Bon temps indeed for Cajun festivals

The music of Cajun country, like its food, is immediately engaging in its piquant spiciness, and ultimately satisfying.

Festivals during spring and summer months serve up regional sounds alongside the gumbo and étouffee. And travelers are invited to come join the natives, descendants of French-speaking immigrants and of the African ex-slaves and freemen whom they found on their arrival in Louisiana 250 years ago.

"Our culture is very healthy, probably healthier than it's ever been in the history of us as a people," declares Cajun bandleader Steve Riley during a break from the annual Festival International de Louisiane, one of the largest annual events in Lafayette, La., the undeclared Cajun capital. "It's probably one of the richest cultural pockets in this whole country, or maybe the whole world."

Each April, musical ambassadors from the French-speaking part of that world, along with a few other parts, are invited to join Louisiana-based white Cajun and black Zydeco performers over five days. Since 1987, the event has wrought an annual transformation of this small city that lies 120 miles west of the far more crowded and expensive Jazz & Heritage Festival in New Orleans. (The one in Lafayette is free.)

Maureen Brennan, a local psychologist, has served the festival as past president and as unofficial host on her lakeside property. "This year," she says, "one of my neighbors said, 'Can you put flags on the tops of their tents so we can know where they're from?' " The attraction is particularly strong for artists from French-speaking eastern Canada. The name "Cajun" is derived from "Acadien," the term for settlers who came to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick from western France in the 17th century, only to be expelled at musketpoint by expansionist British in the next century.

Singer/songwriter Lennie Gallant, from Canada's Prince Edward Island, came to believe that he has relatives among the descendants of those Acadiens who found refuge 250 years ago in the bayous and prairies of Louisiana. "After my show here, a Gallant came up and said, 'Hello Cousin, I'm down here!' And he gave me his card, and told me his history," he says. "We seem to look at life in the same way. Somewhere along the line, despite the wanderings and the scorn and ostracization, the Acadien people have learned to find joy in life."

The resurgence of Acadien culture over the last 25 years has been important in both eastern Canada and Louisiana, he says.

Musicians in their 30s and 40s, like Gallant and Steve Riley, have advocated successfully for the establishment of French-immersion schools, which were denied them during their own childhoods. Their efforts have had the pleasant secondary effect of attracting the youngest generation to traditional music - which is sung in French and echoes the ancestral European homeland and the Canadian outpost, as well as other influences (Celtic from the north and African from the south).

Page: 1 | 2