The History of Cajun Music, 1930s to Today

Tracing the evolutions of Cajun Music throughout the twentieth century

January 29, 2024

3:20 PM

Ron Stanford, from "Big French Dance"

(Left to right) Marc Savoy, Nathan Abshire, Rodney Balfa, and Dewey Balfa at a Nonc Tom's jam session.

This article documents the history of Cajun music, beginning with the Louisiana French culture's first rushes of Americanization in the 1930s. Learn about the contextual origins and "Classical Period" of Louisiana French music—which set the standard for Cajun, zydeco, and Swamp Pop genres as we recognize them today—here : The Origins of Louisiana French Music.

The influences that the outside world brought to Louisiana French music during this time, in addition to driving "Cajun" musicians toward swing and country western genres, also introduced Black Creole musicians to the sounds of the Delta blues and the emerging R&B genre—initiating the early iterations of what would later become known as zydeco music. Read about the history and evolutions of zydeco in The World of Louisiana Zydeco.

In the 1950s, another genre broke off—a fusion of R&B and rock 'n' roll and country western style joined with Louisiana French traditions, now known as swamp pop. Read about the history of Louisiana's most stylized musical child in Swamp Pop Should Go On Forever.

Learn more about the history of the instrumentation in Louisiana French genres, as well as the historical venues the music was played in, here:

The Instruments of Cajun, Zydeco, and Swamp Pop Music

Let's Go Dancin': The Evolution of Louisiana French Music Venues

You can also find a Spotify Playlist to accompany your reading, featuring the artists and songs included in this article, here:

Americanization and the Rise of Swing

By the 1930s, when the Lomaxes were collecting their field recordings, the French communities of Southwest Louisiana were undergoing an era of extraordinary social change. Education was being mandated for the first time within these rural communities, and the state was actively forbidding students from speaking the French of their ancestors. This coincided with the oil boom in Louisiana and Texas, which attracted outside workers to the region while simultaneously drawing Southwest Louisianans to Texas to pursue the economic opportunity there—exposing the formerly isolated communities to the larger American, Anglophone world. The World Wars exacerbated this effect while also establishing a sense of American nationalism within the French speaking communities. At the same time, advances in technology such as the introduction of the radio and improvements in transportation opened new doors from which to access the increasingly urban, Americanized cultures around the Acadiana region.

The Louisiana French ways of old began to be buried under the stigma of the old-fashioned, the ignorant, and the unsophisticated—the word “Cajun” itself becoming a slur of sorts. In music, this shift in social expression resulted in an eagerness to absorb the more popular styles heard on the radio. Recording companies, recovering from the Great Depression, also abandoned their initial interest in roots music in favor of more profitable ventures.

Cajun music, now more formally associated as such, took on new melodic complexity. The accordion was almost entirely abandoned in favor of steel guitars, trap drums, and high-energy fiddling, aligning the genre with the rise of Western swing and country. This new treatment was applied to older Louisiana French songs, as well as to a host of new compositions that later became classics all their own. And while most of the repertoire was still sung in French, by the end of the 1940s, recording companies seemed to be leaning into more bilingualism and Americanization. Black Creole musicians were incorporating into their repertoire elements of the emerging R&B style that they were discovering in nearby urban centers.

Some of the most popular bands of the “Cajun Swing” era include Leo Soileau & the Three Aces, Leroy “Happy Fats” LeBlanc and the Rayne-Bo Ramblers, and Luderin Darbonne’s Hackberry Ramblers. The most famous of all, though, was Harry Choates, the “Fiddle King of Cajun Swing” and the first Louisiana French musician to experience true commercial success. His 1946 version of the traditional Cajun song “Jole Blon” was the one that was immortalized, earning the number four spot on the Billboard charts at the time and ranking number ninety-nine in Rolling Stone’s 2014 list of the “100 Greatest Country Songs of All Time”.

