Southwest Louisiana breathes music. pt at large spent the past ten days sampling gumbo, Dixie Beer, red beans and rice, and spending nights and one memorable morning dancing to Cajun music. The fiddle, accordion, bass, and drums that comprise most bands capture a range of joy and heartbreak with a rhythm and levity that displace every thought but one...find a partner and step out on the dance floor.
Forget about Louisiana as a state. It’s a state of mind. Full of crawfish po' boys, gumbo, and shrimp, what really holds the state together is music. Nowhere is this more evident than in bayou country.
Southwest Louisiana breathes music. It exhales from radio stations, juke boxes in restaurants, and bars and dance halls in places like Lafayette, Breaux Bridge, and Henderson. Zydeco, Cajun two-step, pretty little waltzes, Whiskey River jitterbug, and swamp pop at close quarters so you can taste the sweat on your honey’s cheek when you pull her close and move as one to the rhythmic beat, and oh yes, the absolute joy of inhaling that music.
This is roots music. No fancy clothes or shoes necessary. Just the ability to open your heart for a couple of hours to music born of sunshine, toil, and the displacement of the Acadian people two centuries ago. Now it’s the music of fishermen, farmers, truck drivers along side college kids, smooth-shaven lawyers, young professionals, and more gray haired grandparents than you’ve ever seen within a country mile of a dance floor. Women wearing cut offs and cowboy boots, sundresses that stick to their perspiring bodies, and tank tops with black jeans are just as down as any of the bluejeaned men in the dance halls. When a woman is of a mind to dance, she marches straight to the first man she sees who’s shuffling his feet in time with the music and pulls him to the dance floor.
There may be some mating games going on amongst all the happy hip shaking couples, but the custom is four or five minutes of whirling to the sounds of accordion, bass, fiddles, and drums then look around for another grinning partner with whom you can spend the next few minutes on the dance floor. Sitting down is out of the question until the band decides to take a break. Hell, you’ve got all week to sit down. This is the weekend in Cajun country. There’s a possibility that you’ll catch up on some sleep, there’s a likelihood that you’ll do some laundry and stop in at the local grocery store. But there is no doubt whatsoever that you’re going to find a place to dance.
There’s the big ol’ Whiskey River Landing dance hall in Henderson tucked between the levee and the shore of the Atchafalaya Swamp where there’s dancing on Sunday afternoon from 4 pm to 8 pm. A 72 year-old farmer dances with his wife, his weathered face wearing a devilish grin that just might have been responsible for his wife saying “I do” five or six decades ago. The man’s been up since 5 am feeding cattle and here he is wearing his wide brim hat, clean jeans and pounding the floor with his leather boots just as vigorously as any young buck in the crowd. From the jammed dance floor to the walls lining the building, the place was packed. Jeffery Broussard The Creole Cowboys made sure of that.
“You don’t come from around here, do you,” says Jean Prejean, a wiry man with a shaved head and one gold earring, as I’m taking photos of the band stand and the swamp just beyond one of the huge picture windows that line the rear wall of the Whiskey River Dance Hall. My T-shirt and shorts don't look out of place but only a tourist would want to take that photo.
For everyone else the place was as ordinary as a 7-11.
Prejean is a 56 year-old carpenter who lives three miles down the road. “I used to truck up to Boston, still know some people there from when we kept track of each other on our CB radios,” he says. Dressed in his black T-shirt and jeans, the man has some of the most original dance moves I’d ever seen. “I’m self taught,” he says proudly, “been dancing since I was a baby. I’m the man who laid the dance floor at Café des Amis in Breaux Bridge,” he says.
Any zydeco dancer within a hundred miles knows the Cafe des Amis is the place to go for live music and dancing from 8 am till noon on Saturday. This is not a typo. Let me put it this way. When the band begins playing at 8 am, most of Louisiana might be on their second cup of coffee; the people at the Café des Amis are on their feet dancin'.
For people down here dancing isn’t recreation, it’s a way of life. Saturday night in Lafayette, Randol’s was full of men and women and their children, couples, singles and exactly two tourists- this writer and his dance partner. The restaurant has a sprawling dining room, a small bar and a pine-paneled dance floor surrounded by a low wooden railing. Two fifty apiece, “for the band,” got you a wristband to enter the dance floor.
The band was kicking up a storm of zydeco, waltzes, and Cajun jitterbugs. Over the hand-lettered sign proclaiming “Salle de danse” was a shelf loaded with pieces of parade floats and Mardi Gras costumes. Two giant fans whirred cool air onto the dance floor to neutralize the 90-degree humidity that sat like a fat cat on the countryside just outside the rough-hewn pine paneling.
This is the kind of place Jean Prejean probably had his first dance. Amongst the couples nearly every dance you’d see a mommy or daddy whirl around the perimeter with a toddler in his/her arms. Grade school kids sat with their parents tapping time to the music. Every so often Parain and Marain (grandpa and grandma) or mom or dad took a turn leading one of them through a dance.
There was nary a shred of self-consciousness from the children. They were as at home on the dance floor as a catfish lazing around the bottom of the swamp. The kids’ eyes were bright with excitement. This music was more than happy notes coming from diatonic accordions and ancient fiddles. This was birthright, a sense of belonging that would never be erased by distance or profession.
Music floats lazily over the whole of Southwest Louisiana. Like the Spanish moss cascading over cypress trees in the Atchafalaya Swamp, it’s fed by nutrients floating naturally in the hot, humid air. Hurricanes, floods, and man-made assaults may affect what is on the ground. They will never still the music in the air.
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