Reed (left) and Mahoney (right), photographed by Brooke Broussard at The Holiday Lounge, courtesy of Reed and Mahoney.
Sitting at Juliane Mahoney’s kitchen table on a Tuesday night in December, I’m sipping Topo Chico across from her and Renée Reed, who are each nursing single servings of whiskey from tiny antique glasses (they offered me one, too, but I was about fourteen weeks pregnant at the time). The room is glittering in the cozy kitsch of Christmas décor, and Mahoney’s got a pot of Italian wedding soup simmering on the stove. In the background, an old Cajun record plays on low volume.
I’m trying, somewhat unsuccessfully, to articulate to Mahoney and Reed the thing that captivates me about their Cajun music project as the band, The Holiday Playgirls. It’s difficult to put into words, I’m finding—this quality to their sound and their performance that is simultaneously ancestral and modern, mastering the overwhelmingly masculine legacy of our region’s musical traditions while wholeheartedly embracing their own femininity.
“Cajun people, they’re passionate, and they’re heartbroken.” —Juliane Mahoney
Watching the duo perform on stages around the Acadiana area, I see their long blonde hair, blue jean shorts and sundresses superimposed over the grainy videos that have survived of the old Cajun/Creole greats—Iry Lejeune, Aldus Roger, Dennis McGee, Dewey Balfa, Bébé Carrière and so many more—resurrected. The connection across time is subtle. It’s in the way these women hold their instruments with resolve, the way they sit, knees spread, on a folding chair, and stomp their feet, their focus drawn not to the audience, but within the sound itself, as though it were a place they’re yearning for. It’s in the way the French lyrics sound, emerging raw and gorgeously ragged from Mahoney’s throat in a tradition gleaned from the days before microphones. This is music meant to be heard across a dancehall. This is music meant to be danced to. And a lot of it is music that hasn’t been heard in a generation, or more.
“It’s … exciting,” I land on a word to conclude. It’s not quite like anything else on the Cajun music circuit today.
In attempting to respond to my more-fangirled-analysis-than-question, Mahoney reveals what I already suspected: the effect isn’t manufactured, or even intentional. “I don’t consider myself a performer at all,” she said. “We just play the music we like. I don’t think much about putting on a show or having a stage presence. I just think about playing this music.”
“Right,” interjected Reed. “It’s not something I really think about either. It’s just … I don’t know, it’s like a blood thing. This music is sentimental to me, it’s sacred. And when we play together, I feel that from her.”
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Mahoney suggests that what I’m observing is a basic effect of the old Cajun music played true. “There’s this release, you can hear it in the old records, in their singing,” she said. “It’s passionate. Cajun people, they’re passionate, and they’re heartbroken.”
And when the music is played with care, with love, she says, you can hear it.
Mahoney and Reed’s connection was fostered in the archives at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette’s Center for Louisiana Studies, sitting side by side at desks with headphones on, listening to decades-old recordings of Cajun music.
Mahoney was working on a graduate degree studying history and folklore, and assisting in archiving and documenting film from the Liberty Theatre’s Grand Ole Opry-style Rendez-Vous des Cajuns show, which was held almost every Saturday night in Eunice from 1987–2020.
Renée Reed, photographed by Brooke Broussard at The Holiday Lounge.
Reed, who was completing dual undergraduate degrees in Traditional Music and French, was working on digitizing and documenting audio and film records from her rich line of musical family members, including her grandfather, the accordionist Harry Trahan, and great-uncle Revon Reed—a folklorist and cultural preservationist who hosted Cajun music radio shows broadcast from Fred’s Lounge in Mamou from 1962–1994.
The two young musicians didn’t know each other personally yet, but whenever one of them would come across some jewel of Cajun/Creole ephemera in their work, they’d call the other over to come listen. “I’ve always been really into old, old Cajun and Creole music, and stuff that’s not polished, is just raw,” said Reed. She and Mahoney would both get a particular thrill at discovering the unscripted, in-between moments captured in their records—moments when legends like Nathan Abshire and the Deshotels twins were cutting up in between sets on Revon Reed’s radio show, revealing tiny glimpses of who these long-gone icons were as people, just hanging out with their friends at the local bar. “The tapes were just capturing this real, in the moment, thing,” she said. “They’re getting drunk, letting their mouths fly. It’s just such a time traveling feeling.” The most precious performances on Rendez-Vous, according to Mahoney, were those who took the stage in between the main acts. “They’d get these old musicians, like Adam Hebert, who would play and tell stories,” she said. “That was one of the most exciting parts, I think.”