Cajun Music Post World War II

Just as it began to appear as though the traditional Louisiana French sound might fade permanently into the realm of “the old days,” in 1948 the song “La Valse du Pont d’Amour,” recorded by a twenty-year-old with an accordion, unexpectedly hit a nerve in Cajun and Creole listeners. Deeply inspired by the traditional style of Amédé Ardoin, Iry LeJeune impressed dancehall crowds with his soul-stirring sound and a virtuosic mastery over the instrument, thrusting it straight back into fashion. Credited with spurring the revitalization of accordion-led traditional Cajun music, LeJeune opened a door that brought old accordion masters of the “classic” style back onto the forefront of the dancehall and recording scenes, as well as a sense of pride for Louisiana French heritage as a whole.

Still, sensibilities were different than they had been twenty years before. Even the “old ways” found new modes of expression. A fellow Ardoin devotee, the accordionist Austin Pitre made a name for himself by developing a new, flamboyant style of performing the accordion—which included simply playing standing upright, as well as with the instrument in between his legs and behind his head. Nathan Abshire, considered one of the most prominent accordionists of his generation, adapted many popular country songs into the traditional Cajun style, and was heavily influenced by the blues. And Lawrence Walker, one of Cajun music’s earliest recording artists, is credited with at this point pioneering the “new style” of Cajun music that adapted the accordion to the swing style. Aldus Roger and his band the Lafayette Playboys merged the distinctive accordion style of LeJeune with the more contemporary sensibilities of Walker, performing with one of the first big bands of Cajun music. Even in smaller, more traditional bands, the electric guitar and bass became standard additions.

Over the course of the 1950s and ‘60s Cajun music regained its place in the identities of Southwest Louisianans, who were quickly realizing the costs of losing their now at-risk French heritage. The moment was captured most meticulously by the work of ethnomusicologist Harry Oster, who conducted an extensive fieldwork study of Cajun music in Vermilion and Evangeline Parishes, preserving some of the oldest still-existing songs as well as the way the genre was developing. At the time, a Louisiana recording industry with a special interest in roots music was also emerging, led by producers J.D. Miller, Eddie Shuler, Carol Rachou, and Floyd Soileau.

[Read about the role of record producer Floyd Soileau in recording and promoting Cajun music throughout the twentieth century, here: "Wax & Wane: Two record shops, two pivotal eras"]

On the other end of the spectrum, Louisiana French musicians willing to extend the tradition into the more popular genres, and to sing in English, found acclaim on larger stages. Following the success of Choates’s “Jole Blon” came more national hits, including Mamou guitarist-turned-Grand Ole Opry star Jimmy Newman’s country-Cajun crossovers and Doug Kershaw’s “Louisiana Man”.

[Read about Cathy Pelletier's biography of Kershaw, The Ragin' Cajun: Memoir of a Louisiana Man, here.]

The Cajun Renaissance

Perhaps one of the most significant moments in the history of Cajun music was when Gladius Thibodeaux, Louis “Vinesse” LeJeune, and Dewey Balfa stood onstage before the 17,000 attending the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. The crowd did not dance to their rendition of “Grand Mamou”—a song first recorded (by the name “Basile”) by Mayuse Lafleur and Leo Soileau in 1928. The crowd just listened, and then they roared with applause.

The trio had been selected to perform at the festival by Ralph Rinzler, an ethnomusicologist from the Smithsonian Institute, after he’d conducted a scouting trip in Southwest Louisiana. He was on his way out of town, having concluded that Cajun music had become virtually indistinguishable from contemporary country western music. And then, by chance, he came across a live radio broadcast from Revon Reed’s “French Hootenanny” show at Lakeview Park in Evangeline Parish.

One of Acadiana’s most geographically isolated parishes, Evangeline was home to a collective of lesser-known musicians who still played Old World, unaltered Louisiana French music epitomized by the era of McGee and Ardoin (many of whom are documented in field recordings from Rinzler’s visit). This is where Rinzler discovered Gladius Thibodeaux and Louis “Vinesse” Lejeune of the Eunice Playboys; Dewey Balfa was a last-minute addition to the Newport Folk Festival lineup when the guitarist, Wallace Lafleur, backed out.

