Kristi Guillory as Alt-Country Singer-Songwriter

September 2012. A leading figure in the Cajun New Wave expands creative bandwidth for a rapidly emerging generation of young South Louisiana musicians. 

Unlike a lot of high school seniors, Kristi Guillory not only knew exactly what she wanted to do after graduation, she also knew it definitely wasn’t what she had been doing for the past four years. Raised in a music-rich family filled with mostly amateur musicians, Guillory first picked up the guitar at age seven, began learning accordion at nine, and started writing her own songs in Cajun French while still in grade school. It wasn’t long after entering high school that she organized her first band, Reveille, and began focusing more intently on her song-writing skills. Guillory and the band began playing commercial gigs around Lafayette and soon word began to spread that there was a new Cajun dynamo in town, a 15-year-old girl who stood just five feet tall and could lead a band, sing, play accordion, and write original Cajun French tunes, all with the authority of any grown-up, male or female.

Soon after, in 1994 at the age of sixteen, Guillory recorded her first CD, New Cajun Generation, released on the region’s dominant local label, Swallow Records. The next year, the diminutive seventeen-year-old was named Female Vocalist of the Year by the Cajun French Music Association, and in 1996, Guillory and her band recorded their second album, La Danse des Ancestres. By the time she graduated from high school in 1997, she had already developed the real potential of becoming a leading Cajun music luminary.

Instead, she chose to quit music and pursue academic studies, leading local observers to joke that the talented Cajun star had suddenly decided to retire from the Cajun music scene at the ripe old age of nineteen. For those who knew her, Guillory’s decision to continue on to college did not seem unusual; instead, what was unusual was the reason she gave for quitting the Cajun music scene—as she now recalls, she had already grown “frustrated with the restrictions” of playing traditional Cajun music solely in the classic styles inherited from generations of amateur and professional twentieth-century Cajun music makers. And as it turned out, she was not alone. In the same year that Guillory made her decision to withdraw from the Cajun music circuit, Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys had begun work on 1998’s Bayou Ruler, an album that would change the course of Cajun music and instill new life in a centuries-old musical tradition.

Bayou Ruler and its 2001 follow-up, Happytown, spontaneously blended the ancient feel and musical emblems of traditional Cajun music with a variety of hard-roots sounds borrowed from electric blues, roadhouse honky-tonk, and pedal-to-the-metal rock’n’roll. These influences mixed together so seamlessly that the result almost sounded like a new kind of music. Riley had been, like Kristi Guillory, a Cajun music prodigy, picking up the accordion early in childhood and as a teen apprenticing with fiddler Dewey Balfa, leader of the original 1970s Cajun music revival. In 1988 Riley founded the Mamou Playboys with fiddler David Greely, and in short order the band recorded three CDs of impeccably faithful and spirited traditional Cajun music; the last, 1993’s Trace of Time, earned the young band a Grammy nomination.

“I remember well when we recorded Bayou Ruler,” Riley says. “I was in my late twenties and wanted to make a CD that would appeal more to my own age group and less to the old traditionalists. It was basically about being fearless and taking a chance.”

With the release of Bayou Ruler, the stage was being set for a whole new generation fully prepared to make music that remained true to Cajun traditions but sounded nothing like what traditional audiences were prepared to hear.

Three groups in particular that would change the soundscape of Cajun music were founded in 1999. In Baton Rouge, a group of LSU students put together The Red Stick Ramblers, an ensemble featuring virtuoso musicianship that would emphasize the Western Swing and honky-tonk aspects of Cajun music, but remained equally ready to play an expanded repertoire that included everything from classic Cajun waltzes and two-steps to roughhewn zydeco and blues. In the rural environs southeast of Lafayette, two brothers, Louis and André Michot, having spent several years apprenticing with their father and uncle’s band, Les Freres Michot, felt ready to make their own music mark by founding The Lost Bayou Ramblers. And in Lafayette, the preternaturally talented Chris Stafford and his brother Michael, not yet in their teens, began playing in a band they’d formed called Feufollet, named for the ghost-like appearance of gaseous eruptions sometimes seen deep in Cajun swampland.

