Tu Parles Ma Langue
Reflecting on the intricate cultural exchange fostered by Festival International de Louisiane
As Louisiana enters yet another scaled down festival season due to the spread of COVID-19, I wanted to reflect on one of my favorites. In 2019, I spent three days interviewing Francophone musicians performing at Festival International de Louisiane, with the intention to profile them to publish the following spring in a story anticipating 2020’s festival. Needless to say, things didn’t go as planned. Revisiting those interviews in 2021, a year into this global pandemic, I discovered that this was more than a story about Festival. My conversations with these four artists—a rock and roll Haitian Voodoo Priestess, a bearded librettist of the world’s first Acadian rock opera, a French piper in a kilt, and a New Orleans pop singer who learned French from her Cajun grandfather—revealed instead a story of profound cultural connection spanning continents, histories, and even languages.
For almost thirty four years now, Lafayette’s annual April congregation of cultures has facilitated one of the world’s most remarkable global exchanges in the name of art and music. An incomparable feat of perfectly-coordinated serendipity, celebration, and connection—the energy of “Festival” is nothing short of quixotic. I’ve attended every year since I was seventeen, where—feeling very hip and cool in my floor-length skirt and crop top—I heard Trombone Shorty live for the first time and found myself swaying along to the idiomatic “Tuku” music of the Zimbabwean musical legend Oliver Mtukudzi. In the years to follow I’d laugh with friends as we tried to imitate the mesmerizing way Imam Baildi’s lead singer gyrated her hips to alternative Greek rhythms; I’d follow a stilt man through the streets in search of a crawfish boat; I’d pay tribute to local legends Marc Broussard, Steve Riley, the Givers, and Tank and the Bangas; I’d witness African drumming and Irish stepdancing and the Balkan Beat Box. And I’d do a ton of two stepping.
Festival International has always been about sharing such diverse perspectives through art. After a year of necessarily turning inward—into our homes, into our communities—the dazzling exchange that takes place in Downtown Lafayette each April recalls as all the more transcendent. More than that, it is valuable. This year, with caution and restrictions still in place, organizers have promised to build on the momentum of 2020’s Virtual Fest with a slew of livestreamed and archival virtual programming, combined with a schedule of safely-coordinated live and immersive experiences in Downtown Lafayette. The theme is commUNITY, a reminder that to best share our heritage and our home, we must take pride in it. We must preserve and protect it. And next year, we’ll meet our friends again on Jefferson, with plenty of new stories to tell.
These days, Serge Brideau works in a nursing home on the Acadian Peninsula, playing classics on his guitar for dementia patients, many who have no awareness of the pandemic that has temporarily halted his musical career. But two years ago, the Viking-esque frontman of New Brunswick’s Les Hotesses d’Hilaire sat across from me in the lobby at the Holiday Inn in Lafayette, rubbing his eyes and nursing a hangover.
“You know, we’ve been playing together for ten years, touring all over the world,” he said. “I don’t know how many shows we’ve played, probably something like nine hundred. And I’d have to say my favorite show was at the Blue Moon Saloon last night.”
"I’m Acadian. This is my perception of the world, living in a Francophone rural area in Canada. This is my reality. It doesn’t depend on a particular sound. It’s just who we are. And that is still Acadian music.” —Serge Brideau
Part of Festival International de Louisiane’s 2019 Rhythms and Roots after hours series, the intimate concert paired Brideau’s psychedelic rock troupe with Cypress Island Cajun musician Jourdan Thibodeaux’s band Les Rodailleurs. On first glance, these two groups might seem to have little business playing music together. Les Hotesses d’Hilaire’s seventies-inspired, eccentric blend of punk and prog rock, which the heavily bearded Brideau usually performs in a dress, stands in stark contrast to fiddler Thibodeaux’s classic two-step-able contributions to the modern Louisiana French repertoire.
And yet, in the Blue Moon that night, centuries and distances coalesced into a shared history, a shared language, even a shared ancestry. Music of the peninsula met the music of the prairie, and, as Brideau put it, “magic happened.”
“I play rock music, but I love traditional stuff too. We did a song with Jourdan and Cedric [Watson], this Acadian song from up north,” he recalled. “It sounds a little different with the squeeze box [accordion] . . . just beautiful. And the violin. . . People from the islands have a certain way of playing music, people from the peninsula, people from the mainland. And y’all have your own thing. If you’re really into it, you can hear these intricacies, this other way of playing the violin, with all of the energy put into it. The swing of the bow is not the same, and you can hear it. I really love watching those guys play the violin down here.”
The next day, on Festival International’s Fais Do Do Stage, Haitian singer Moonlight Benjamin initiated another fold in the cultural matrix, belting out emotionally-laden lyrics in Creole against a unprecedentedly blended backdrop of traditional Haitian melodies and blues rock rifts. The crowd beneath her pulsed, entranced. Most of us didn’t understand the language, but we did understand what we heard, thanks in no small part to her collaboration with guitarist Matthis Pascaud, who served as her translator in our interview back at the Holiday Inn.