So the legend goes, Balfa would return home from the festival forever changed, ready to dedicate his life to reigniting that applause in Louisiana. His activism would result in the ongoing prominence of traditional Cajun music performances at folk festivals across the country for years to come, in which he took part with his family band, the Balfa Brothers. He encouraged local record producer Floyd Soileau to publish recordings of the Brothers performing older songs with a newfound energy. These subsequently took off and became local hits, then classics. The momentum, fueled by Balfa’s fervent dedication, led to the organization of Louisiana music festivals dedicated to traditional forms of the genre (including the precedents of today’s Festivals Acadiens et Créoles), and ultimately the establishment of CODOFIL as a means of fostering the French language in Louisiana’s future generations.

Major collaborators and contemporaries of Dewey and his brothers Will, Rodney, Harry, and Burkeman included legendary accordionists Nathan Abshire and Marc Savoy, who continues his work as a preservationist to this day; as well as guitarist D.L. Menard, the composer of one of Cajun music’s most performed songs, “La Porte En Arrière”.

Though firmly established within the cultural matrix as “Cajun,” the traditional music being revived during that time also encompasses the pre-zydeco styles of Black Creole musicians from the turn of the century. While most of Louisiana’s Black Creole music culture was moving in the direction of Zydeco by the 1960s, there remained some Black musicians who still performed the older Creole expressions of the Louisiana French traditions, too.

The most famous of these is the Evangeline Parish duo made up of fiddler Canray Fontenot and accordionist Bois Sec Ardoin—both of whom began their music careers playing with Amédé Ardoin. Canray and Bois Sec were among the musicians who joined the national and international roots festival circuits following Dewey Balfa’s triumph at Newport, and in fact played at that festival in 1966—bringing the Black Creole tradition to a national stage of its own. Fontenot’s original compositions, such as “Joe Pitre a Deux Femmes” and “Bonsoir Moreau” have become standards across the spectrum of Louisiana French music genres.

[During the time of the "Cajun Renaissance" spurred by Dewey Balfa, folklorist Nick Spitzer was staying at the musician's home, studying the world of Cajun and Creole music. He credits much of his success and career to Balfa, as well as to Bois Sec Ardoin. "More than any of my graduate-school instructors, they were my teachers," he said. Read the story, here.]

The New Wave of Cajun Music

Since the Newport Renaissance, a new generation of musicians has emerged that speak English as their first language. This, along with the academic elevation of Cajun music as a valuable, hyper-regional roots music, has made the calling to contribute to the genre a more self-conscious one than for musicians of previous generations. Decisions to lean into tradition or to break new ground have become less trend-driven and more directed by creative sensibilities.

[Read about one of Louisiana French Music's most prolific modern scholars, Barry Ancelet, in this profile by Ruth Laney from 2014.]

Perhaps no band demonstrates the possibilities of this newfound perspective better than the Grammy-winning band BeauSoleil—which is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary on February 1 and 2 with a reunion concert at the Acadiana Center for the Arts. Led by accordionist Michael Doucet, BeauSoleil is today considered one of the highest-profile of the modern Cajun bands, having produced over twenty albums—two garnering Grammy Awards, with a dozen more nominations. From the band’s beginning, bandleader and accordionist Michael Doucet demonstrated a creative philosophy of demonstrating respect for the tradition and its forefathers, while stretching the music to its most remote possibilities. BeauSoleil’s first album, released in 1977, included Cajun songs drawing from jazz, rock, and bluegrass; “Cajunized” treatments of popular songs; and forgotten traditional songs pulled straight from the Lomax field recordings.

In similar form, the French language activist Zachary Richard’s fifty-plus-year discography is made up of traditional and original songs sung in Louisiana French superimposed with influences ranging from Haitian Creole to hip-hop to reggae. Less experimental but just as wide-ranging in style is Terry Huval and Reggie Matte’s popular dance band of the ‘80s and ‘90s, Jambalaya Cajun Band, whose performances might include anything from Cajun swing to Creole blues, to Cajunized country songs. This is also the era when the king of ZydeCajun, Wayne Toups, and country music accordionist Jo-El Sonnier were rising to fame, bringing several traditional Cajun songs, and the Louisiana French language, with them into the national spotlight.

[Read these stories about popular Cajun musicians who have been active since the 1980s:

On the more traditional front came Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys, who rested their laurels on excellent and enlivened performances of the old stuff and traditional-style new compositions. Riley, an apprentice of Dewey Balfa and Marc Savoy, formed the band with fiddle virtuoso David Greely in 1988, and they have since recorded prolifically and to great critical acclaim, mostly staying within the standards set by the traditionalists of the Renaissance.

