What do you find in the swamps of Louisiana besides aligators and snakes? Good music and plenty of it. At least that's what you can find in the dance halls of Louisiana.
This year has brought an awareness of Cajun food to places like New York and Washington, D.C. After dinner a little entertainment is called for and the Cajuns have that too. One example is Beausoleil, a Cajun dance band that is based in Lafayette, Louisiana.
The group is named after Joseph Broussard dit Beausoleil, a rebel who led the Acadian resistance against the British during the exile from Acadia in 1755. The members of the group are : Michael Doucet (fiddle/vocals), Errol Verret (accordion), David Doucet (guitar/vocals),Billy Ware (percussion ), Tommy Comeaux ( mandolin) and Tommy Alesi (drums).
Cajuns are descendants of French Canadians whom the British, in the 18th century, drove from the captured French colony of Acadia (now Nova Scotia and adjacent areas) and who settled in the fertile bayou lands of southern Louisiana. The Cajuns today form small, compact, self-contained communities and speak their own patois, a combination of archaic French forms with idioms taken from their English, Spanish, German, Indian, and Negro neighbors. They variously raise cattle, corn, yams, sugarcane, and cotton and perform much of their own spinning, weaving, and other home crafts. Their separateness, though often their own preference, is also the result of the prejudice of the non-Cajuns against them, for what is alleged to be the Cajuns' black and Indian ancestry. Louisiana was primarily a European community until 1900. Then serious Americanization set in. During the twenties and thirties this lead to a general neglect of Cajun roots among the populace.
"The Cajun of South Louisiana are a unique people and their music which plays an important part in their lives, is a reflection of that uniqueness…Certainly music is the chief artistic expression of the Cajun culture, a culture that has enjoyed a great resurgence of pride in recent years," writes John Broven, author of South to Louisiana.
Michael Doucet of Beausoleil explains, "It's the isolation…. The bayous and the prairies are to Cajun music what mountains and hills are to so-called mountain music." He reminisces, "Our culture is something we all took for granted…. There was a dichotomy between the way we lived at home and at school."
Cajun music reflects the heart of the poor white man just as the blues of the black man transmits the sound of deep sorrow and pain. Cajun music is a kind of hurt and lonesome sound which echoes the long hard trail from Canada.
"The music bites, burns and blisters the heart with its cruel loneliness of our Cajun history--not only the loneliness at the time of our exile, but the later years of poverty, the poor chimneys, or the big, sad old houses with a stairway to the attic and their mournful shutter in the gables," writes Pierre V. Daigle in Tears Love and Laughter.
If you just sit down to listen to the music, your whole body will be in for a surprise. Before long your toes will be in for a surprise. Before long your toes will be moving in your shoes, then your knees will be bouncing up
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