At the same time, Kristi Guillory had already embarked on a program of undergraduate study at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette that would ultimately lead to a bachelor’s degree with an emphasis on Francophone literature—but she hadn’t yet given up music entirely. Instead of performing in the Cajun tradition for tradition-minded audiences, she traded in her accordion for an acoustic guitar and reverted to her very first love: writing and performing original, contemporary English-language songs heavily influenced by a rock aesthetic and inspired by contemporary songwriters like Paul Simon, Van Morrison, and Joni Mitchell.

A very early role model, Guillory recalls, had been Dolly Parton: “I remember being a Dolly Parton freak,” Guillory recalls, “at, like, seven.”

Before long, however, school work and domestic life would bring Guillory’s short stint as an English-language singer-songwriter to a close. In her freshman year she met Mike Munzing, a geologist in the petroleum industry, who would become her husband, and in 2001 she gave birth to daughter Morgan. And while she was no longer using songwriting and performance to explore the Cajun experience in general, and the female Cajun experience in particular, Guillory’s academic career helped deepen her understanding and mastery of both. As an undergraduate, she began doing field work collecting stories of women’s birthing experiences (“How you tell that story was interesting to me,” she explains) and as a graduate student, she absorbed countless hours of previously collected songs belonging to a musical genre unique to Cajun music, women’s “home” music.

In the Cajun tradition, which is strongly Catholic, women were discouraged from entering the arena of commercial entertainment, which early on in the twentieth century consisted largely of work camps, barrooms, and dancehalls. Instead, they developed an aesthetic of their own, performed mainly for gatherings of friends and family, that preserved some of the oldest French music traditions and spoke about the joys and hardships of Cajun domestic life. The majority of these songs are located in the Archive of Cajun and Creole Folklore at ULL’s Dupré Library, on rolls of analog tape recorded by a series of professional folklorists from the 1930s through the 1960s.

For her master’s dissertation, Guillory used her knowledge of these songs and more contemporary historical material to produce a 200-page thesis on the poetics of Cajun song lyrics. “Basically,” she confides, “I was asking: What makes a good Cajun song?”

After completing graduate school, Guillory’s years spent rummaging around in ULL’s Folklore Archives led to a plum job. Funded by a five-year grant from The Grammy Foundation, she became a freelance contractor charged with transferring all the archive’s analog tapes to digital media. And before long her music career was fully revived through a coincidental experience now as legendary as her abrupt departure from Cajun music—a chance gathering of four Cajun women master musicians sitting around a roaring campfire on a starry spring evening.

In 2000, Louisiana Folk Roots, an organization devoted to perpetuating the understanding and appreciation of the Cajun music tradition, founded the annual Dewey Balfa Cajun and Creole Heritage Week at Chicot State Park, located on the northern edge of Cajun country in Evangeline Parish. The program features master classes taught by working musicians to students at all stages of development; but the overall experience also consists of concerts, dance classes, and informal jam sessions along with the occasional nighttime bonfire.

On the evening in question, Kristi Guillory found herself gathered around the fire with Christine Balfa, daughter of Dewey Balfa, founder of Louisiana Folk Roots, and a masterful singer/guitarist in her own right, whose young children had also lately limited her ability to perform regularly. Also present were Yvette Landry, bassist with the Lafayette Rhythm Devils and one of the first to coax Guillory back to performing Cajun music, and Anya Burgess, a fiddler from New England who’d migrated south to become an expert violin maker—her primary profession—as well as a passionate and eloquent Cajun fiddler.

“Christine and I were talking about how much fun it would be,” Guillory recalls, “to play music again, but this time get together as girlfriends and play some music that really rocks out, that’s a little more honky-tonk. Since we both have daughters, we also wanted to put together an all-female Cajun band that really rocks to prove to our daughters by example that the old Cajun prejudice toward women playing on stage is definitely a thing of the past.”