[Read this: "Fiddling in the Shadows: Musician David Greely uses Shadows-on-the-Teche as both inspiration and recording studio" ]

In 1992, the repertoire of Cajun music gained its first recorded album by a female accordionist, Sheryl Cormier and Cajun Sounds. With a style influenced by the 1940s sound of Abshire, Roger, and Walker—Cormier also led one of the first all-female Cajun bands. She received a Grammy nomination in 1993 and was named a “Living Legend” by the Acadian Museum in 2002.

This was around the same time that the accordionist Kristie Guillory was recording her first albums as a teenager, including the 1994 CD Reveille:New Cajun Generation. Guillory would go on to study the “home music” sung by Cajun women in the 18th and 19th centuries, eventually receiving a grant from the Grammy Foundation to transfer the Archive of Cajun and Creole Folklore at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette’s analog tapes to digital media. A later collaboration between her and Dewey Balfa’s daughter Christine would ultimately lead to the formation of the groundbreaking all-women group Bonsoir, Catin—a band formed with future generations of Cajun female musicians in mind, bringing a sometimes poetic, sometimes rock ‘n’ roll treatment to the traditional Cajun repertoire. In the years since Cormier and Guillory's launch onto the scene, women performers have become increasingly integral to the modern Cajun music world, and several women-led and all-women bands have become favorites at local venues and on the national festival circuit, including the early Cajun and Creole danceband, the Daiquiri Queens; the trio of Kelli Jones, Drew Simon, and Megan Constantin T'Monde; the string-style duo Renée Reed and Juliane Mahoney's Holiday Playgirls; and sisters Gracie and Julie, the Babineaux Sisters.

[Read these stories about Cajun women musicians:

Also significant to the scene of the late 1970s through the ‘90s were family bands, including Les Freres Michot, whose repertoire reaches further back into the late 19th century to specialize in new renditions of the all-acoustic “bal du maison” tradition. Similarly, cultural preservationists Marc and Ann Savoy’s Family Band committed themselves to an acoustic, stripped down style of playing. And in 1992, to carry on the legacy of the Renaissance’s storied leader, Dewey Balfa’s daughter Christine started the Grammy-winning family band Balfa Toujours—which over the past thirty years has grown and contracted with a definition of family that extends beyond blood and into heritage. Led by Christine and her husband Dirk Powell, the group has also featured Bois Sec Ardoin, Dewey’s brother Burkeman, his sister Nelda, friends Craig Guillory and Todd Aucoin, Courtney Granger, and Christine’s daughter Amelia Powell.

An example of how these family bands have continued on into the next generation, spawning a new collective of legacy music-makers in the Acadiana region—Amelia’s own traditional Cajun band Amis du Teche, which includes fiddler Adeline Miller and her brother Robert on bass, released their debut album in 2023, featuring a slate of old and original songs performed with a fiddle at the forefront.

The Savoy family, perhaps more than any other family, has remained a pillar of the Louisiana French music community—Marc Savoy’s Music Center in Eunice not only providing accordions for most of the musicians of the area, but also a place where the musical tradition lives on in its purest form via the Saturday morning jam session tradition. Taking place every Saturday morning for over forty years now, the jams bring together the biggest names in Cajun music to play beside newbies in a collaborative environment, in the way of the old days. Marc’s wife Ann, a musicologist in her own right, has played with various groups over the years, and started her own all-woman Cajun band, the Magnolia Sisters, in the 2010s. Their sons, Joel (fiddler) and Wilson (accordionist), have gone on to start impactful bands of their own.

[Read these stories about the Savoy Family:

Joel’s Red Stick Ramblers committed themselves to playing music from the Cajun Swing era, and made a name for themselves with appearances in an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations and in HBO’s Tremé. Today, Joel is the owner of the independent Louisiana music label, Valcour, and he plays guitar in one of the most popular Cajun bands of the moment, Jourdan Thibodeaux et les Rôdailleurs—who have taken the scene by storm as a militant force of cultural preservation, delivered through raw, high-energy performances of original songs sung entirely in Louisiana French.

