Bring it on Home

Dustin Dale Gaspard on ancestry, language, and singing Cajun French for America

by

Visual & Performing Arts

On October 6, 2025, the more than 5 million viewers tuned into NBC’s reality singing competition, The Voice, watched Michael Bublé get a frisson at the sound of Dustin Dale Gaspard’s harmonica. Reba nodded her head as he shifted into the first verse of Sam Cooke’s classic soul ballad, “Bring It on Home To Me.” Niall Horan and Snoop Dog couldn’t help but sing along, their growing excitement at the voice behind them palpable. None of them had even seen Gaspard’s face yet. 

The song is one that the thirty-three-year-old musician from Cow Island, Louisiana has sung at most every show he’s played since he began his career as an itinerant singer-songwriter, performing for mostly small crowds and at festivals across North America with the occasional jaunt to Europe—mostly living in his car. “[‘Bring It On Home To Me’ is] overdone,” he said in mid-December in an interview conducted over fried okra and fries at Mickey’s Drive Inn in Kaplan. “Everybody plays it. But it is because it is a true song. It has real heart and soul.” The song was also his PawPaw’s favorite, and the very last thing Gaspard sang to him before he passed away. 

The previous October, when Gaspard had first gotten a response to his application for The Voice, inviting him to move into the interview process, he stepped outside beneath the night sky. And he prayed to his grandparents, his greatest inspirations. “I said, ‘Hey, if this is a real thing you want to happen for me, I’m ready. I’m gonna find a way.’” 

“I just wanted to get on stage and sing in Cajun French and go home, then look at the stars and tell my grandparents, ‘Thank you so much for sending me on that journey.’”  —Dustin Dale Gaspard

It wasn’t about fame, or about winning. Gaspard’s only goal, only hope, was to have the opportunity to stand on a national stage and sing, in his own style, the language of his ancestors from Vermilion Parish. “I just wanted to get on stage and sing in Cajun French and go home, then look at the stars and tell my grandparents, ‘Thank you so much for sending me on that journey.’” 

Seamless as it sounded, the shift to French in such a well-known song was a surprise to the celebrity coaches of The Voice. You could see the moment of confusion on their faces as Gaspard crooned, “J’sais que j’ai ri / Quand t’as partie.” Horan turned to Bublé (a Canadian) and asked, “French?” It wasn’t French like anyone had ever heard, though. The translation and arrangement of Cooke’s second verse had been a labor of love, completed with help from Cajun/Creole language experts Drake LeBlanc and Barry Jean Ancelet. 

Behind their backs, Gaspard felt as though the whole world had stopped. “All went silent,” he said. “And I remember looking at the big lights above the coaches’ chairs and seeing almost like a big star just shining back at me.” He closed his eyes and thought, “There it is. This is the moment I’ve been waiting on forever. I had this dream to do all these things, to explore my heritage and legacy, to travel and perform, to get on national television and sing in the Cajun language, and it is happening.” 

After completing the French verse, Gaspard almost stopped singing and walked off the stage. “That was it, I had done it,” he said. But when he opened his eyes, all four of the coaches’ chairs had turned to face him, signaling that they wanted him on their team for the competition. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh God, no, this wasn’t supposed to happen,’” said Gaspard. Holding back tears, he finished the song in “complete disbelief.” When Horan told him, “There’s nothing better than hearing a proper, unique, full-of-character voice … that was absolutely incredible, the bit of French, you could sing ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’ and it would sound good,” Gaspard only responded with, “This is a weird dream.” 

When Gaspard imagines how his grandparents might have reacted to his historic performance on The Voice, he can hear his grandfather’s voice saying, “Oh, that’s my boy, I knew, when you started singing in French!” 

“When I hear people from home tell me that it resonated for them, I hear him saying it,” said Gaspard. 

The musician attributes much of his current lifestyle, ever-transient, to a childhood going back and forth between his divorced parents’ homes, where he spent most of his time with his grandparents on each side. Days spent with his maternal grandfather, who ran the 26,000-acre Paul J. Rainey Wildlife Sanctuary southwest of Vermilion Bay, were days of adventure. “With him, there was this exploratory appreciation for the wonders of the water and the stars and nature,” said Gaspard. “And also, an understanding that this is the land that raised my people, it was the foundation of who we are.” 

His paternal grandmother, by contrast, rarely left her little brick home in Cow Island. “She was a very superstitious Cajun woman, a traiteur,” said Gaspard. “And that kind of lent itself to this deep, meditative mysticism. She told her stories within this world, and I came to recognize the tiny universe in which she existed. I feel like she made me think a lot about internal emotions that you deal with. Like the way she lived was this giant metaphor.” 