“I am not African. I am not Haitian,” said Pascaud of his own ethnic and musical background. “I’m just a French guy who learned guitar and grew up on jazz and loves Dr. John. What is our connection? It is the music. We mix our cultures together.”
"[This festival] is a chance to give a strong idea about who we are. Not who we want to be, who we are, in a friendly romance of sorts, together, celebrating life, right here. Exchanging experiences, sharing something very human, all through our music."
—Moonlight Benjamin
Raised in a Christian orphanage in Port-au-Prince, the “Voodoo Priestess of Blues Rock” got her starts in gospel. Curious about her heritage, she eventually found a home in the culture of Haitian Voodoo, and spent many years performing traditional folk Haitian music before seeking more formal training in France. “I wanted to bring Voodoo culture, through my music, to Europe, where it tends to be misunderstood,” explained Benjamin, through Pascaud. “I wanted to show people that our culture is about connection, energy, positivity.” After achieving considerable success on her own in France, she joined up with Pascaud in hopes of reaching new audiences by integrating influences of American blues and rock and roll into her expressions of Haitian music.
“When we started to work together, I would listen to her recordings, and say ‘Okay, this is blues mode, blues melodies. I hear something like Muddy Waters there, a little B.B. King.’” said Pascaud. “They’re there already because Southern Mississippi blues comes from the same tradition, these African roots. And she feels a strong connection to this music. It was not a long trip to arrive to that. Was just in front of us, made sense.”
The result was the critically lauded album Siltane (2018), whose tour across the globe included this stop in South Louisiana. All-too-briefly brushing elbows with another branch of Creole, Voodoo, and blues cultures flourishing in the Crescent City, Benjamin’s ballads honoring the struggles of Haiti’s people—particularly its slaves—find a particular resonance here.
“This music, my culture, it is the culture of the slave,” Benjamin said. “I want to offer an homage to the people who came to the Americas and led difficult lives, and I don’t want this culture to be forgotten. I want it to be alive.” This, explained Pascaud, has also been the effect of fusing Voodoo melodies with the energy of American rock and roll. “We want to show her culture to the world,” he said. “Make it more accessible. Take it out of the museum.”
This strategy of challenging the paradigms of traditional folk music came back around in a conversation I had twenty-four hours later, standing behind the TV5Monde Lafayette stage as the members of Sweet Crude packed their van after their show. The New Orleans indie pop band—known for their flamboyant costumes and vivacious stage presence—has described their approach to using Louisiana French lyrics in their songs as “dressing an old language in new clothes”. Like Benjamin, they aim to share their culture with new audiences, using the strategy of shifting genre.
Both of the band’s lead vocalists (and multi-instrumentalists) Sam Craft and Alexis Marceaux have Louisiana French roots. “We started toying around with the idea of taking old Cajun songs and putting them in a new idiom, freshening them up and having fun with them,” said Craft. “People were really responding to it, even on the road and not in Louisiana. They kind of understood what we were doing. So, we said, let’s make a band that’s just this.”
“It really is kind of up to our generation to preserve this, and not only to preserve it but to continue it. We want to wave that French flag of Louisiana, because if we don’t, who else will?” —Alexis Marceaux
Trading in the traditional accordions and fiddles for bright percussion all around and an emphasis on harmonious vocals, Sweet Crude has brought the Cajun language into brand new territory. “We are really very influenced by the energy of the music that comes out of New Orleans,” said Craft. “So, we wanted to have that, but also be French. And also be pop and accessible and all of these things.”
As part of the millennial generation of Louisianans awakening to the urgency of our region’s language loss, Craft and Marceaux are excited about the renaissance of Louisiana French culture currently taking place—of which traditional musicians like Thibodeaux are no small part. “There is a ton of music representing French Louisiana right now,” said Craft. “It’s very exciting.” Marceaux added, “It really is kind of up to our generation to preserve this, and not only to preserve it but to continue it. We want to wave that French flag of Louisiana, because if we don’t, who else will?”
Craft pointed out that there are several incredible groups of young musicians working to do the same thing, and even putting their own spin on it. “We’re just a little bit further out there in terms of French music typical of Louisiana,” he said. “But when we go to places like New Brunswick or Quebec, places where they consciously sing in both English and French and switch back and forth, we totally have a home in what they are doing.”
Brideau, who is from Canada’s only official bilingual province—New Brunswick—would agree. Language is treated just as intentionally in Les Hotesses d’Hilaire’s lyrics, which, like Sweet Crude’s, shift back and forth between the two languages. And while Les Hotesses d’Hilaire does not necessarily sing “traditional” Acadian music, the band does proudly promote its identity as Acadian. In fact, their 2018 album Viens avec moi was actually written as an irreverent, theatrical, and caricaturist “Acadian rock opera” inspired by the story of Wilfred LeBouthillier, whose success as the first winner of Quebec’s reality television show Star Academie Brideau credits as the agent behind the early 2000s popularization of “Acadian music” beyond the peninsula. “He was kind of a perfect Acadian poster child because he was a singer, a lobster fisherman, all these ‘exotic’ things,” said Brideau. “And he exploded, became a superstar in Canada.”
