Carl Brasseaux describes the early musical tradition of the Acadians settling in Louisiana in his book, Acadian to Cajun. Although the details of the custom varied across settlements, almost all new Cajuns participated in weekend bals de maison (house dances). The musicians were limited to two or three fiddlers performing for the entertainment of the dancers (Brasseaux 29). These musicians inherited their instruments and their repertoire from their Acadian progenitors.
Soon after their arrival in Louisiana, the Cajuns began to buy accordions from German-Jewish merchants (Ancelet 149). The accordion quickly displaced the fiddle as the lead instrument in Cajun music, marking the primary differentiation between Acadian and Cajun instrumentation. Pre-existing cultures in Louisiana influenced Cajun instrumentation, as well. The most famous contribution is Afro-Caribbean percussion. Cajuns turned from rasps and gourds to washboards, or frottoirs. The washboard evolved into a corrugated metal sheet with shoulder hooks, still called a washboard (Ancelet 166). A less popular instrument in Cajun music, contributed by the Spanish, is the guitar (Ancelet 149).
Less tangible musical elements from other cultures include vocal wailing from Native Americans and vocal and melodic improvisation from Black Creoles (Ancelet 149). Additionally, French Creole settlers in the New World continued to update the new Cajuns on the newest songs from Western France.
Traditional Cajun music has not been immune to new American culture's influence. Many Cajun bands today incorporate electric bass guitars, drum sets, and sometimes electric or acoustic guitars. The blues, rock and roll, and especially country music have influenced the rhythms and harmonic progressions of today's Cajun music. Still, the lyrics of Cajun music are almost exclusively in Cajun French. Finally, Cajun music should not be confused with zydeco, the similar but more bluesy musical form of Black Creoles (Ancelet 150).
Bruce Daigrepont is widely acclaimed as the most popular Cajun musician in New Orleans and often acclaimed as the most popular in Louisiana. Gina Forsyth calls him "arguably the best living songwriter in the Cajun French language." I interviewed Mr. Daigrepont at his home in Metairie, Louisiana, on September 4, 2003.
Although his family had lived in Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana, for generations
since the 1700s, Bruce was the the first of his family born and raised in New
Orleans. He readily states, "My whole viewpoint of Cajun culture has
to be shaped ... by the fact that I lived in New Orleans."
Nonetheless, he spent much of the time in his formative years with his
grandparents on a farm. He considers his experience "with that old
way of life" necessary to play music with the "heart and soul"
that he does. Thus, he has a unique perspective of both an old, rural
Cajun life and a modern, urban Cajun life.
"I played music as long as I can remember," explains Mr. Daigrepont. "I never took formal lessons. I don't read music. I play entirely by instinct." His father played the guitar in the style of Jimmy Rogers and of the Carter Family, whom Bruce calls the "fathers of country music." Bruce received his first guitar for Christmas at the age of five, and he received inspiration from the annual South Louisiana Hayride music festival in Ponchatoula, Louisiana. From the ages of seven to ten, he remembers hearing at the festival musicians such as Ernest Tubb, George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Merle Haggard and the Strangers, Bill Monroe, and Jim and Jesse and the Virginia Boys. Both he and his father took banjo lessons from a man Bruce knew only as "Mr. Jim" from West Virginia who played "like Earl Scruggs." Mr. Jim hosted jam sessions on his front porch where Bruce would play for hours.
Mr. Daigrepont began to play Cajun music when he was about twenty years old. In 1978, he attended Festivals Acadiens in Lafayette, Louisiana. At the music festival, he observed, "For the first time in my life, I [saw] people around my age playing Cajun music and speaking French. ... I came home from that festival with two things that would change my life forever: I wanted to play Cajun music" and to learn to speak Cajun French fluently. When he was younger, his grandmother would tell him, "ton français 'est pas trop bon (your French isn't very good)," but in his twenties, he learned to speak Cajun French fluently.
He admits, "I learn on stage." He cites several instances of playing songs for the first or second time in performance during last-minute gigs. However, he has played Cajun music for twenty-five years now. Despite his experience, Mr. Daigrepont believes "there's so much more to learn." The Cajun music repertoire is not limited to the same thirty songs, he says. The body of music is vast, and he continues to expand it with his original works.
When asked, "What makes Cajun music Cajun?" he gives a fairly precise definition: Cajun music must be sung and Cajun French, and the lead instrument must be the accordion, the fiddle, or both. He says the majority of songs are two-steps or waltzes, but Cajun music is not limited to those styles. As an example, he cites his original song "Bébé de la Famille," which is a cha-cha. He also notes, "People that are not of Cajun heritage that play Cajun music very often are guilty of trying to play the music too fast." The music may sound fast from embellishments on the melody, but the tempo itself is not very fast.
After visiting Acadian Canada, Mr. Daigrepont believes Cajun music in Louisiana is more about dancing than the lyrics. After all, the French-speaking audience in Louisiana is much smaller than that in Canada. As a result, he believes most non-Cajun people believe that Cajun music is happy. Yet the lyrics are often "gut-wrenching." The music is "happy in the sense that it makes us feel good, but if you really listen to the music, it's a lot like the blues. It's mostly a lot of sad things that happen to people. It's a lot of songs about parting, about going away and never seeing someone again." His song, "Acadie à la Louisiane," "maybe the best song I ever wrote," follows the first-person narrator from the grand dérangement in Canada to the decades of wandering after the exile to the oppression in Louisiana, specifically when school teachers reprimanded students for speaking French.