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When he imagines his grandmother’s reaction to his performance, he doesn’t think she’d say very much. She almost never left Vermilion Parish except, in her final years, to occasionally attend her grandson’s gigs until two in the morning. “She believed in me so much,” he said. “It was such a lifetime love, I don’t know that I’ll ever experience anything like that again.”

So no, she wouldn’t say much at all, just, “I knew,” with a smile.  

Growing up between these two worlds, with access to the depths of the internal as well as the wealth of the external, gave Gaspard a foundation upon which he’s built his life as an artist. Such folklore is the stuff great music is made of; references to Gaspard’s early life in Vermilion Parish, and especially to his grandparents, permeate his body of work—especially in his 2022 album, Hoping Heaven Got a Kitchen. 

“They gave me the courage to say, ‘I know who I am,” he said.  

Listening to Gaspard’s discography, you’ll hear more influence from Otis Redding and Al Green than Iry LeJeune or Nathan Abshire; he plays guitar and harmonica instead of an accordion or a fiddle. When asked, he’ll lean toward soul and blues as classifications for his body of work, and often he’ll lift up the umbrella of folk or Americana. But still, he doesn’t shy away from dubbing his music “Cajun,” because the fact is, “I am undeniably Cajun, and I’m not outrunning who I am.” 

As a young musician, Gaspard’s impression of Cajun music was that it existed on a pedestal, in the often-isolated realm of strict tradition and Acadiana dancehalls, to be admired from afar. By contrast, he found himself connecting deeply with the universality, timelessness, and tradition of adaptation within classic African American soul and blues. 

“It just comes from something that is a deep resonance that everyone needs,” he explained. “I think all of the best music, it’s just ripples of what soul and blues music is. That music makes me want to tell a story, it makes me want to sing my guts out. But it also just makes me want to love and nurture close.” 

There’s a conviction to the blues, an “undeniability,” as Gaspard describes it, that can also be heard in the old Cajun music. “They’re not just doing vocal runs, they’re singing from a particular place. They have these crazy, impeccable voices that are so specific but so full of yearning ... Tapping into that is what I enjoy doing most. Because that translates itself to the highest form of art, which is just making people feel at their depths.” 

“I don’t want my Cajun heritage to live in a room in a different house from who I am. I think we’ve compartmentalized it so much that people in my dad’s generation and younger, we feel completely disconnected from it. We feel like it’s someone else’s thing, when it’s the most us we can be. I mean, what if the door gets locked? What if the house gets knocked down? Then it’s gone forever ...  I want my Cajunness to be in my home forever, in every room. And if it’s a little less here and a little more there, that’s completely fine.” —Dustin Dale Gaspard

The link Gaspard draws between the two genres is not without precedent. In the 1950s, many Cajun and Creole musicians began leaning more mainstream, drawing in the sounds of rising genres of rock n’ roll, country, soul, and blues, while maintaining a regional flare. The genre eventually became distinguished as “Swamp Pop,” a label Gaspard also proudly embraces as a way to define his music. 

“It’s like, all these Cajun artists that heard the conviction of soul and blues music—they wanted to provide their version of it, so they covered some of these songs, or wrote songs that were specifically emulating that,” he explained. “But what was inescapable was their heritage, their legacy of being Cajun men and women. So, there is this sprinkle of dust of Cajunness on it, an asterisk that it’s not purely blues music, and it’s performed by Cajuns.” 

As an artist, Gaspard holds a supreme reverence for the soul and blues genres that he continues to be drawn to, “but I’ll never be a Black soul artist,” he said. “I love this music, it’s undeniable for me. How do I filter it through me, so that it feels like it is me, not like I’m trying to mimic someone else?” 

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The answer, he found, was to try to integrate the language of his ancestors, the story of his ancestors, into his songs. He wanted to pull his Cajunness off the pedestal and into his art, into himself. 

“I don’t want my Cajun heritage to live in a room in a different house from who I am,” he said. “I think we’ve compartmentalized it so much that people in my dad’s generation and younger, we feel completely disconnected from it. We feel like it’s someone else’s thing, when it’s the most us we can be. I mean, what if the door gets locked? What if the house gets knocked down? Then it’s gone forever ...  I want my Cajunness to be in my home forever, in every room. And if it’s a little less here and a little more there, that’s completely fine.” 

In 2023, Gaspard received a grant from the Acadiana Center for the Arts’ ArtSpark program to create a bilingual, conceptual folk album telling the story of his Acadian ancestor, Angelique Pinet Lege, who traveled with her three sons to Louisiana following Le Grand Dérangement and who serves, according to Gaspard, as “the Divine Feminine perspective” of the story. 

