try to distract him from my disastrous moves by asking questions.  “Cajun music still survives because of, well, the music.” he reckons.  “People were isolated in Nova Scotia for 150 years, and then down in Louisiana for another 150 years.  They just stewed with time, and the music along with them.  Like gumbo!” 

Harold will be cooking gumbo tomorrow, gumbo des herbes, or as he pronounces it, gumbo zaab, for the cook-off. “If you’re white, or under fifty, you’ve never heard of it,” he guffaws.  “It’s got turnips, mustard greens, collards, andouillette, smoked sausage, corn, and I’m making it in my granddad’s old cast-iron pot.”  The granddad died only recently, at the age of 111.

We one-step and two-step and jig and jitterbug.  “Look at what’s going on around us,” Harold says.  “Kids are dancing because it’s kids that are playing.  In fact, the music’s better than it’s ever been, because the old musicians are still around, getting older but still willing to teach, and they have a whole mess of people wanting to learn.” 

As the night winds down, the campsite fills with bonfires and small jam sessions, people squeezing boxy black accordions, plucking child-sized ukuleles, and tapping kitchen spoons and castanets.  A man who turns out to be the captain of the Mississippi Highway Patrol plays the claw hammer banjo; another hoots at him, “He’s got more tricks than licks, that one!”  Away from the bright lights and amplifiers, the music becomes more itself, the kind of comfortable sound that people once upon a time would wrap around themselves like a quilt.

I’d expected minstrelsy, old-fashioned-but-fun hokeyness.  But what I’d found was surprising: traditional music that had lost neither relevancy nor affectiveness nor muscle.  Something the health-food rep had said earlier popped up in my head.  “Compared to the processed pop music we hear today, Cajun music’s totally…organic,” she said, carefully.  “It’s home-grown stuff, nutritious, you know?  That’s why it feels so satisfying.” 


In October and November 2006, I meandered circuitously between San Francisco to Miami under the auspices of Minnesota-based nonprofit Renewing the Countryside, interviewing farmers, ecologists, musicians and activists for a book on youth revitalizing rural landscapes all across America.  Hero-bosses Jan Joannides and Brett Olsen have allowed me to post my interviews here, but look for them in the Youth Renewing the Countryside book, due out in the spring of 2008. 

Comments

[Suzannah DesRoches]

Natalie,
Nice write-up on the BlackPot Festival! You did a great job of depicting it and just reading about it has made my mouth water. I remember meeting you somewhere near that blanket of hairy people and I somehow just found you. I think the book is going to be amazing, I can't wait to see it. I hope to see you this year in Lafayette. Bon Temps!