Word: acadianational
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...Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Now their cuisine has become democratized into a culinary cliche as even fast-food restaurants offer ersatz renditions of jambalaya and gumbo. Yes, the Cajuns have shouldered their share of suffering. But are these injustices enough to transform the 250,000 descendants of the original Acadian settlers in Louisiana into a minority group eligible for state affirmative-action programs designed for blacks...
...levitates above her backyard and propels herself off into the universe, a voyage that is presented with no more wonderment than a trip down to the 7-Eleven. Road to Nowhere, which ends the second side, has the title of a Sunday sermon and the rhythm of an Acadian barn dance but turns out to be an unabashed paean to nihilism: "Well we know where we're goin'/ But we don't know where we've been/ And we know what we're knowin'/ But we can't say what we've seen . . . We're on a road to nowhere...
...Chenier's musical style, sounds initially like rhythm and blues, mostly New Orleans with a pinch of primitive Chicago. Sometimes the saxophones break honkingly loose, sometimes they lay in one foghorn-like riff through an entire song. But the real musical underlay is Cajun, a musical cross-fertilization of Acadian immigrants driven from Nova Scotia by the British and Africans brought to rural Louisiana by slavery. Which explains both Zydeco's compelling rhythmic patterns and the fact that several of Chenier's numbers are sung in Cajun French...
Their roots are romantic enough. The Cajuns' Acadian (Nova Scotian) ancestors founded a colony on Canada's Bay of Fundy in 1604, and by 1755 had transformed the wilderness into a bucolic countryside. Then came a scheming English Governor who hated the French. In an act of genocide that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow later made a cause célèbre with his poem Evangeline, the British jammed thousands of Acadians onto prison ships and scattered them throughout the Old and New Worlds...
...half who survived, many found their way to Louisiana's "Acadian Coast," a new mecca on the Mississippi. From there, they filtered into the woods, turning into the dialectal "Cajuns" along the way. Those who went south into the swamps became the ancestors of today's fishermen and trappers. Those who retreated still farther, settling Louisiana's western prairies, rode into another part of American folklore: the West...