Brideau explained that for musicians like himself, the LeBouthillier phenomenon allowed Acadian musicians to claim their heritage without necessarily having to play a fiddle. “It gave permission to more underground groups like us to simply be like ‘I’m Acadian. This is my perception of the world, living in a Francophone rural area in Canada. This is my reality. It doesn’t depend on a particular sound. It’s just who we are. And that is still Acadian music.”
And though Les Hotesses relishes in its own distinct style and sound, Brideau’s lyrics often deal directly with things like language politics, such as in the song “Super Chiac Baby,” in which Brideau proclaims: “I’ll French you right on the English. Come on we have the same lips!” The song satirically addresses the linguistic tensions in New Brunswick where there are the French purists who won’t utter an English syllable, there are the English-speaking conservatives who are actively working to do away with the country’s French institutions, and then there is everyone in between.
“There are a lot of places where there is a totally different kind of French, almost half English half French, where they speak English words in French sentences and conjugate English words like French words,” said Brideau. “So, it’s kind of its own language. We call it Chiac. The song basically says, ‘Oh, we can’t agree on the language? Let’s just all speak Chiac!’”
The story of linguistic struggles against the forces of colonial assimilation, and the distinct regional languages that developed as a result, is not a story isolated only to the Americas. Just as Moonlight Benjamin travels the globe singing of her homeland in Creole; as Sweet Crude bops along in Louisiana French; as Brideau invites us to settle our differences through Chiac; across the Atlantic a culture of language preservation exists right in France herself.
“One hundred years ago, ninety five percent of the people in Brittany spoke Breton,” explained Nicolas Husson, the co-president of the pipe band Bagad Plougastell, who met me at Dat Dog following their afternoon performance at the Scene TV5Monde Lafayette stage. Breton, a Celtic language most similar to Welsh, dates back to before the eleventh century. Today, the only place in the world where it is still spoken is Brittany, where it was almost entirely eradicated due to assimilation policies throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. “Today, only about ten percent of people speak it, and most of them are over seventy years old. Everybody’s grandparents spoke Breton, but our parents spoke only French. Some children are starting to learn it in school now, but it isn’t compulsory,” said Husson of the plight that feels eerily parallel to the generational decline of the Cajun French language in South Louisiana. But just as it has here, interest in language preservation in Brittany has soared in recent decades—a renaissance of sorts. And it is in no small part because of the music.
“It’s amazing how the revival of pipe band culture has gotten so many young people interested in Breton culture,” said Husson. A relatively new phenomenon, the pipe bands—called Bagads—have emerged as representatives of each major town in Brittany. Bagad Plougastell comes from the community of Plougastell-Daolas, and has a membership of one hundred and twenty players, featuring bagpipes, bombards, and drums. Made up entirely of volunteers, there are over eighty bagads across the country who participate in various ceremonial events and festivals, compete against each other, and even travel across the world to events like Festival. “Since this musical revival, there’s also been a revival in what we call Fest Noz, our traditional parties,” said Husson, describing Saturday nights spent performing traditional dances, “with lots of drinking,” he laughed. “Anywhere you go at night, you’ll find it. And it’s full of young people. The culture is vibrant, and the language—it returns with the culture.”
Thirty-seven members of Bagad Plougastell made the trip to Louisiana, and participated in parades down Jefferson Street leading up to a rousing onstage performance, which included another appearance by Thibodeaux alongside Trey Boudreaux. “We had the whole pipe band playing Cajun music, and they played some Breton music,” said Husson. “This exchange of music and cultures—there was definitely a connection there.”
Brideau spoke of this connection, and he spoke of the energy vibrating through Lafayette: “The happiness is contagious. Even the cops are smiling, people are drinking in the streets. Kids playing music with their parents on stage. There’s a spirit to it.” A continuity, he explained. A respect for music and its role in tradition from one generation to the next, spanning continents and cultures and experiences. “It brings out the best in musicians,” he said.
As Benjamin put it, it was a chance for unabashed authenticity: “A chance to give a strong idea about who we are,” she said, through Pascaud. “Not who we want to be, who we are, in a friendly romance of sorts, together, celebrating life, right here. Exchanging experiences, sharing something very human, all through our music.”
Festival International de Louisiane 2021 will officially take place, with a schedule of virtual and in-person events, from April 23–25. Throughout the month, local restaurants will also take part in FEASTival International, celebrating the best of Festival eats. Get all of the details at festivalinternational.org.
Since 2019, when I met with these artists, Les Hotesses D’Hilaire, Moonlight Benjamin, and Sweet Crude have all released new albums. Learn more about their music, and about the important work undertaken by Bagad Plougastell, at the websites below: