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Run That Music Bayou
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10674 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1986 |
1,152 Words |
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Kathleen Reese
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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
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