50 Ans et Demain

Fifty years ago, Cajun music drew its biggest local crowd

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March 25, 1974 was a Tuesday, and in Lafayette, Louisiana, it was thunder storming—lightning flashing in the sky, rain pounding on the roof of the Blackham Coliseum. There was a foot of water on Johnston Street. 

And yet, the parking lot was full. Cars were actively being turned away. Inside, the floor was covered in mud, and everyone sweated in their raincoats, squeezed in until the space could hold not one more person. Organizers of the event, dubbed the “Tribute to Cajun Music,” estimate the crowd numbered 12,000 people. Local newspapers would report the bold claim that “there had never been so many Cajuns together at any time in history.” 

Now considered the first rendition of the globally-acclaimed Lafayette fall tradition Festivals Acadiens et Créoles, that first event fifty years ago was originally conceived as an academic affair—a folk concert for an audience of 150, programmed by CODOFIL for the annual International Association of French-Speaking Journalists and Broadcasters. 

Barry Ancelet, a twenty-one-year-old student in the French studies program at ULL, was working for CODOFIL at the time and had gotten Cajun musician and cultural activist Dewey Balfa involved. Before anyone knew it, the excitement around the slate of Louisiana French musicians required a change of venue from a university performance hall to the 8,000-seater coliseum. 

The headliners helped draw in much of the crowd. Jimmy C. Newman was an Evangeline Parish boy-turned-Grand Ole Opry star who had just relaunched his career as a Cajun musician with the hit, “Lache Pas La Patate.”  And Clifton Chenier, the “King of Zydeco,” was steadily building a passionate regional audience as he neared the peak of his national stardom. Both major artists, with the rest of the musicians on the lineup, had agreed to participate in the event free of charge. 

“We weren’t even certain the musicians would show up,” said Ancelet. “None of them were being paid. We weren’t sure that anyone would come.” 

[Read this: "Thirty seven years later, Ann Savoy releases Volume Two of her acclaimed Cajun music anthology"] 

But they did come, in droves. Patrick Mould, now a Lafayette area chef and educator, was one of the college students in attendance that evening. “I was one of those hippies that was there,” he remembered. “And it ran the gamut, you know, there were people of color, white people, old people, and a lot of young people—college-age and high school people.”  

The Louisiana French cultural renaissance of the previous decade—which had resulted in the establishment of CODOFIL and the launch of Cajun and Creole music onto the national and international folk festival circuits—was finally reaching the new generation. Mould was evidence of it, as was Ancelet. 

Bringing Cajun Music Back Home

During the previous year spent studying abroad in France, Ancelet had found himself longing for home in a way he couldn’t articulate. Then he came upon a concert in downtown Nice by musician Roger Mason, who was playing “The Crowley Two Step”. “Hearing that, it hit me like a ton of bricks,” he said. “My God, that’s it. That’s what I have been longing for.” 

Growing up, Cajun and Creole music was something Ancelet had taken for granted, the background noise of his hometown culture, the music of the old people. Expressing to Mason what the performance had meant to him, the musician recommended he visit Dewey Balfa. “Go to his house and introduce yourself,” he told Ancelet. “He’ll orient you.” 

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Balfa’s role in the Cajun Renaissance had been sparked a decade before, when folklorist Ralph Rinzler recruited a group of Cajun musicians from Mamou to perform at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. On stage in Rhode Island, Balfa joined Eunice Playboys Gladius Thibodeaux and Louis “Vinesse” Lejeune in introducing the audience of 20,000 festival-goers to Cajun music for the first time. 

While playing the “Grand Mamou” waltz, the trio found themselves unsettled by the crowd’s stillness, the way they simply sat and listened. “Why aren’t they dancing?” Balfa had wondered, assuming the experiment a failure. Perhaps Cajun music only belonged in the dark, beer-stained world of Louisiana dancehalls, after all. 

[Read Elise Riley's memoriam for her late brother, the prolific Cajun musician Christopher Stafford, here.]

But then, at the end of the song, that massive audience roared in applause. The musicians looked at each other in wonder. No one had ever clapped for them like that before. The experience struck something deep within Balfa, a realization that his culture’s music held something beyond courting tunes or drinking songs. It was also worthy of being recognized as art.  

When Ancelet got back to Louisiana, he did just as Mason had advised him: drove out to Basile and knocked on Dewey Balfa’s door unannounced. And the rest, as they say, is history. 

Balfa was, as Ancelet put it, his first true professor of folklore. The two would go on to collaborate in various cultural preservation efforts for decades to come—the 1974 Tribute to Cajun Music being one of the first and most significant. 

"People who were interested in rock and pop and blues and other contemporary music forms realized this was a living form just like that, but it was ours. For us, the counterculture statement turns inward. We look to ourselves.” —Barry Ancelet

Since Newport, Balfa had attended dozens of other folk festivals around the globe and dreamed of bringing something similar back home. He wanted to teach Louisianans to listen to their own music, to hear it anew. While planning the Tribute in collaboration with CODOFIL, Balfa insisted, “We’ve got to make it so people can’t dance.” 

