Bon temps indeed for Cajun festivals

Mr. Riley began teaching Cajun accordion to Chris Stafford, son of festival programming director Lisa Stafford, when the boy was 8 and in his second year of the immersion program at the Prairie Elementary public school in Lafayette.

"I started to identify with it because I could understand the lyrics," says Mr. Stafford, now in his late teens. "And then I realized what makes me like [Cajun music] is the feeling and emotion in it."

Under Riley's watchful eye, Stafford went on to learn fiddle and guitar, and then cofounded the group Feufollet, named for the eerie gas that bubbles up from the region's swamps. Feufollet has recorded and performed for audiences of all ages.

"A lot of people appreciated that even though we were younger, we were still interested in traditional music, and that we didn't try to change the music," Stafford says. He appeared at this year's festival with Feufollet, as well as alongside his teacher, Riley, in the band Racines.

In an even broader intergenerational span, 15-year-old vocalist and fiddler Sarah Jayde Castille Williams performed with her fiddle teacher and grandfather, the legendary Hadley Castille, and her uncle, guitarist Blake Castille.

For decades, "Nobody wanted to play Cajun music, or to go see it, because they thought of it as all these old people playing off-key," Sarah Williams points out. But now, "A lot of my friends like to come and watch me. They know this is where they come from, and it's got a good beat, so of course they're gonna dance."

Dancing, authentic or not, accompanied performances of several French-speaking bands from western and northern Africa. Traditional two-steps and waltzes were in evidence for a concert by Geno Delafose. As a child, Mr. Delafose had followed his father, John, into Zydeco, a syncopated musical form that arose among Louisiana blacks in the 1950s. It was a gumbo of melodies and rhythms adapted from white Cajuns and from Creole and blues sources traceable to people of African descent who'd preceded the Acadiens to Louisiana. Adorned in Stetson, starched shirt, tight jeans, and boots (his day job is ranching near Opelousas), Delafose proved a crowd pleaser.

With a tiny paid staff and a thousand volunteers shepherding four dozen acts and an array of workshops, the Festival International is both a tantalizing musical offering and a model of municipal and cultural pride.

"As people who have lived here their entire lives, we don't realize what we have until we don't have it any more," says Jodi Hebert of Louisiana Folk Roots, one of the presenters. "Then people come here from the outside and they want it for themselves."

• Next year's Festival International de Louisiane will be held April 26 to 30. For information on other music festivals, visit: www.jambalayafestival.org, www.swamppopmusicfest.com, and www.cajunfrenchmusic.org.

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