Cajun readings/listenings for the first week

The bulk of the course will focus on blues and country, since these are arguably the forms of roots music that have had the broadest influence on music around the world. We will, however, explore other types of roots music (e.g., gospel), and our keynote FYS speaker (Governor Blanco of Louisiana) gives us a nice excuse to start with cajun and zydeco, two wonderful local Louisiana musics that reflect the complex and amazing history of the cajun and creole peoples of the region. (Make sure you mark 7pm, Tuesday, 5 Sept, for that talk, as attendance is required as part of the course. We'll talk more about that when classes start.)

The main purpose of this post is to share links to some useful resources. We'll have to get up and running really fast (the Governor's talk is the second week of the semester and we only meet twice a week), so hop to it!

History of the cajuns and overview of cajun/creole music:

• http://www.lsue.edu/acadgate/music/history.htm
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cajun

A large and wonderful collection of (mostly) very early cajun recordings:

• http://npmusic.org/artists.html

There's a ton of good stuff here, but you need to be pretty open to these scratchy old recordings. Remember that this stuff was recorded on what we would consider pretty primitive equipment, and most of these early musicians were used to performing without amplification, so they often just blow out the poor microphones. Still, there's some wonderful ballads and dance music here. Try to imagine these people sitting on a porch, or playing a party in someone's living room, then try to combine the readings and the music to create an image of who these people were.

Some names or songs to particularly check out:

• "Evangeline" by Iry LeJeune
• Amede Ardoin
• Dennis McGee
• The Falcon family
• Amedee Breaux
• Blind Uncle Gaspard

When we meet tomorrow I'll show you how you'll be able to come in and listen to lots of music, and we'll start with some (more) modern descendants of these musicians like Clifton Chenier. For the most part these aren't available for free, though. One pleasant exception is Buckwheat Zydeco (who played in Clifton Chenier's band for quite a while) who has several complete songs available on his website:

• http://www.buckwheatzydeco.com/bwzydecomusic/bwzydecomusic.html

I especially recommend "Hot tamale baby". It's worth going back and forth between Buckwheat's more contemporary songs and the early stuff and think about how things have changed and (perhaps harder, but more important) how these things are connected (what's remained much the same).