Wilson’s Grammy-nominated Cajun/Zydeco band, the Pine Leaf Boys, which he founded with Black Creole/Zydeco musician Cedric Watson, continue to perform across the spectrum of Louisiana French genres, accumulating four Grammy nominations, recognition by the New York Times and other national media outlets, and six world tours for the U.S. State Department. The band’s fiddler and vocalist Courtney Granger, before his death at age thirty-nine in 2021, was considered one of the biggest talents of his generation. Accordionist and fiddler Blake Miller, noted as one of the modern-day Cajun music scene’s most prolific composers, played in both of the Savoy boys’ bands before starting a new one, The Revelers, in 2010 with several other performers from the scene. Their repertoire includes songs across the range of Louisiana French genres, from Cajun to zydeco to swamp pop. More recently, he also started the traditional Cajun band the Old Fashioned Aces with guitarist Amelia Biere and old time fiddler AJ Srubas.

[Read this: A Rougarou's 'Trip to the Moon': Puppetry and folklore are a perfect fit for The Reveler's new music video.]

In the same vein, Freres Michot accordionist Tommy Michot’s sons Louis and Andre went on to start the Grammy award-winning Lost Bayou Ramblers in 1999, bringing a singularly psychedelic, punk treatment to old Louisiana French lyrics and melodies. In 2018, Louis founded his own record label for experimental and traditional South Louisiana music, Nouveau Electric, and in 2023, released his first solo album, Reve du Troubadour—a groundbreaking collection of songs written entirely in Louisiana French, but sung in arrangements that draw in hip hop, Nigerian Tuareg music, and jazz.

[This year the Lost Bayou Ramblers were nominated for a Grammy for their innovative collaboration with the Louisiana Philharmonic Symphony. Read about the project, here.]

Steve Riley launched his family band at the start of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, taking advantage of the slowdown of his typical performance schedule to hone in on his two young sons’ natural skills in Cajun music. They released their debut album, La Vie de Riley, in 2022, featuring a lineup of classics from the likes of the Balfa Brothers, Iry LeJeune, and a few new originals by Riley, including “King of Quarantine”. At the start of this year, Riley’s daughter Elise announced the formation of her own band, Chère Elise, which features her father on accordion.

Riley was also behind the 1995 formation of one of the scene’s most dynamic groups, Feufollet—serving as a mentor and producer on their first album (when they started, everyone in the band was between the ages of eleven and seventeen). The band was in many ways the dream of Dewey Balfa’s Renaissance: a group made up of young, creative musicians who—through Louisiana’s French immersion program—spoke Louisiana French in the twenty-first century. Though multi-instrumentalist Chris Stafford is the only original member today, the ever-evolving band remains a fixture of the regional French music landscape over twenty years later, known for producing imaginative and referential takes on the Cajun music genre, incorporating everything from string-band music to honky-tonk to time-honored waltzes.

[Read this story about Feufollet's impact on the music scene a decade ago, by Roger Hahn: "Feufollet Takes Off".]

Former members of Feufollet, and many of the other previously-mentioned bands of the last thirty years, have frequently jumped from band to band, or played in more than one at a time, across the spectrum of Acadiana’s music scene—fostering an extremely tight knit, collaborative world of contemporary French music-making centered around the Lafayette area.

Beyond the well-known collective of festival-playing Cajun bands are also dozens of lesser-known performers playing at small town venues, or privately for their families—an essential piece of carrying forward the tradition in its own right. The world of Cajun music looks very different from the way it did a century ago in the days of Amédé Ardoin and Dennis Mcgee. Bands, as they did with the rise of mass media in the 1930s and ‘40s, are pulling from the sounds of the popular music of our day and age, as well as from the rich repertoire of the past, and from more obscure creative wells. But today’s emerging Louisiana French musicians possess a foundational respect for the tradition and its language, a commitment to remembering and honoring the world it came from, and an urgency to explore pathways to bring it, resonant, into the future. After that, the possibilities are endless.

The History of Cajun Music, 1930s to Today

Americanization and the Rise of Swing

Cajun Music Post World War II

The Cajun Renaissance

The New Wave of Cajun Music

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