Personally, I particularly identify with Mr. Daigrepont's description of one of the songs on his first album:
It's called 'Disco et Fais Do Do,' and it tells a story of a young Cajun who grew up in Louisiana in a small Cajun community, and he didn't appreciate all the things he grew up with, like celebrations like Mardi Gras, the food. He didn't want to speak French. ... He went to California. ... After the guy's in California awhile, he finds he starts missing that old Cajun music. He says he'd give two hundred dollars if he could find a pound of crawfish. He misses the Cajun language. ... What he misses most of all is the Cajun fais do do dances.
For more information, visit Bruce Daigrepont's website.
Waylon Thibodeaux, a Cajun musician from Houma, Louisiana, is known for his
electric fiddle. He plays gigs internationally, and he was featured at the
Grou Tyme 2003. I interviewed Mr.
Thibodeaux on September 12, 2003, during a break in one of his gigs in the French Quarter in
New Orleans.
Mr. Thibodeaux began his musical career playing country music. He learned the French language from his grandparents. One day, when he turned the radio to a Cajun station in Georgia, he missed home and decided to play Cajun music himself. Although his parents spoke to him in English only, he now speaks to his sons in French because he believes the preservation of the language is important.
He was inspired by a fiddler named Herbert Breaux. Breaux attracted women, and that appealed to Mr. Thibodeaux. He also found inspiration in the Cajun musician Doug Kershaw and especially the country musician Johnny Gimble. Gimble's fiddling really spoke to Mr. Thibodeaux. He stopped playing the drums to learn the fiddle.
When asked to define Cajun music, Mr. Thibodeaux mentioned the musical roots in Cajun ancestry and the instrumentation: triangles, fiddles, and guitars. The accordion is not vital to Cajun music, he says, citing Hadley Castille, whose band plays without an accordion. Mr. Thibodeaux also does not believe that Cajun music needs to be in French. It just has to be "Cajun." He differentiates Cajun music and country music. Cajun music has Louisiana roots, a Louisiana sound, and a Louisiana feel whereas country music has a bluegrass feel and is sung only in English.
Asked about the role of the Acadians' history in Cajun music, Mr. Thibodeaux says he just tries to put on a good show when he plays his fiddle. However, when he composes music, the history of the Acadian people really speaks to him.
For more information, visit Waylon Thibodeaux's website.
Gina Forsyth has established herself as a Cajun fiddler in New Orleans. She has played regularly with the Bruce Daigrepont Cajun Band since 1994, and she appeared on their latest album, Paradis. I interviewed Ms. Forsyth on September 11, 2003, in New Orleans.
Ms. Forsyth was born in Alabama to a musical family. She played rock and roll and a lot of country. Twenty years ago, she moved to Louisiana to study music at Loyola University. She studied classical guitar and jazz violin in addition to playing violin in the orchestra. She explains, "I started playing Cajun music on a regular basis about my ... third year" at Loyola. She never found a formal class on Cajun music. "Cajun music classes were all on-the-job training."
She found inspiration in musicians such as Belton Richard, Lawrence Walker, Mike Doucet, and Dewey Balfa. She played in an all-female band with Cheryl Cormier and toured with several other groups before she found her true inspiration to make a career out of Cajun music: "hanging out with Bruce Daigrepont."
Ms. Forsyth believes that fiddling style, instrumentation, and the Cajun French language define Cajun music. She concedes, "There are almost as many Cajun fiddle styles as there are fiddlers," but each of those styles shares a distinct Cajun-ness. The accordion, she recognizes, is one of the most important elements of Cajun music, and it distinguishes Cajun from Acadian. Interestingly, Ms. Forsyth believes that the Cajun French language dictates harmonic progression. The cadences of the language are simple; therefore, the chord structure is simple. Regardless of what defines Cajun music today, she recognizes that all the characteristics she describes are "mutable and changing." For example, Cajun musicians today lament the decline in French speakers in Louisiana. "In the next fifty years, it's very possible that a lot of Cajun songs will be in English with Cajun instrumentation, with an accordion and fiddle and possibly a steel guitar, but will it be as good?"
Continuing to explore the boundaries of Cajun music, she describes its influences. "Up until 1975 or 1980, the main influence in Cajun music was country [music]." After then, "you had musicians who were more rock influenced," like Mike Doucet. She even called Zachary Richard "the Mick Jagger of Cajun music," and she labels Mamou, a band she toured with before joining Bruce Daigrepont, a "Cajun rock band." Nonetheless, she notes that Cajun musicians, including herself, who experiment with other genres always "come home."
Ms. Forsyth describes Cajun music as folk music. "American folk music in general is just as much an aural tradition as an oral tradition." Cajun is folk music because of the tradition, "the insistence of keeping the accordion [and] the fiddle." Unfortunately, she fears that folk music is suffering a decline in popularity. "All over the country--and New Orleans is no exception--a lot of the folk music has been ... marginalized" on radio stations.
Near the end of the interview, she re-addressed the question, "What makes Cajun music Cajun?" She claims definitively that it is the "emphasis on melody." She says that she rarely looks at written music any more because Cajun music really is an oral/aural tradition. To describe how really to play Cajun music, he quoted her former co-musician, Cheryl Cormier: "'Play the song the way it goes.'"
For more information, visit Gina Forsyth's website.