Telling the Ongoing Story of Cajun Music

                Cajun music is more than just a musical style. It’s an expression of a local culture and lifestyle handed down from generation to generation. Despite the commercial successes of a few artists, for the most part the music is homegrown, created by farmers, mechanics and businessmen who learned from their fathers and grandfathers and who spend their weekends playing for family and friends in living rooms and dancehalls throughout south Louisiana.

                The story of the music is an important chapter in the story of Cajun culture, and it’s been recorded in the pages of Cajun and Creole Music Makers (Musiciens cadiens et créoles). The book, released in 1999, is a newly updated collection of interviews and photographs compiled by Barry J. Ancelet, head of the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette (ULL), and Elmore Morgan, Jr., photographer and retired ULL visual arts professor.

                The book was first published in 1984 as The Makers of Cajun Music. Ancelet and Morgan began working together to capture Cajun musicians on paper and film during the first Tribute to Cajun Music festival in Lafayette in 1974. Their project expanded to include documenting these musicians at home and at work. They sat down on porches or stood in rice fields, and listened to the musicians’ stories in their own words, told in their everyday environment.

                By recording more than the artists’ performances, Ancelet and Morgan chronicled an important part of Cajun and Creole history and gained insight into the character of the people who make up the culture. In the process, they opened a window into the daily lives of  families and communities throughout south Louisiana.

                “I learned from them not only about music and its place in Louisiana French society, but also about the prairies and practical jokes, about hard times and hell-raising, about families and farming, and about survival, all in a wonderfully off-handed way that sticks better than book learning anyway,” Ancelet writes in his preface.

Ten years after that first festival, the University of Texas Press published The Makers of Cajun Music, a tribute to and a record of the masters of Cajun music and the up-and-comers. After a few years, the book went out of print.

Fifteen years later, Ancelet and Morgan have revisited Cajun music’s part, present and future. The University Press of Mississippi, who has published other books by Ancelet, agreed to re-issue the book as Cajun and Creole Music Makers. The author and photographer updated the text and photographs, and included musicians who were unknown in 1984 but have made their mark on the local, and in some cases national and international, Cajun music scene.

The first edition concentrated on the musicians who first played in restaurants and dancehalls – and those who launched the Cajun renaissance – masters such as Dewey Balfa and Nathan Abhsire, and emerging artists such as Beausoleil and Zachary Richard. “Lots of the musicians in the first book are no longer with us,” Ancelet says. “It’s unfortunate to lose some of the connections from the past. But it’s encouraging to see lots of new people.”

The book’s second edition adds names that hadn’t been introduced in 1984, musicians such as Steve Riley, Christine Balfa and Geno Delafose, some of today’s most well-known artists. Ancelet says the sounds of today’s musicians are rooted in the traditions of the past, but the music has definitely changed.

“Cajun music has always changed,” he says. The music played by Joe Falcon in 1928 was not the Cajun music of 1888. And what Iry LeJeune played in 1948 was not what you would have heard in the 1920s and 30s. “Every generation has had people push the music in new directions,” Ancelet adds. “It’s alive. That’s the great thing about it. But it only remains great if it changes in its own terms.”

Ancelet describes his role as observer, not cultural police. Music doesn’t listen to folklorists and ethnomusicologists, he says. It does what it wants to do. “Cajun music would lose a lot if people tried to artificially control it,” Ancelet cautions.

As Cajun and Creole Music Makers proves, Cajun music is alive and active in south Louisiana, and the audience continues to grow. Cajun groups have sprung up across the country and internationally. There are even Cajun groups in England. “First they exile us, then they fall in love with us,” Ancelet jokes.

As Cajun music takes its place among American folk music styles, Ancelet and Morgan are faithfully recording the public and private personalities of the people who bring it to life. In the process, they are documenting the constant evolution of a vibrant culture.

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