As part of a committee that included Mamou cultural activists Paul Tate and Revon Reed, musician Marc Savoy, and other members of the community—Balfa helped put together a lineup that, in addition to the heavy hitters of Newman and Chenier, included musicians representing a range of musical expressions sung in Louisiana French. 

There were the old fiddle masters: Dennis McGee and Sady Courville, who had created some of the very first Cajun music records in the 1920s and had been performing together in dance halls for fifty years; as well as “the greatest unrecorded Cajun Musician” Varise Conner with his famous Lake Arthur Two-Step, performing with Lionel Leleux. 

Then there were the accordion sensations: Nathan Abshire, best known for his “porch music” and his “Pine Grove Blues”; dance hall king Blackie Forestier and his Cajun Aces; and a thirty-three year-old Marc Savoy, who demonstrated how the tradition was being carried forward in the next generation. 

[Read more about the history of Louisiana French music in these stories from our 2024 Music Issue: 

Balfa brought his brothers, who’d cut their teeth in the dancehalls and were now making a name for themselves on the national festival circuit. “Bois Sec” Ardoin and his family band represented the old sound of “La Musique Creole”—reminding all where Cajun and the emerging Zydeco traditions came from. And to open the night was Inez Catalon, who had never before performed on a stage but captivated the crowd from the start with her ancient French lullabies and ballads. 

Balfa needn’t have worried about the people dancing; there was simply no room. Everyone had no choice but to sit still together inside Blackham, and listen. “It was beyond my wildest dreams,” said Ancelet. 

In this crowd, he saw himself in France—longing for that indescribable sense of home, and finally, finally hearing it. “The young people especially, they showed up because they understood this as a counterculture statement, something that wouldn’t get washed away in this sort of plastic Americana that was taking over. And people who were interested in rock and pop and blues and other contemporary music forms realized this was a living form just like that, but it was ours. For us, the counterculture statement turns inward. We look to ourselves.” 

Festivals Acadiens et Créoles Today 

The Tribute and the festivals that followed were a show of relevance, a collective demonstration that this music still matters, today. “That’s one of the biggest impacts of the event,” said Ancelet. “It has given a stage and a place for the tradition to produce new, youthful approaches.” 

As a sort of “home base” event for professional musicians performing within the tradition of Louisiana French music, Mould described the festival today as a “barometer for where we are culturally, from a music standpoint, as well as an artistic and culinary standpoint”—highlighting the other two contemporary pillars of Festivals Acadiens et Créoles. 

[Read this: "The Instruments of Cajun, Zydeco, and Swamp Pop Music"]

After fifty years of evolution and growth, the event is celebrating its anniversary this year with the theme “50 Ans et Demain” (“50 Years and Tomorrow”)—emphasizing the passing of tradition, with all its evolutions, from one generation to the next, the very stuff that fueled the success of that first concert. 

“It’s always been about celebrating our past, it’s always been about honoring our past,” said Ancelet. “But it’s also always been about passing it forward, making it move into the future.” 

In this spirit, this year’s festival, taking place October 11–13 at Girard Park in Lafayette, will launch with a re-creation of that first Tribute concert held in March 1974—the exact lineup performed by each late artist’s “musical heirs” (with the exception of Marc Savoy, the last living performer from that seminal night, who will perform with his family band). Fiddle virtuoso David Greely will perform Inez Catalan’s home songs, and will be joined by Cameron Fontenot. Joel Savoy and Linzay Young will take on the legacies of Dennis McGee and Sady Courville, and Robert Jardell will demonstrate the distinguished accordion style of Nathan Abshire. Donny Broussard and Sheryl Cormier, legends in their own rights, will play the repertoire of the accordionist Blackie Forestier. 

[Read this: "The evolution of Louisiana French Music venues"]

Then there are the legacies, honoring their ancestors through the shared language of traditional Cajun and Creole music. Playing with Cedric Watson, the Zydeco/Creole accordionist Dexter Ardoin will stand in place of his grandfather Bois Sec and his father Morris. CJ Chenier, the Grammy-nominated “Crown Prince of Zydeco,” will take the stage in memory of his famous father. Gary Newman, who grew up at the Grand Ole Opry, will no doubt perform a rousing rendition of “Lache Pas La Patate.” And the legacy of Dewey Balfa and his brothers carries forth “toujours” through his daughter Christine Balfa, who will perform with Peter Schwarz, who studied the Cajun fiddle under Dewey in 1983.

“The main difference will be that this time we have a house band,” laughed Ancelet, recalling the chaos of moving entire bands off and onto the stage during that first concert. “Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys”—a band full of Balfa’s mentees and, now, their own heirs, too.  

“Beyond that, the festival is going to keep doing what it always did,” said Ancelet. “We’re going to have new performers and more established performers, all in a blend.”

This year's Festivals Acadiens et Créoles will take place October 11–13, 2024. festivalsacadiens.com.