Category: Uncategorized (Page 5 of 20)

Is the name. Cajun music. This title demands that the music is only played by cadiens, but that’s not the case. Even if one were to define a Cajun as an inhabitant of Southern Louisiana, this word wouldn’t work because there are, for example, some groups like The California Cajun Orchestra who play it. Cajun music is no always so Cajun. The big question: “How important is it for the musicians who play Cajun music to be Cajun?”

Here’s a song played by real Cajuns that has few of the characteristics that one would expect from this genre:

In fact, Amazing Grace is a Christian hymn composed by a British man. There’s almost nothing about this song that suggests that it’s something Cajun save the language.

Likewise, this group here plays songs from time to time that are without a doubt of Cajun origin, even including a violin, an very important instrument in the music, but I doubt that they would call their sound Cajun:

They often sing in Louisiana French, another defining feature of Cajun music, which is a language that’s sometimes called Cajun French. This is a similar problem: speakers of Cajun French are not at all always Cajun, regardless of how on defines a Cajun. For example, one common definition est that a Cajun is someone white who comes from Southern Louisiana while a Creole is someone black from the same place, yet Canray Fontenot speaks Louisiana French, not Louisiana Creole, even though he is usually considered a Creole who played Creole music or la-la music:

I here nothing in his music that’s particularly different from Cajun music, but it’s not according to some people. But maybe one decides that a Cajun is someone with Acadian roots, then Mr. Fontenot could be Cajun, but who really knows?

I tried to determine exactly who Cajun music is, among other things, in my honors thesis that I wrote at the end of my undergraduate career. I adapted a tableau from linguistic optimality theory in order to do it and the ethnicity of the musicians turned out to be one of the most important constraints. There are of course problems with my study, so y’all can figure out yourselves how all that works as I’m uploading my whole thesis to this site. Click Writings and look for The Use of Language in Cajun Music to read it.

For what it’s worth, I really like the name la-la. Maybe we can bring it back.

I can remember the first time that I ever heard Cajun/Creole music. It was while I was studying at City College of San Francisco. I took a class on American music and a portion of the course was about Cajun/Creole music. My professor put on some Amédé Ardoin et I was captivated, without a doubt thanks to the language as much as the raw sound. It was mysterious, something that made me imagine an exotic world that yet was part of the United States. The image was strong, powerful, like the idea of bayous and voodoo doctors (at that time, I didn’t know much about the differences between the culture of New Orleans and the rest of South Louisiana).

As for language maintenance, this power helps so much. My thesis on the use of language in Cajun music (which I might post soon) showed that Louisiana French is so pervasive in the music that it’s almost its most important defining feature, to the point of being the only characteristic that’s needed to define the music as Cajun. For this reason, you find many people who have learned French due to a love of the music. It’s that, a love that is intimately connected to the language, that can save endangered languages. That is also a reason to preserve them: you lose more than a language when you can no longer speak it.

Well, I’ve been about uploading some papers that I wrote while I was an undergraduate and I decided that would be a good idea. It’s a shame to leave them behind after all these courses. The ideas and the writing are not perfect at all, I laughed at myself a little bit when reading them because of how much more I know about these subjects now, but I think they could be useful for some people. In any case, read them here, under “Writings.” The new ones are those entitled “Juggling About Cajun French Morphology” and “Meaning in Musical Quotations.”

Also, I intend to start posting something every Sunday from now on.

… or juste use theirs. The organizer, someone named Reese, provided some that you could rent (ours was covered in glitter).

This annual event started just three years ago and is interesting because it’s really a variety show.. that last from 9pm to noon the next day (hence, the need for beds). There was art, music, interpretive dance, plays, poetry, even burlesque. The description lacked details but it’s worth going to. This is a free jazz group, Enfuego, that played there. It includes Jeff Zielinski, John Grimsley, and Mike Mito.

The name of this event interests me also. BYOBed is a play on the acronym BYOB (“bring your own beer”). Usually, this implies that one must provide their alcohol themselves, but in this case, the beds were already there. Maybe the sense of this phrase is changing.. or maybe the organizer doesn’t understand the way it works.