The Prairie Cajun Home Companion

A two-hour trip down Highway 190 afforded me a brief moment of calm in my usual hectic life to contemplate all I’d seen this year under the kind auspice of this column. This column served as a defiant period to my tepid question mark, providing resolution to the statement we all utter – “I’ve always wanted to go check that out.”  I am as willing a victim of entropy as anyone, so this column has spurred me on to act, to seek out  the sources of those static-filled signals from our region. 

My destination this month was appropriate nectar for this thirst—The Liberty Theater in Eunice, Louisiana.  It’s one of those many places I hear about where Southern indigenous culture still pushes through the pavement threatening to blanket all that is wild and unique in the U.S.  Apparently, I picked the absolute correct weekend to try Eunice on, since the Liberty Theater was hosting two giants on different ends of Cajun music, Beausoleil with Michael Doucet and Jo-El Sonnier.

My destination this month was appropriate nectar for this thirst—The Liberty Theater in Eunice, Louisiana.  It’s one of those many places I hear about where Southern indigenous culture still pushes through the pavement threatening to blanket all that is wild and unique in the US. 

First, a word about the theater itself.  In the twenties and thirties  Eunice was a stop on the famed Rock Island railroad line, and the Keller  family owned two theaters back to back, the Queen on one corner and the Liberty on the other. The Liberty was the showcase vaudeville and movie house, with the likes of Fatty Arbuckle, Roy Rogers and Tex Ritter gracing its proscenium in its heyday. In 1987, the city of Eunice purchased the aging movie-house and opened it as the Liberty Center for the Performing Arts. A weekly radio and TV program “Renedezvous des Cajuns” is broadcast on Saturdays from its homey stage, using the downhome announcer and performer format set by the Grand Ole Opry and Louisiana Hayride programs.

The mural at the back of the stage depicts the prairie Cajun life of living on the land.  The interior is a gleaming example of Proto Modern Chicago architecture, replete with murals designed by someone I could only identify as “old man Zelman” and breathtaking etched glass by the late Nancy Stagg.  The balcony holds the camera  and broadcast gear, but the real action is on the floor, where its thousand seats are frequently abandoned for the dance floor before the stage when the band starts cooking.

When I arrived, the famed ambassadors of Cajun culture Beausoleil avec Michael Doucet had just taken the stage.  In most parts of the world, if they have heard Cajun music first hand, chances are it was emanating from Doucet’s fiddle.  Their performance was the final stop on a tour of Lousiana Main Street Communities called “Thirty Years of Beausoleil avec Michael Doucet,” where the band brought their impeccable musicianship and knowledge of the culture to theatres all across the state.  Doucet explained Beausoleil’s approach to music making during the Q&A session in the middle of he concert stating they aim to “show the subtlety in our music, the ballads, the Tin Pan Alley favorites adapted to this style, not just the two-steps and waltzes.”

This I what I like about Beausoleil, they don’t treat Cajun music like a museum piece that needs to be delicately handled, but rather as a vibrant living form of music with roots in all the music of the world. Doucet is a virtuoso of the droning double string style most Cajun musicians employ and the darker, deeper Eastern European style, where the violin transcends being merely an instrument, but opens a conduit to the Hereafter.  The truth, as always, is in the pudding, and when the citizens of Eunice took to the dance floor, one could see the stamp of approval for their efforts. Doucet proclaimed from the stage “This is really North American music, music created here. We’ve been fortunate to be able to play it in all fifty states, at least twice over, but there is nothing like being back home.” Really, if you have never seen Beausoleil in action, I insist you do so at the next opportunity.

This I what I like about Beausoleil, they don’t treat Cajun music like a museum piece that needs to be delicately handled, but rather as a vibrant living form of music with roots in all the music of the world.

I had a little time to kill between the Beausoleil show and the 6 p.m. radio performance so I sauntered down Park Avenue to take in the Cajun Music Hall of Fame and the Eunice Depot Museum. The Cajun Music hall of Fame is a wealth of artifacts and photos from the history of Cajun music in the Prairie parishes. Old records, accordions, instruments and a wall of photos gives one a glimpse at the breadth of history that Cajun music holds, how National musicians like Hank Williams and Johnny Cash saw the beautiful heart beating in the Cajun breast and included songs from it in their repertoires.  The Eunice Depot museum was a similar experience  for the railroad portion of Eunice’s history, of when it was a major stop on the Rock Island line, bringing visitors traveling south to the the Liberty and long gone hotels in the area.

Also a welcome site that afternoon was Russ Chenier and the Inner City Band, in a  parking lot across the street from the theatre, playing blues and R&B to a motorcycle group taking advantage of the beautiful weather.  Chenier’s throbbing blues and the barbeque pork sandwiches were perfect for the afternoon, since such of the downtown area in Eunice appeared to be closed for the weekend.

Modernity tightened its leash on me as it always does, so I spent the next hour in the Eunice library getting caught up on email and such when I heard one of the librarians exclaim, “They sure are lining up out there.” I got up to look and  line had formed around the block for Jo-El Sonnier’s performance that night, and I had neglected to get a ticket early, so I gleefully abandoned my computer and joined the fray.

I asked the woman in line next to me, a full hour and a half before the performance was set to start, if the line was always this long, and she said, “If the performers are good, it is. I bet they didn’t have a line like this for Beausoleil.” I asked one of the others in the vicinity if they had caught Beausoleil’s performance, and they flatly stated “NO. I prefer the more traditional style.”  One could view this response as a touch xenophobic, but after living almost as long among Cajun people as Beausoleil has been bringing it around the world, I’ve grown to understand that theirs is a culture you are more than welcome to share in, but you have to be born into it to claim it.  Their resistance to assimilation is frankly one of the most inspiring things about the Cajuns.  It only took two questions in the afternoon Q&A session to resurrect the specter of the ban on publicly speaking French imposed by the state in the early 20^th century. 

If you had any doubts of the reason for the Cajun defense of their culture and their music, Jo-El Sonnier would allay them.  His more traditional version of Cajun music is powerful and percussive, filling every crevice of the theatre with reels of fiddle and accordion. During his first numbers, the crowd was mesmerized by his dexterity on the accordion, playing it with the bravado and power of a lead guitarist. But when they launched into a rousing two-step, the audience left the seats, forming a circle of dancers that exhibited a precision Swiss clockmakers would find enviable. There is nothing better than watching older Cajun couples dance, the group synchronization is almost kaleidoscopic. This mix of movement and powerful music was only eclipsed by the thunderclap of applause when the song finished. The group continued with a cycle of waltzes and two steps and jump country tunes, intermixed with half-French, half-English commentary from the announcer. When I finally made my exit, my two hour drive back to Baton Rouge before me, and my head dizzy from the shear power of the accordion and the warmth of the people of Eunice, I knew this was a perfect place to cap off a year of exploring our part of the world.

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