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.
Two new books encapsulate an era of Louisiana music, in the mainstream & at home
On a Saturday night in 1945, at a Lake Arthur haunt called the le Bucket de Sangre (the Bucket of Blood), dubbed by some as the “rowdiest of rowdy clubs,” a nine-year-old boy sat, barefoot, on an upside-down beer crate. With a fiddle in hand, a young Doug Kershaw took command of his first public audience, playing alongside his mother and guiding the room of sweaty, pie-eyed Cajuns into a rousing fais do do.
“It’s one of the last great American rags to riches stories,” said author Cathy Pelletier. “When you think of how Doug started out on a house boat in the swamps of Louisiana, speaking no English, knowing nothing about town or the larger world at all, becoming a national music icon, it’s a huge leap.”
Courtesy of Cathy Pelletier
Doug Kershaw's first ever gig was playing alongside his mother, "Mama Rita." Here, he performs with her again at the Troubadour Club in West Hollywood (p.s. that's Waylon Jennings in the back).
In Pelletier’s basement, she said, there’s a plastic tub overflowing with twenty-two years of fax correspondence with Kershaw, the primary sources for the upcoming memoir, The Ragin’ Cajun: Memoir of a Louisiana Man, published by Mercer University Press, co-written by Pelletier and Kershaw.
The book offers an intimate, raw, and remarkably detailed look into “The Cajun Hippie,” a man largely responsible for bringing traditional Cajun music out of the remote bayous of Louisiana to the rest of the world (and in 1969, beyond). Elaborating on his archetypal autobiographical hit, “Louisiana Man,” Pelletier––preserving Kershaw’s no-nonsense, bayou-French-inflected tone—draws us into Mama Rita and Daddy Jack’s ramshackle houseboat, through the trauma of his family life, to night after night after night at the Cajun dance halls, all the way to the Grand Ole Opry stage.
Courtesy of Cathy Pelletier
"Who could forget 'Take Me Home, Country Roads,'?"—Doug Kershaw, pictured with John Denver.
Readers will follow the fiddler into the world of the 1960s and ‘70s Nashville music biz—a vortex of fame, money, music, and drugs—all told from Kershaw’s unflinchingly honest, reflective, and often quite funny perspective.
By 1972, Kershaw’s name was well known among the legends of the mid-century—he had played alongside Joni Mitchell, Arlo Guthrie, Johnny Cash, Elvis, and Bob Dylan. He’d sold millions of records, appeared on network television, and performed at various major concert halls.
Courtesy of Cathy Pelletier
But back in Louisiana’s dancehalls, places like the Bucket of Blood were still ringing with the songs of the rural French-speaking communities of Louisiana. And though in 1945, there was no one to capture little Doug playing on the crate, in the years of 1972–1974, Ron and Fay Stanford took it upon themselves to preserve such sacred spaces and their sacred sounds.
Big French Dance, to be released in conjunction with an exhibit at the Acadiana Center for the Arts on September 14, is a collection of photographs documenting the Stanfords’ discovery of Southwest Louisiana’s traditional French music scene.
Ron first came in contact with Cajun music while working summers at the Smithsonian’s Festival of American Folklife in Washington D.C., where he met the members of the popular Cajun band, the Balfa Brothers. When Dewey Balfa invited the Stanfords to visit Louisiana, it took a few years but Ron and Fay ultimately made their way south.
Ron Stanford
In his journal, Ron Stanford's accompanying notes for this photograph said, "’Tit George’s Club, Lake Arthur.This is perhaps the strangest dancehall I’ve been to. Allie Young’s friends the Frugés (Blackie et al) played the early shift from 2:00 to 6:30 for a packed house of adolescents, pensioners, drunks, and fist fighters."
With a grant from the Youthgrant program of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the couple spent 1972–1974 preserving the musical culture of the Southwest Louisiana region, which culminated in a record called J’étais au Bal: Music from French Louisiana produced by Floyd Soileau of Swallow Records.
“It was very exotic,” said Ron. “Such a formative experience for both of us, seeing this really strong family culture, where people of all ages could meet and go to dances and bars. It was just idyllic, in a way.”
Forty years later, in 2016, Ron rediscovered a box of remnants from the project—hundreds of negatives of the photos he had taken during his time in Louisiana. Among them: jam sessions between Nathan Abshire, the Balfa Brothers, and Marc Savoy; Pat Breaux (the grandson of the great Amédé Breaux), performing at a family reunion at age fifteen; Christine Balfa, just a child at Delton Broussard’s house; and national musicians Jimmy C. Newman and Rufus Thibodeaux performing on local stages. Familiar sites like Floyd’s Record Shop, Lakeview Park, and the Mamou bandstand are interspersed with community church halls, private camps, and clubs.
Ron Stanford
A young Shelton Broussard—who went on to play guitar with Jeffery Broussard and the Creole Cowboys—plays alongside Eraste Carriere and Dewey Balfa.
In both Big French Dance and The Ragin’ Cajun, we Louisianans are gifted gorgeous documentations of our distinct musical culture through perspectives of the past and of outsiders eager to understand. One tells the saga of French Louisiana music being introduced to the world; the other shows us—in candid, chaotic joy—where it began, where it always begins: in the rowdy dancehalls of Southwest Louisiana.
Pre-order your copy of The Ragin’ Cajun: Memoir of a Louisiana Man, to be released on October 4, at mupress.org.
Learn about the “Big French Dance” project, and order a copy of Big French Dance (advance copies available now) at bigfrenchdance.com.
The exhibition of Stanford’s photos will be on display at the Acadiana Center for the Arts from September 14–October 20.
