French Louisiana Music and Its Patrons: The Popularization and Transformation of a Regional Sound

226 Pages·2019·1.874 MB·English

by  Patricia Peknik

f r e n c h l o u i s i a n a m u s i c
a n d i t s pat r o n s
Th e Popularization and Transformation
of a Regional Sound
pat r i c i a p e k n i k
French Louisiana Music and Its Patrons
Patricia Peknik
French Louisiana
Music and Its Patrons
The Popularization and Transformation
of a Regional Sound
Patricia Peknik
Berklee College of Music
Boston, MA, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-97423-1 ISBN 978-3-319-97424-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97424-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018951604
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
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To the memory of Paul Peknik, who really should be here to read this.
A
cknowledgments
I greatly appreciated the assistance of Greg Adams at the Smithsonian
Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, and Todd Harvey of the Folklife
Center at the Library of Congress, along with Chris Segura at the Archives
of Cajun and Creole Folklore at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette,
and the archivists at the Research Center at the Historic New Orleans
Collection. Charles Larroque and Jean-Robert Frigault offered their
insights and enthusiasm at the offices of the Council for the Development
of French in Louisiana in Lafayette. Richard DesHotels kindly shared his
historic photo collection of Mamou, Louisiana. I owe a special thank you
to Frank Tate, who apparently inherited his father’s graciousness.
Berklee College of Music’s Faculty Development Office funded my
research and travel through a fellowship, and Berklee as an institution has
been unfailingly generous in supporting this project. I owe a special thanks
to Reg Didham and the interlibrary loan office at the Stan Getz Library.
Megan Laddusaw and Christine Pardue at Palgrave Macmillan were sim-
ply excellent, and I valued the comprehensive feedback of the academic
reviewers who contributed their time and professional wisdom to make
this a better book.
We academics also have our patrons. They are the parents, siblings, and
friends who support us with intellectual companionship and social celebra-
tions as we weather the lonely joy of archival research and travel. I’ve been
lucky to know the best people. I am grateful for the mentorship of Jon
Roberts at Boston University and for the example of his intellectual rigor
and prodigious curiosity. I first walked into his office as a student of intel-
lectual history eager to have a conversation about scientific and religious
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ideas in Moby-Dick, and for the next ten years, he endured with patience
and humor my ramblings on about topics each time farther afield, always
helping me to the see the foundational connections between disciplines. I
envy his current students the opportunity to learn from him.
This book belongs in a way to Bruce Schulman of Boston University,
who had the great kindness to entrust me with the topic, offer exception-
ally precise and helpful critical feedback, and guide me through years of
reworking and refining my understanding of a complicated narrative. He
continually inspired me with his ability to connect trends in music with
larger political, social, and cultural conflicts and innovations, and with his
knowledgeable passion for American music. I am deeply appreciative to
him for having faith in my ability to tell the story.
Un grand merci à ma chère petite famille. Dominique, Madeleine and
Maximin, thank you for the magnanimous gift of time you gave me to
work on the research and writing, for the editorial assistance with the
French, and for patiently believing in the project.
Finally, I must thank my father for instilling in me a love of history and
a desire to listen to other people’s stories. When I was a teenager sitting
on the porch of our family camp on a small lake in upstate New York, he
said he thought the most interesting literary form was the American novel,
for its lessons in history. I’d like to think that the narratives of history are
as strange and compelling as fiction, and that although many of the char-
acters in Southwest Louisiana spoke in a musical language inflected with a
disappearing dialect of French, theirs is very much an American story.
c
ontents
1 Introduction: “A Wild and Ferocious Waltz” 1
2 F rench Louisiana Music from Home and Dance Hall to
Radio and Fred’s Lounge 25
3 F rom the War on French to the War in France: World War
II and Cultural Identity 59
4 “ It’s All French Music”: Patrons on the Trail 85
5 B rand New Old-Time Southern Americana: Harry Smith’s
Anthology Brings French Louisiana Music into the Folk
Canon 109
6 “ I Want You to Be/Just like You Used to Be, Darling”:
Choreographing the Newport Waltz 133
7 U tter Strangers: The English and French Language
Movements 163
ix
x CONTENTS
8 “Les metamorphoses”: Civil Rights, Ethnic Revival, and
New Regional Sounds 189
9 Postscript 211
Index 219
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: “A Wild and Ferocious Waltz”
This book about music is also a story about looking, observing, and per-
ception. It tells the story of the manner in which the collectors, advocates,
and patrons of French Louisiana music saw its traditions and performers in
the context of social, political, and cultural debates in the United States
from the mid-1920s to the early 1970s. It is about the outsider’s gaze as
it fell on a regional culture, and the insights and misperceptions of ethno-
musicologists and commercial promoters as they struggled to understand
a regional music that appeared to exist on the outskirts of American musi-
cal culture and outside the traditional scope of folk and popular music
scholarship. French Louisiana music, a harmonically simplistic, ballad-
based music that developed on the bayous and prairies of Southwest
Louisiana in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is dissonant,
raucous, exuberant and haunting, and although Southwest Louisianans
listened to and performed a whole range of musical genres and styles,
including jazz, blues, and country, old-time French-language music was a
unique cultural expression of the region and played a powerful and endur-
ing role in rural community life. Folklorists who first documented and
recorded it, following the trail of renowned ethnomusicologist John
Lomax, painted a portrait of a Southwest Louisiana culture that was largely
isolated and insulated from popular music well into the first few decades of
the twentieth century, while recent accounts by Cajun music scholar Ryan
Brasseaux and French anthropologist Sara Le Menestrel have emphasized
the adaptation, innovation, and improvisation of Southwest Louisiana
© The Author(s) 2019 1
P. Peknik, French Louisiana Music and Its Patrons,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97424-8_1