Calling themselves Bonsoir, Catin (colloquial Cajun French literally meaning  “Goodnight, Doll” or “Goodnight, Darling,” but also bearing an oblique and appropriate reference to insolent young ladies), the group recorded its first CD, Blues à Catin, in 2006, and Guillory re-entered a Cajun music scene just then on the brink of a dramatic transformation. Joel Savoy, son of prominent Cajun-music revivalists Marc and Ann Savoy, had left The Red Stick Ramblers, the band he’d helped originate, and was busy making plans for a record label of his own, Valcour, which would begin recording some of the new young bands just then emerging. Around the same time, Marc’s brother Wilson, started a band called The Pine Leaf Boys, which quickly recruited a supremely talented fiddler and accordionist named Cedric Watson, who’d migrated to the burgeoning scene from San Felipe, Texas. The Pine Leaf Boys record made with Cedric Watson, Blues de Musicien, not only won a Grammy nomination, but also helped serve notice that the Cajun music tradition was now undeniably in the hands of a new, younger generation.

Before long, Feufollet, Cedric Watson, and The Lost Bayou Ramblers would each embark on “vision quests” of their own, ultimately resulting in a series of very new, very different sounding Cajun music bands and recordings. In the next half-decade, The Pine Leaf Boys and Cedric Watson would both rack up three Grammy nominations and share a fourth, while The Lost Bayou Ramblers and Feufollet would each earn a Grammy nomination of their own. To that mix, Bonsoir, Catin added its own creative element, partly derived from obscure songs unearthed in the ULL Folklore Archives, partly from new Cajun French songs written by Kristi Guillory, and partly from a looser, more hard-rocking attitude adopted by the band in general. At last year’s Festivals Acadiens et Creoles, music programmers marked a milestone of sorts by awarding the festival’s top two spots, the last two acts performing on Saturday night, to Bonsoir, Catin and Feufollet.

Having firmly established her academic career (Guillory typically teaches two classes a semester at ULL, one in accordion instruction and another in Cajun music history) and with her new band now solidly at the forefront of a Cajun new wave, Guillory embarked on two new projects at the beginning of 2012: she prepared for the birth in late summer of a second daughter, and she recorded a set of English-language songs with Cajun inflections but clearly defined by an aggressive and contemporary country-rock approach.

Unveiled last spring with little publicity and debuted live for a national audience on a tiny stage at this year’s New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, the seven “American” songs of Guillory’s—contained in what is essentially a full-dress demo, Broken Glass—succeed well beyond expectation. Accompanied by an insistent snare-drum beat and whiplash electric-guitar lines, the songs are surprisingly well made, simple, direct, and unflinching. Drawing on traditionally dark themes of love, loss, despair, and death, and based on material taken from her own and from friends’ experiences, the whole is held together by Guillory’s unvarnished, gruff-alto-register vocals, plainly delivered and rendered with a slight air of detachment.

Ranging specifically in subject matter from anxious introspection to the powerful presence of mortality in everyday life and the very real dangers of working on the Gulf Coast’s offshore drilling rigs, the songs on Broken Glass stand up extremely well to repeated listening, with Guillory’s compelling vocals consistently striking a perfect tone halfway between confession and observation. The CD is clearly the work of a daring artist whose career as a singer-songwriter performing in an aggressive alt-country mode has only just barely begun, with the kind of potential that could easily outshine anything Kristi Guillory has previously accomplished.

And it’s just these kinds of creative, artistic breakthroughs that tend to characterize cultural movements that are long-germinating and just beginning to come into full flower. Perhaps Kristi Guillory explained it best herself, in liner notes she composed for Feufollet’s 2008 release Cow Island Hop. Describing the band as “proud of their heritage, confident of their roots, and ready to soar into the future,” she also characterized the Lafayette music scene as “a vortex of vibrant energy, a buzzing flow of youthful expression, a scene of endless possibility.”

“Like the cultural renaissance of the late 1960s,” she observed, “now is a time of fearless, joyful expression and thoughtful creativity.” With Bonsoir, Catin solidly established as a fundamental element of the Cajun New Wave movement, Kristi Guillory’s latest accomplishment adds yet another possibility to a creative music scene growing increasingly abundant with the release of each new recording.

A music journalist, magazine editor, and freelance writer for more than four decades now, Roger Hahn tends to write about a fairly wide variety of subjects but loves writing about music, and new, emerging music, most of all.