Word: cajun
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Welcome to Acadiana, the heart of Cajun country and home of the tastiest food, best dancers and liveliest music in America. In an increasingly homogenized musical nation, the area around Lafayette, Louisiana, a town of 106,000 located 120 miles west of New Orleans, remains blessedly distinctive. Here the Cajun-Zydeco tradition has not just survived but flourished, as 125,000 people were reminded last week at the Festival International de Louisiane, an annual celebration of the music of the Francophone world...
...Cajun musicians are a colorful, immensely talented lot whose fame is just beginning to reach beyond the bayous and prairies of backcountry Louisiana. Among them are the scholarly accordionist Mark Savoy; guitar virtuoso Sonny Landreth; Michael Doucet, the leader of the fiery Cajun band Beausoleil; and Zydeco players like Keith Frank, Geno Delafose and Terrance Simien, whose dynamic marriage of white Cajun and black Delta blues offers a thrilling alternative to rap and processed...
Major record labels are starting to take notice. Musicians like Landreth, Wayne Toups and Stanley "Buckwheat" Dural have been marketed beyond the "roots music" category, and Cajun-Zydeco festivals and clubs have sprung up on both coasts. The Cajun-Zydeco sound has influenced mainstream artists as well. Paul Simon's homage to Zydeco and its late "king,'' Clifton Chenier, That Was Your Mother, was one of the highlights of his multimillion-selling Graceland album. Country chanteuse Mary Chapin Carpenter won a Grammy in 1992 for Down at the Twist and Shout, her foot-stompin' tribute to Cajun music in general...
...preservation of a folk tradition that nearly expired during the region's Americanization in the 1950s owes much to accordionist Savoy, 54. The godfather of the Cajun revival, he hosts a weekly Cajun jam session in the front room of the music store he has operated since 1966 in Eunice, a small town (pop. 11,000) northwest of Lafayette. A master craftsman who builds 75 to 100 accordions a year, some of them costing up to $1,400, Savoy is a purist who prefers French to English, forbids amplification at his jam sessions and plasters the walls of his workshop...
Blue Dog by George Rodrigue and Lawrence S. Freundlich (Viking; $45). The hottest Louisiana purchase since the paperback rights to Anne Rice's vampire novels is a Blue Dog painting by the canny Cajun artist George Rodrigue, whose striking work can be found not only at his New Orleans gallery but also in Carmel, California, and abroad. Posed with barnyard animals or buxom nudes, Blue Dog is a captivating and mysterious mutt who stares out at readers with zonky yellow eyes. Did someone put hashish in her biscuits? No. As B.D. "explains," she is the cerulean ghost of the artist...