Titled Avec le Courant, the project is still in production as Gaspard has navigated the demands of his touring career, not to mention his time spent filming for The Voice. More than anything though, ever-unfolding inspiration has kept the project from completion, as new ideas and new songs continue to emerge. 

Using an ancestral guidebook containing decades'-worth of research compiled by one of his cousins, Gaspard has approached the songwriting and storytelling with the vigor of an academic, piecing as many details of Lege’s journey together as he can. “It’s a treasure map for history,” he said. “I’ve learned so many intricacies of the Acadian exile, and I think there are things that needed to be included that haven’t been talked about much. I just felt there needed to be more.” 

In the midst of his songwriting, in 2024, Gaspard decided to put a brief pause on his “hippie, hustling, go-getter lifestyle” to return to the homeland itself, to Grand Pré. Like so many other creatives from the Acadiana region, he dedicated himself to six weeks of rigorous language immersion through the Université Sainte-Anne in Pointe-de-l’Église, Nova Scotia. Being there, in the place his ancestors left from, learning to speak and write in their language—being almost trapped inside of it—was what Gaspard described as “one of the most life changing experiences of my life.” 

The experience has also expanded his treasure trove of language when it comes to songwriting and brought him closer to the place he’s trying to reach when he plays music. He describes this locus as “in between worlds,” a state of being he’s witnessed in other folk musicians tapping into roots. “I like to believe in the ‘woo woo,’” he said, explaining that he believes that for him, that place was established in the womb, hearing French—this mystic, mysterious language—spoken all around him from the very beginning. “There’s a melody and a cadence to it that I truly believe has integrated itself deep, deep in there,” he said. “And when I sing, I am trying to connect to that place, trying to be vulnerable and expose that, to where other people are invited in.” 

He is able to get to that place, he believes, easier in the Cajun French language than in English. “I struggle, when writing songs, not to overcomplicate things,” he said. “I love to be poetic, so I can get really dense.” In French, because he has fewer words, he is forced to keep it simple. “And [simple songs] are the best songs of all time,” he said. “The ones that plug directly in.” 

“I think all of the best music, it’s just ripples of what soul and blues music is. That music makes me want to tell a story, it makes me want to sing my guts out. But it also just makes me want to love and nurture close.” —Dustin Dale Gaspard

When I met with Gaspard, he'd been home in Cow Island for a little over a month—“the longest I’ve been back in three years,” he said. Just a few weeks prior, viewers keeping up with The Voice had watched him be eliminated from the competition during the show’s “Knockout Round,” despite being a fan favorite. 

Of course, Gaspard had already gotten what he wanted during his Blind Auditions. But he walked away from the reality show experience with more than he ever imagined. “I’m a better singer,” he said. “Those vocal coaches, they’re like your cancer-curing doctors of the vocal world. They are able to unlock certain things within you, connect all these dots emotionally, mentally, and to your physical body that allows it all to come forth.” 

When he came home, and the show started airing, his only fear was that fellow Cajuns would interpret his performance as a marketing ploy, as a capitalization on his own culture. “That was a huge fear I had,” he said, especially because so many traditionalists don’t consider the music he sings as “true” Cajun music. But that’s not what happened. When they heard their grandparents’ language on national television, a tidal wave of Louisiana pride washed over social media, news networks, and Gaspard’s cell phone. “They believed it,” he said. “Because I believed it.” 

These days, he’s working on Avec le Courant, dreaming of someday touring it down the Vermilion River on a boat. He’s performed with Swamp Pop hero Wayne Toups, released a Christmas single with Wilson Savoy and Geeroy Scott, stepped onto local stages like Rock ‘N’ Bowl, Prejean’s, and at his local church’s Christmas fair; and he was named the Grand Marshal of Abbeville’s Christmas Parade. 

He has more followers on social media, and more people streaming his music on Spotify. More people are coming to his shows. “I sing a little better,” he said. “I’m probably a worse musician because I haven’t practiced as much.” He’s playing for less time and a little more money. He’s preparing to close on a management deal and will soon be free to explore the option of a record deal—“which would take what I’m already doing and multiply it by one hundred,” he said. 

When asked about his dreams, Gaspard doesn’t deviate all that far from where he’s at today. He wants to be on tour more often, “exploring like I am with my grandfather—I’m out there, on the boat, water’s splashing my face. I’m roaring and yelling and seeing all these amazing things.” And then, for a few months out of the year, he wants to come home, to Cow Island—to a little piece of land that’s his and a little house like his grandmother’s. “When I’m home, I’m with her. I’m underneath the canopy of trees again. I’m cooking late at night, just sitting in the quiet, being grateful.”  

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