The Evangeline Club in Ville Platte, Louisiana.

July 2011. A New window into a world of old memories.

When you’re researching the history of swamp pop and Cajun nightclubs in the 1950s and 60s, one name keeps coming up—or rather, one YouTube ID keeps coming up: The video channel of Richard DesHotels, amateur historian and archivist of Acadiana’s cultural and historical past. Any researcher will tell you that there is a wealth of information out there on any topic, including this one; the trick is finding it. What DesHotels has done is simple yet perfect for the Google age—he’s digitized old photos from Mamou and Eunice’s past and assembled them into video slideshows uploaded to YouTube, readily accessible for anyone with an Internet connection.

While I was working on my book, I was looking for the name of the railroad line whose passengers were served by the Hotel Cazan in Mamou when I came across DesHotels’ video “Old Mamou 1900-1952 Part 1.” It explained that in 1909, the Southern Pacific Railroad connected relatively isolated Mamou to the nationwide Rock Island Line in Eunice. Richard’s annotated video traces the history of transportation in Mamou in the early part of the twentieth century with a flair for immediate storytelling. One shot of a serious man posing with a Model T ford is labeled “Rene Vizinat returned from WWI (wounded) and launched Mamou’s first taxi service. He was known as ‘KING OF MAMOU.’”

My favorite of his videos is “1939-2008 Dance Halls, Honky Tonks, Saloons & Dives” documenting the bartenders, bands, and patrons of long gone Evangeline Parish clubs like the Silver Slipper in Eunice, the Evangeline club in Ville Platte, and the Jack Brogard bar in Redell. At one point, a newspaper clipping from 1953 explains “Mamou’s eleven juke boxes are fed 6500 nickels a week to play a song whose revival spotlighted the town,” with a pop-out explaining that song to be Rust Draper’s “Big Mamou.” It’s such a simple yet effective way to get so much information across. Ken Burns could learn a thing or two about condensing historical data.

DesHotels came of age in the 1950s, when Cajun music was starting to arise from years of dormancy to find its place along with another form of music popular in Southwest Lousiana—swamp pop.

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