Recognizing a shared appreciation for the world of old Cajun music and its luminaries, Reed and Mahoney started getting together and playing music. “We, like, jammed,” said Reed. “And I don’t know. Her voice and the way she is as an artist . . . I never felt so connected to somebody before, musically, like that. We see really eye-to-eye, and it felt so special. It started from a place of just, love, and having fun.”
“It’s just so much fun,” said Mahoney.
The gigs started out just the two of them, Reed on guitar, Mahoney on steel, playing Cajun and country music they loved. “It was just us messing around,” said Reed. Eventually they settled more comfortably into a standard duo of fiddle (Reed) and accordion (Mahoney) in the tradition of so many of the old-style Cajun/Creole musicians that inspired them. They became a bonafide band when they brought on Jimmy Breaux—a legacy Breaux Bridge accordion player and drummer best known for playing with bands like Beausoleil and Jimmy Breaux and Friends—and guitarist Mark Latiolais from Church Point—who has played with accordion legends Jason Frey and Paul Daigle, some of Mahoney’s biggest influences.
“It changed everything,” said Mahoney, about bringing Breaux and Latiolais on board. “They are very supportive, and just the best.”
“I feel like we’re on a cloud when we’re playing with them,” said Reed. “The rhythm section!”
Their band needed a name, though. Drawing from tradition, Mahoney and Reed turned to the “Playboys” convention of band-naming, used by Cajun musicians since the 1950s, in which a band’s sound was identified by its geographical origins. The Lafayette Playboys. The Mamou Playboys. The Church Point Playboys.
So, they’d be the Playgirls, the first of their name—but what was the place that drew their project together? Mahoney is originally from New Iberia, home of the bayou Cajuns. Reed grew up in Lafayette, though her family has roots in the surrounding prairie towns of Mamou and Ossun. The music they love runs the gamut regionally, but is especially drawn from the Cajun prairie.
They needed a place that was less of a geographical marker than a feeling, a place apart from the normal conventions of the culture, but also within it, a place that existed outside of time.
When the idea of the Holiday Lounge came to them, it felt all too obvious. The circa-1950s bar sits just off Highway 13 in Mamou, hand-painted over in a mural resembling a tropical oasis. In its heyday, it was one of the area’s most notorious haunts, known for its electric disco dancefloor, its jukeboxes, its slot machines, and its eclectic clientele. Today, the Holiday opens a couple of times a year, surviving as an idealized, psychedelic time warp to the Cajun prairie past. Owner Eugene Manuel happily gave Mahoney and Reed permission to use the name.
Juliane Mahoney, photographed while performing at Fred's Lounge by Brooke Broussard.
“We have both always loved that place,” said Reed, whose father, Mitch, wrote a song called “Le Holiday” with his band, Charivari. “It’s just so mythical, like a mecca or something.”
Mahoney remembers going there for the first time on a New Year’s Eve years ago. “And I was just like, ‘What is this place?’ You’re in the middle of nowhere and when you go outside, you feel like you’re on a beach, because it’s just crawfish ponds, and breezes, and there are palm trees painted everywhere.”
“My dad used to tell me it was like a mothership that landed in a rice field,” said Reed. “It feels like that.”
“And they’ve got Iry Lejeune on the jukebox,” said Mahoney. “That’s what really sold me. The cherry on top.”
A recent setlist, scribbled out on a pink legal pad stamped with The Holiday Playgirls logo, documents a show in which Mahoney and Reed performed some of their favorites, mostly lesser known and forgotten songs from deep in the Cajun/Creole repertoire—some especially rare, like “Milton,” “Contredanse,” “Chupic,” and “Manuel’s Bar Waltz” (named for the proprietor of the Holiday Lounge, T-Ed Manuel). There’s their version of the “Scott Playboy Special,” called the “Scott Playgirl Special,” and other standards like “La Danse de Limonade” and “Jongle á Moi”—which Reed says they try to play lesser-known versions of, “the more crooked, old-style way.” For example, their version of the commonly heard “Limonade” is played in the style of Cyprien and Adam Landreneau—“The chord switches are crooked,” said Reed. “And It’s stylistically more rough and raw.”
“What’s been funny is that we’ve been so focused and just drawn to the lesser-known songs that we’ve kind of had to learn the standards on the spot,” said Mahoney, describing how, at a recent gig, someone requested “Jolie Blonde,” and she realized she had never actually played it before.
"This music makes my life worthwhile. I feel it in a sort of familial way, like I need to protect it.” —Renée Reed
She went on to explain that the entire archive of Cajun music is there, waiting for musicians to use; the songs are available for interpretations of all sorts—no matter how far they stray from the source material. “Do whatever you want with it,” she said. “And there are a lot of bands doing that, and I think that’s important . . . but for us, I mostly just like the old stuff as it is. And somebody’s got to keep doing that, too.”
While they are dedicated to fidelity, and respecting a song’s original spirit, Mahoney and Reed don’t hesitate to interject their own styles. It’s part of the tradition of oral transmission, after all—especially before the age of recording. No two performers played one song in the same way. “You listen to different accordion players, each fiddle player, each singer—they have their own way of doing it,” said Mahoney.
Reed agreed, saying that the careful art of layering one’s own identity over a folksong is becoming rarer today—when a lot of musicians seem to be trying to recreate the most popular recorded versions of the standards.
The Holiday Playgirls photographed at Festivals Acadiens et Créoles 2024. Photo by Brooke Broussard, courtesy of Reed and Mahoney.
“For me, it’s like, when you take that approach, are you just performing the songs to be popular?” asked Mahoney. “Or do you really love the music?"
"How do [they] sleep at night?” Reed laughed.
While the Playgirls’ setlists are overwhelmingly pulled from the French Louisiana traditions, “nothing’s really off-brand,” said Reed. They also play country songs, rock 'n' roll, and even the Super Mario Bros. theme song. Even to say they only play Cajun music is to oversimplify it, and it’s to oversimplify what constitutes Cajun music.
“Cajun music, that’s the thing about it, you know,” she said. “It’s such a mix of different cultures around the world.” Many of the songs the Playgirls play, sourced straight from the Cajun music archives, sounds Appalachian, or Scottish, or English. When they performed at the Lotus World Music & Arts Festival in Indiana last September, members of the crowd identified the Playgirls’ performance of “Contradanse de Mamou” as sounding like the Appalachian folk song “Old Molly Hare.”
“I think a lot of these tunes arrived here [in Louisiana] in ways we’ll never fully understand,” said Reed.
At the same festival, they jammed with a Colombian band during their sound check, and one of the bandmembers commented on the Playgirls’ use of rhythm and syncopation. “You have it, too,” he told them, referring to the influence of Afro-Caribbean music traditions—which joined with the Acadian folksongs brought to Louisiana in the eighteenth century to create the distinctly Louisiana sound we now know as Cajun music. “The summer before, we had gone to Canada,” said Mahoney, “and the music sounded different, because it was missing that rhythm. I mean, how lucky are we to be here, and have that rhythm in our music?”
In the summer of 2024, when accordionist and radio host Donny Broussard announced he would be departing from KRVS’s Dimanche Matin French radio show, Mahoney thought to herself, “damnit.” Another thread to the past, snapped. “I loved hearing him on the radio,” she said. “His first language was French, and there are not very many people you can hear on the radio today who are, like, native Louisiana French speakers.”
But then, KRVS approached her and Reed. “I never expected anything like that to happen,” she said.
Today, Reed and Mahoney are the official hosts of the show, which presents the musicians’ curated selections of Cajun and Creole songs, interspersed with their lively commentary en français, every Sunday morning at 8 am.
The responsibility has been a natural continuation of their work together as historians and musicians, granting them an appointed “duty,” as Reed puts it, to dig deeper. “It’s like a musical collage for me,” she said. “It feels like I’m just putting stuff together and seeing how things are connected.”
The show acts as yet another avenue for the duo to proclaim their discoveries to the world, to proverbially call us all over to their desk at the archives and listen to something remarkable sung by a long-gone Cajun icon.
“It’s this thing that we have bonded over,” said Reed, “this just deep love for old music. And it comes from a fear that the spirit of Cajun music is dying in a lot of ways. It’s not like it used to be, and we get angry about it together—just because we love it so much, and it’s so sacred to us. Like, this music makes my life worthwhile. I feel it in a sort of familial way, like I need to protect it.”
It's the dream, said Mahoney. “Playing this music, doing the radio show. I feel very fortunate and lucky. It’s an honor and a joy to have the chance to share it, straight from the heart.”
Hear The Holiday Playgirls on Bandcamp at theholidayplaygirls.bandcamp.com and follow them on Instagram @theholidayplaygirls.
